Finanzas

El presidente del BCE ha dado un sonoro espaldarazo a líneas propuestas por Francia y la Comisión Europea que encuentran barreras en los países del Norte

Casi una veintena de municipios tiene graves problemas de sostenibilidad financiera a medio y largo plazo

El presidente de Repsol defiende la persistencia del petróleo y el gas como complementarios de las energías verdes y apuesta por el coche eléctrico

IN THE past, coach travel was seen as somewhat glamorous. That is perhaps an odd legacy of a Clark Gable film from 1934 called “It Happened One Night”, about a romance between two passengers travelling on a crowded bus travelling from Florida to New York. But now many people look down on it as something used only by time-rich, money-poor people—at best by students going on a Greyhound bus across America for the summer on the slimmest of budgets; at worst by homeless people who “carry all their stuff in plastic bags”, as one of Gulliver’s interviewees unsympathetically put it.

But when Gulliver went on a Flixbus coach in Germany recently, he was very surprised to find business travellers on board:

On the firm’s flagship route from Nuremberg to its hometown of Munich, winding between snow-capped peaks and picture-book villages in Bavaria, its bus passengers look distinctly affluent. Many on board play on tablets to pass the time; shirts and ties are common. One discerning traveller reads The…Continue reading

El Gobierno aprueba un proyecto de Ley que afectará a 3.200 corredores de seguros y 77.000 agentes

Casi una veintena de municipio tiene graves problemas de sostenibilidad financiera a medio y largo plazo

La firma auditó durante 30 años el banco quebrado sin encontrar problemas

IF ONE concern unites Americans, it is the high prices of prescription drugs. One incident in particular tarnished much of the pharma industry: in 2015 the price of an antiparasitic drug, Daraprim, jumped from $13.50 to $750 per pill. But large price increases remain stubbornly commonplace (see chart). According to IQVIA, a health-data firm, the wholesale prices of leading drugs such as Humira, Enbrel and Lyrica increased by more than 120% between 2012 and 2017. Other data show that cancer-drug prices rose from about $10,000 to over $100,000 per year in just over a decade to 2012. Further ahead, a new generation of cures, such as a gene therapy for haemophilia, may cost more than $1m.

President Donald Trump, never one to avoid stoking a grievance, has waded in, accusing the pharma industry of “getting away with murder”. This week, as The Economist went to press, he was scheduled to deliver a speech outlining a strategy to lower prescription-drug prices. Whatever he says, though,…Continue reading

TWENTY years ago schoolyard fads revolved around clothes and music. Now they are as likely to involve video games. The latest must-have is “Fortnite Battle Royale”, a lighthearted multiplayer shooter in which up to 100 players parachute onto a continually shrinking playing field, hunt each other down and compete to be the last one standing.

It is wildly popular. One estimate is that it had 45m players in March. A match broadcast on YouTube, and featuring some of that site’s stars, attracted more than 1.1m concurrent viewers, making it one of the most watched streams ever. Other big publishers, such as Activision-Blizzard, are pondering jumping in with clones of their own. Parents blame it for unfinished homework and for corrupting their children’s oh-so-pure minds. Some schools have tried, mostly in vain, to prevent students from playing.

Moral panics are tedious things. But “Fortnite” is interesting for a good reason. It shows the long-established influence within…Continue reading

IN CHINA no company achieved $1bn in annual revenue as quickly as Xiaomi did, in the year following the launch of its first smartphone in 2011. Chinese media initially nicknamed Xiaomi the “Apple of the East” (its literal translation is “little rice”). That was a stretch, even in good times. But within another two years the affordable-handset-maker became the world’s most valuable startup, worth $46bn.

Analysts reckon that it now wants to raise up to $10bn in an initial public offering (IPO) on Hong Kong’s stock exchange which was announced on May 3rd. (Its filing documents disclose neither the valuation that it is seeking, nor a fundraising target.) That could afford it a very generous valuation of as much as $80bn—not far off the $91bn market capitalisation of Baidu, China’s biggest search engine and one of the country’s three “BAT” tech titans alongside Alibaba and Tencent.

Yet only 18 months ago such talk would have seemed outlandish. In 2016 Xiaomi’s sales…Continue reading