Finanzas

JUST over a year ago Harold Hamm, billionaire boss of Continental Resources, one of the biggest shale-oil producers in America, issued a stern warning to his fellow frackers. Drill with restraint or we will “kill the market”, he said. This month the 72-year-old Mr Hamm, son of an Oklahoma cotton sharecropper who went on to become one of the founding fathers of the shale revolution, had a different message. Restraint is working.

The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the light, “sweet” (or low-sulphur) crude that is a benchmark for American producers, rose to $71 a barrel on May 9th, its highest level since November 2014. OPEC, which Mr Hamm once called a “toothless tiger”, is successfully leading efforts to balance the market. Oil prices are partly rallying because President Donald Trump this week pulled America out of the nuclear deal with Iran and said he would reimpose sanctions on a big oil producer. Meanwhile a free fall in Venezuelan production may be further exacerbated by the…Continue reading

Digging in its wheels

MANY Europeans see long-distance coach travel across America as glamorous. That may be a legacy of a Clark Gable film from 1934 called “It Happened One Night”, about a romance between two passengers on a bus travelling from Florida to New York. Modern Americans see it as anything but alluring. It is looked down on as something used only by time-rich, money-poor people who cannot afford to travel by car, train or plane.

Flixbus, a German coach startup which is launching in America on May 15th, wants to change that. 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 Economist. Since Flixbus was founded in 2013, its efforts to encourage more people to try coach travel…Continue reading

IN A British television show, “Doctor Who”, the titular character is able to travel anywhere in time and space in his Tardis police box. Given access to that technology, what useful message would this columnist impart to his previous self, nearly 12 years and 550 columns ago?

The first lesson would be to avoid confusing the economy with the financial markets. If you looked at share prices alone, you might assume the intervening period had been calm; the S&P 500 index is around double its level when this column began in September 2006. But though the markets have long since recovered their sangfroid after the crisis of 2008-09, the trend growth rate of developed economies has never regained its strength. That is a bitter irony given that the crisis originated within the financial sector, bringing to mind a teenager who crashes their parents’ car and leaves them with the bill.

In part, the market’s resilience was owing to the remarkable strength of corporate profits,…Continue reading

AIR FRANCE likes to present itself as a cut above other European airlines. Offering fancy French food and free champagne in economy class on long-haul flights, the company’s strategy is to justify its high ticket prices by offering a premium service. But facing intransigent unions at home and competition from abroad, the airline’s financial fizz is rapidly going flat. 

A drawn-out fight with its unions has toppled the boss of its parent group, Air France-KLM, yet again. On May 4th Jean-Marc Janaillac, its chief executive, resigned after its workers voted against a pay rise of 7% over four years. His predecessor, Alexandre de Juniac, left two years ago after two executives had their shirts violently ripped off by a mob of angry workers over a restructuring plan. The latest resignation is more serious because investors are also losing their rag. Air France-KLM’s shares have halved in value since January; over the same period those of rival carriers such as IAG and Ryanair have risen.

Air France’s trade unions are demanding an…Continue reading

Expolíticos, economistas y politólogos afirman que «se esperaba que Europa fuera más fuerte y más integrada con el euro. Hasta ahora eso no sucede”

El banco presidido por González calculó que la compra le costaría casi 14.000 millones y no presentó una oferta

El expresidente de CaixaNova afirmó que «no había otra opción, pues la ley gallega de cajas no permitía uniones con entidades de otras comunidades»

WHEN a hacker gets hacked, hackers hack back. That is exactly what an attendee at a hacking conference in Berlin in 2003 did when the keycard-operated lock of his hotel room got hacked. On returning to his hotel room, he found that his laptop had been stolen, but there was no evidence of forced entry. So how did the thief get into the room? Two of his colleagues spent more than a decade trying to answer that question. Now they have succeeded—and in the process they have exposed a security vulnerability that leaves millions of hotel rooms susceptible to theft.

Tomi Tuominen and Timo Hirvonen of F-Secure, a cyber-security firm, devised a hack that they say allows them to create a master key that mimics the guest keycards produced by VingSecure, a manufacturer of hotel locks. According to F-Secure, the affected software is used in more than 40,000 hotel…Continue reading

IT IS an enormous privilege, and responsibility, to write for The Economist and capture a small sliver of readers’ attention. All told, there have been well over a thousand posts on this blog (the site history runs for 98 pages) as well as 546 print columns (the last will appear at the end of the week). The first post, back in February 2009, was written in the depths of the crisis and “was looking for signs of hope, although without any confidence it can call the bottom exactly.” In fact, the market bottom occurred only a few weeks later. There have been a few wobbles along the way but that bull run is still going. The irony would be that, just as the start of this blog heralded the upswing, the last post might signal the demise of the great bull market.

This blogger has been a bit gloomy during his tenure, too gloomy as it turns out. So as well as three signs of danger, I wanted to close with three signs of optimism. First, the…Continue reading

El director general de la institución, Santiago Menéndez, asegura que tres de cada cuatro sentencias por delitos fiscales fueron favorables al fisco en 2017