Finanzas

Se multiplican los cursos para adaptar la cultura financiera de los compradores de empresas al mundo de las ‘start-ups’ tecnológicas

Fomento rebaja hasta los 1.800 millones el coste del rescate pero no eleva el importe de su relicitación pese a la recuperación de estas vías

SOME years ago, when Gulliver was a wide-eyed reporter on his first business trip, he sidled up to a bureau de change in London’s Heathrow Airport to buy some foreign currency. His nervous excitement quickly turned to dismay when the teller gouged 12% from the transaction, justifying the theft by tapping on a display-screen of ruinous exchange rates. Today, Gulliver knows better than to buy foreign currency at an airport. But many do not: in 2016 Heathrow raked in £50m ($68m) by renting retail space to bureaux de change. New technology and startups could soon change that.

Savvier travellers have, until now, bought their foreign currency in advance from bureaux de change outside the airport. Higher competition and lower costs mean that these firms trade closer to the interbank exchange rate–the price at which two currencies are actually swapped by financial institutions. Yet all middlemen need a mark up, so they still add a margin of 2-5% to their “commission-free” quotes.

A new breed of “challenger banks” wants to…Continue reading

El Estado se gastará 1.800 millones en rescatar las autopistas quebradas este año y espera ingresar 1.000 millones al volver a privatizarlas al año siguiente

INTEREST rates are heading higher and that is likely to put financial markets under strain. Investors and regulators would both dearly love to know where the next crisis will come from. What is the most likely culprit?

Financial crises tend to involve one or more of these three ingredients: excessive borrowing, concentrated bets, and a mismatch between assets and liabilities. The crisis of 2008 was so serious because it involved all three—big bets on structured products linked to the housing market, and bank-balance sheets that were both overstretched and dependent on short-term funding. The Asian crisis of the late 1990s was the result of companies borrowing too much in dollars when their revenues were in local currency. The dotcom bubble had less serious consequences than either of these because the concentrated bets were in equities; debt did not play a significant part.

It may seem surprising to assert that the genesis of the next crisis is probably lurking in corporate debt….Continue reading

BUSINESS school graduates do not all want to work in investment banking these days. The industry does not have the same kind of cachet it did before Lehman Brothers went bust. Still, 31% of those who left Harvard Business School last year went into financial services. That made it easily the most popular sector, as it has been in each of the lprevious four years. And it is hardly surprising; in London, for example, the average pay for a finance worker is around £72,000 – twice the level earned by other workers in the UK capital.

But is this high pay justified? The finance sector has four key functions. The first is to operate the payments system, without which the economy could not function. The second is to channel money from savers to those who need capital either through the banking system or through pooled savings vehicles like mutual funds. Third, it provides liquidity to the system by making markets, and thus establishing prices for financial assets. Fourth, it…Continue reading

La Agencia Tributaria desmantela una red que falsificaba 25.000 memorias de USB y baterias al día

La red social está invirtiendo para dotarse de programas originales y potenciar los ingresos publicitarios

La condena es aparte de los procesos Marqués, Monte Branco y EDP, donde está imputado por decenas de delitos

La entidad cobró 1.435 euros pero el tribunal dice que «no obedece a servicios efectivamente prestados»