Economía

El nuevo aeródromo tendrá capacidad para transportar a 220 millones de pasajeros y 16 millones de toneladas de carga al año

Javier Marín será consejero del banco de la Santa Sede

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Un estudio de Fedea advierte de que el tiempo medio para recibir un primer servicio de política activa es de 9,5 meses

Tsipras pide un avance en el rescate heleno «sin chantajes» y con respeto a la «soberanía de cada país», después de que ayer el Mecanismo Europeo de Estabilidad decidiera congelar temporalmente las medias de alivio sobre su deuda. Leer

La entidad bancaria italiana prosigue con sus planes para evitar un temido rescate estatal

La Fiscalía francesa reclamó hoy la absolución de la directora gerente del Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), Christine Lagarde, en el juicio contra ella por negligencia en su gestión cuando era ministra francesa de Finanzas, durante el mandato de Nicolas Sarkozy. Leer

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INSURANCE is banking’s boring cousin: it lacks the glamour, the sky-high bonuses and the ever-present whiff of danger. So European stress tests for insurers, whose results were due to be published on December 15th after The Economist went to press, have attracted far less attention than those for banks in July. Yet insurance also faces a grave threat, from prolonged low interest rates.

Insurers invest overwhelmingly in bonds, so low interest rates make their lives difficult. The last time the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) conducted an insurance stress test, in 2014, a quarter of participants scored poorly: they would not have met their capital requirements in the test’s long low-interest-rate scenario. The proportion jumped to 44% in an alternative scenario involving an asset-price shock. The new results are unlikely to be better. Each year of low interest rates worsens the problem. Higher-yielding bonds mature and insurers end up with ever more newer ones with low, or even negative, interest rates.

Insurers are focused on the problem. One strategy is to outsource more to external…Continue reading

IN SEPTEMBER 2010 Brazil’s then-finance minister, Guido Mantega, gave warning that an “international currency war” had broken out. His beef was that in places where it was difficult to drum up domestic spending, the authorities had instead sought to weaken their currencies to make their exports cheaper and imports dearer. The dollar had recently fallen, for instance, because the Federal Reserve was expected to begin a second round of quantitative easing. The losers in this battle were those emerging markets, like Brazil, whose currencies had soared. Its currency, the real, was then trading at around 1.7 to the dollar.

These days a dollar buys 3.4 reais, but no one in Brazil or in other emerging markets with devalued currencies is declaring a belated victory. A cheap currency has not proved to be much of a boon. Indeed new research from Jonathan Kearns and Nikhil Patel, of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a forum for central banks, finds that at times a rising currency can be a stimulant and a falling currency a depressant. They looked at a sample of 44 economies, half of them emerging markets, to gauge the effect of changes in the exchange rate on exports and imports (the trade channel) and also on the price and availability of credit (the financial channel).

They found a negative relationship between changes in GDP and currency shifts…Continue reading