Finanzas

White heat of change

FEW industrial scenes offer the drama of a steelworks in full flow. Perched high in a cabin, a technician guides a bucket the size of a house to send 250 tons of lava-like molten metal into a vast crucible. As a roar echoes across a gargantuan hall, a pile of scrap slides into the mixture. Plumes of illuminated smoke rise. Sparks like giant fireflies tumble down. ThyssenKrupp’s steelmaking plant in Duisburg makes 30,000 tons of the metal daily.

The firm itself is going through an industrial drama, after years of ailing. Its boss, Heinrich Hiesinger, was seen as its saviour after arriving from Siemens late in 2010. But swiftness is not his forte: a colleague says he talks of “diligence before speed”. He did rid the firm of loss-making steel plants, such as assets in the Americas that cost €8bn ($9.3bn) in write-downs. Yet he has not reformed a top-heavy company.

Several bits of the group—a hotch-potch that includes submarine-,…Continue reading

THE last time a corporate-finance concept went mainstream was during the financial crisis, when banks’ capital became a subject you could raise in yoga studios or biker bars without being hushed or hospitalised. Now there is a new candidate: share buy-backs, which reached $189bn in the three months to March for firms in the S&P 500 index, a record high. They may rise even further when a wave of cash comes home in response to America’s new tax rules, which encourage firms to repatriate the $1trn of funds they have parked in foreign subsidiaries. Apple plans to spend $100bn on buy-backs, for example.

As the sums rise, so does the controversy. In a buy-back a firm acquires its own stock to return cash to its shareholders. To critics they are a financial voodoo that exacerbates inequality and depresses investment. Elizabeth Warren, a left-leaning senator, wants them partially banned. But among investors such hostility is seen as a “derangement syndrome”, to quote Cliff Asness, the boss of AQR,…Continue reading

AFTER 99 peaceful days of protests, the 100th brought carnage. On May 22nd in Tuticorin, a coastal town near the southern tip of India, police indiscriminately fired live rounds into a crowd of several thousand demonstrators who were opposing the planned expansion of a copper-smelting facility. Thirteen people died and scores more were injured. The fallout threatens to be a chronic headache both for the Indian authorities and Vedanta, the mining giant which owns the facility.

Corporate public-relations consultants in London, where Vedanta’s main holding company is based, have depressingly ample experience in helping commodities firms whose reputations risk being sullied by such police violence. Royal Dutch Shell, an oil group, still faces ire for the way Nigerian authorities arrested then executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, an activist, in 1995. Lonmin, a platinum-miner also listed in London, had to rebuff claims by South African police that it should carry some blame for cops shooting its striking workers…Continue reading

El selectivo cede un 1%
La prima de riesgo española baja 13 puntos básicos y el euro avanza frente al dólar

La Comisión plantea un fondo para facilitar las reformas de 25.000 millones y un esquema para proteger las inversiones públicas de los países con problemas de 30.000 millones

HERE we go again. Financial markets don’t much like uncertainty. Thanks to Italy’s politicians, in recent days they have had plenty. By May 30th some calm had returned: it seemed possible that a pair of populist parties, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, would form a government after all (see article). Markets had been in turmoil for two days, unsettled by a farcical back-and-forth between the populists and the country’s president, who had rejected the parties’ choice of a Eurosceptic economist as finance minister. The politicians may have done the markets a service, by shaking them out of complacency. Investors may have returned the favour, by shaking some sense into the politicians—at least for now.

Italy is perennially slow-growing and groans under public debt of around €2.3trn ($2.7trn), or 132% of GDP. The drama…Continue reading

El Boletín Oficial del Estado anuncia hoy el cese de Linde y la designación de Hernández de Cos «con efectos del 11 de junio de 2018»

El regulador financiero relaja los limites que impuso en la Volcker Rule tras la crisis financiera

ARE you on America’s newest airport-security watch list? You could be, but you would never know. That is because the list is secret, and no one quite understands what it takes to land on it. News of the list emerged earlier this month, when the New York Times obtained a five-page internal directive from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the government agency that oversees airport security in America. It revealed that the TSA could place flyers on the watch list, which it created in February, if they engaged in behaviour that the agency found problematic. That includes violent altercations with TSA agents. But, more problematically, it appears to extend well beyond physical assaults.

“An intent to injure or cause physical pain is not required, nor is an actual physical injury,” the memo states. People can be…Continue reading

Entrecanales reclama la contribución de los mercados en la descarbonización de las economias