Economía

ON NOVEMBER 11th, Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, posted nearly $18bn in sales for the day. This broke last year’s record for Singles’ Day, an anti-Valentine’s Day that has become a love affair with spending. The popularity of the company’s virtual credit-card, Huabei (roughly translating as “Just spend”), may have helped. Consumers who spend less than 1,000 yuan ($146) online a month spend 50% more once they get one, according to Ant Financial Services, an Alibaba affiliate. To older generations, taught to save, borrowing is shameful. But financial habits are changing: Chinese consumers are being encouraged to develop credit histories.

Last year, the government awarded eight companies consumer credit-rating licences. Their pilot programmes are an attempt to flesh out thin financial records and get people thinking about their credit scores. This is new for most Chinese, who do not use credit cards and have never had credit scores. As of 2014, the People’s Bank of China maintained credit histories for around 350m citizens—less than one-third of the adult population. In America 89% of adults have credit scores. Without a credit history,…Continue reading

IN ITS never-ending quest to rein in profligate local officials, China this week ordered its indebted cities and provinces to draw up detailed repayment plans. But for these rules to work, the central government must prove that it is willing to let the miscreants default. Creditors doubt its resolve and expect it to go on bailing out the spendthrifts. As a result, they systematically give more generous lending terms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than to their private peers.

The bias is not immediately obvious. Looking at interest costs, China seems to have a level playing field. A 2011 survey, for example, revealed that the median interest rate on bank loans to private firms was 7.8%, just above the 7.5% average at the time. Borrowing rates for both SOEs and private firms have remained in line with each other since then, declining in tandem.

But this appearance of parity is superficial. Borrowing costs only tell half the story. The other half is the borrower’s quality. When investors assess the risk of lending to Chinese companies, they price in the assumption that the state will stand behind SOEs. How much is this…Continue reading

THE fines paid to America’s financial regulators by errant bankers vary enormously these days: from sky-high to stratospheric. Deutsche Bank is fighting a demand for $14bn. BNP Paribas paid $9bn last year for facilitating the evasion of American sanctions. So eyebrows were raised at the final settlement disclosed this month between the state-controlled Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) and New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). The fine imposed on the bank was a mere $215m.

The comparative leniency towards ABC is probably a consequence of a failure to prove that many illegal transactions took place. But that by itself produced unresolved suspicions; compliance systems made transfers untraceable. In 2014 a new compliance officer at the two-year-old New York branch reported finding an “alarming” pattern of transactions; 20-30% were “virtually impervious to screening” for sanction violations.

In the “alarming” category were large transfers between Chinese companies and companies in Russia and Yemen; dollar-denominated payments from the United Arab Emirates; and dollar transfers from a Turkish bank to an Afghan one…Continue reading

SINCE Donald Trump won the election, American bank shares have surged on traders’ hopes of a bonfire of financial regulations. So a proposal from Neel Kashkari, head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, vastly to increase capital requirements looks ill-timed. On the other hand, the plan mimics the direction—if not the extent—of one backed by congressional Republicans.

Mr Kashkari is an experienced financial firefighter. An alumnus of Goldman Sachs, best-connected of investment banks, he spent much of 2008 and 2009 in the Treasury department overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, under which the American government bought more than $400bn of toxic assets to prop up teetering financial institutions. In 2014 he ran to become governor of California as a Republican. He now says that, despite the efforts of regulators since the crisis, much more needs to be done to avoid future bail-outs of banks that are “too big to fail”.

Using an IMF database, the Minneapolis Fed logged the levels of bank capital that would have been needed to avert 28 financial crises in rich countries between 1970 and 2011. Based on the historical…Continue reading

IN A world of low investment returns, many a pension scheme is in trouble. In both Britain and America employers who have promised to pay workers a pension based on their final salary are struggling to cope with huge deficits.

But the problem is not confined to those with so-called defined-benefit (DB) pensions. It also affects those saving for retirement via a defined-contribution (DC) scheme, where both employer and employee contribute, and the worker takes charge of the pot when his career ends. In America the most popular form of DC savings are called 401(k) schemes after a section of the tax code.

In an article* in the Journal of Retirement, three authors from AQR Capital Management, an investment group, argue that workers in 401(k) schemes are simply not putting enough money aside.

What you get out of a pension depends on what you put into it. One would expect a DC pension to deliver a smaller income than a DB scheme because less money tends to be put in the pot. Total DC contributions average around 9% of payroll (6% from employees; 3% from employers). But figures from the Centre for Retirement Research at…Continue reading

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El Ministerio Público reclama esa sanción adicional a la devolución de los 29,7 millones de euros defraudados por la subvenciones para residentes

El Ayuntamiento abre a raíz de las informaciones de EL PAÍS un expediente que podría acabar con una sanción, la rescisión del contrato o la inhabilitación de la empresa

La compañía Airbus ya ha suministrado otras 33 aeronaves a cinco países

Las primeras estimaciones señalan que contiene cerca de 20.000 millones de barriles que lo sitúan como el más grande de ese país