Finanzas

La criptomoneda pierde alrededor de un 3% de su valor tras conocerse el proceso abierto por el Departamento de Justicia

El banco asumirá la propiedad del emblemático edificio de la Diagonal de Barcelona y un paquete de acciones que tenía en el grupo editorial

When they are not fretting about the American dollar or Chinese debt, policymakers in emerging economies keep a close eye on the oil market. The price of Brent crude has risen by nearly 50% in the past year to around $80 a barrel. It ranks as the 11th-biggest spike in the past 70 years (adjusted for inflation), according to UBS, a bank. So should emerging markets now worry that oil prices will carry on rising above $100, or that they will tumble below $50? The answer is yes.

Many emerging economies import oil; others export it. As a rule, higher prices hurt the first group and lower ones hurt the second. But it can be more complicated than that. Indonesia, for example, is a net importer of oil, but a net exporter of “energy”, more broadly defined, including coal and palm oil. Since coal, palm and oil prices tend to rise roughly in tandem, Indonesia would benefit overall from $100 oil, according to UBS. Mexico, like America, is also a net importer of crude. But in both countries a higher oil price…Continue reading

HOW much should company bosses be paid relative to their employees? It depends who you ask. Plato argued that the richest members of society should earn no more than four times the pay of the poorest. John Pierpont Morgan, a banker from America’s gilded age, reckoned that bosses should earn at most 20 times the pay of their underlings. Investors today hold chief executives in vastly higher esteem. According to new filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), America’s largest publicly listed firms (those worth at least $1bn) on average paid their chief executives 130 times more than their typical workers in 2017. The figures are being disclosed by firms in their financial filings for the first time this year.

The SEC’s new requirement to quantify the gap has its origins in the financial crisis. Facing populist outrage over the pay packages of Wall Street executives held responsible for triggering the crash, Congress added a provision to the Dodd-Frank act, a financial-reform…Continue reading

A RECENT tweet from Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car firm, shows footage of a Model X undergoing rollover testing. The SUV is propelled rapidly sideways on a trolley before encountering a sand trap that stops it suddenly, tipping the car. The Tesla teeters between ending up on its roof or settling back on its wheels. It is an apt metaphor for a firm hovering between fulfilling its promise and succumbing to financial woes.

In April Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley, a bank, said the next three months would be the “most critical time in Tesla’s history” since launching its upmarket Model S six years ago. The move from a niche in expensive electric cars to bringing battery power to the masses has been troublesome, to say the least. The firm had once hoped to be making 10,000 of its cheaper Model 3s a week by the end of 2018. But difficulties with a highly automated production line mean that just over 2,000 are rolling out of the factory each week. Even a revised goal of 5,000…Continue reading

No ordinary fashion statement

WALK down the streets of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and at first sight the passers-by look rather uniform. The women are in tidy skirt suits and medium-high heels. The men sport variations on the theme of the jacket and wide trousers preferred by Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Government-mandated lapel pins with portraits of one or both of Mr Kim’s predecessors continue to be ubiquitous. But look closer and a wealth of individual variations can be seen, particularly among the women: some bright-coloured lace stitched onto a jacket here, a daringly cut skirt in a sparkling satin material there.

Although fashion from China and even from—Kim forbid—South Korea is increasingly making its way to the markets of Pyongyang, many of these flourishes are the work of the city’s own tailors. They may be only a small subset of North Korea’s textile industry—which accounted for around 30% of exports before being hit by sanctions…Continue reading

“PLEASE don’t leave us.” From the dozens of e-mails in people’s inboxes, begging them to give their consent to be sent further messages, you could deduce that the senders of newsletters and the like are hardest hit by the European Union’s tough new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on May 25th. But the main loser may well be an industry that few have ever heard of but most have dealings with every day: advertising technology, or ad tech. In fact, the GDPR would probably not exist at all were it not for this collection of companies, which have an insatiable hunger for personal data.

Ad tech emerged because advertising is the internet’s default business model. Since targeted ads tend to be more efficient and targeting requires personal data (sites previously visited, searches in online stores and the like), these data became the fuel of a new industry to automate online advertising. It is so complex that even experts often resort to what is…Continue reading

ONE of the more extreme recent cases of corporate bribery is that of LafargeHolcim, a giant Swiss-French cement-maker which was accused in 2016 of funnelling money to armed groups controlling roads and checkpoints around a factory in Syria. The firm still cannot be sure who pocketed its payoffs, via middlemen, that were intended to keep its facility running at all costs. The money may well have ended up funding Islamic State terrorists.

The investigation into LafargeHolcim is one sign of a wider change. The era when European firms could talk up lengthy “ethics codes” at home and behave badly abroad is over. Long gone are the days when German law counted bribes paid by the country’s industrial champions as tax-deductible. A spate of scandals in Europe suggest that prosecutors, as well as the politicians who influence how much freedom judicial investigators enjoy, are becoming ever less tolerant of corporate corruption.

Another big firm under pressure is Novartis, a Swiss drugmaker….Continue reading

WORK is like a capricious lover whose incessant demands are resented but who is missed terribly when they are not there. The relationship is long-term; an average person spends more than half their life at work. Work defines people’s social status, sets income levels and generates a circle of friends.

Attitudes to management, as to work, are double-edged. The modern economy has become immensely complex. Coordinating the production of goods and services across international supply chains represents a huge achievement. Becoming a manager is usually seen as a promotion, yet the role of a “middle manager” is often despised as a useless layer of bureaucracy. Workers simultaneously blame managers for not providing enough leadership and for interfering too much with their daily tasks.

For their part, managers desperately want to improve their performance. Enter “management books” as a search term on Amazon and you get more than 100,000 results. Budding executives solemnly learn the…Continue reading

REPUBLICANS in the House of Representatives had hoped to cut a swathe through the Dodd-Frank act, a titanic set of financial regulations passed in 2010 in the wake of the 2007-09 crisis. The “Financial Choice Act”, drafted last year, would have lessened bureaucratic oversight and relied more on stiff capital requirements. Responsibilities and penalties would have been made clearer and regulators’ discretionary powers would have been reined in. President Donald Trump, who had promised on the campaign trail to “do a number on Dodd-Frank”, was effusive when the House endorsed the Choice Act last year.

But the bill approved by the House on May 22nd, and expected soon to be signed into law by Mr Trump, is a distinctly tamer affair. It moves the line between big, systemically risky banks and the rest, set in Dodd-Frank at $50bn in assets, to $250bn. That cuts the number of institutions subjected to stress tests and stricter supervision from 38 to 12. It also eases some restrictions on proprietary trading. But only the very smallest banks will be allowed to substitute higher capital for strict regulation. Even as bold thinking was thrown out, one truly bad idea made it in, presumably under pressure from representatives from heavily indebted states. Municipal bonds will be granted special treatment in the composition of bank capital, incentivising lenders to load up…Continue reading