Finanzas

AS A teenager, Travis Kalanick’s first job was to knock on strangers’ doors and sell them knives. Now he is trying to dodge the daggers aimed at him and at Uber, a ride-hailing firm that is the world’s most valuable startup. On March 19th Jeff Jones, the company’s president, stepped down after six months, declaring that “the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber.” At least six key executives and high-ranking employees have left in the past nine weeks. They include Uber’s head of mapping, a former head of self-driving car technology, and an artificial-intelligence (AI) expert who had been put in charge of the firm’s AI research lab only three months ago.

Aggressive and unrelentingly ambitious, Mr Kalanick built his eight-year-old company into America’s largest privately owned technology firm by treading on the toes of different groups, including traditional taxi drivers, other…Continue reading

AMERICA may be the world’s largest economy, but these days its government pays more than many others to borrow money. Its ten-year bond yields are higher than those in Britain, France, Singapore and even Italy.

The gap between American and German ten-year yields has been above two percentage points. For much of the past 25 years, it was very rare for the difference to exceed a single percentage point. On occasions, American yields fell below German levels (see chart).

Go back a generation and you might have expected the country with the higher bond yields to be the one with the weaker currency; investors would demand a higher yield to compensate for the risk of future depreciation. But that is not the case today. The dollar has been strong, relative to the euro, and many people expect it to strengthen further. Indeed, the higher yield on American government debt is one reason why investors might want to buy the dollar.

Instead, the gap may reflect differences in both monetary and fiscal policy. In America the Federal Reserve stopped buying Treasury bonds a while ago and has raised interest rates three times since December 2015; the European…Continue reading

FEW slogans were chanted with as much passion by Donald Trump’s supporters in the presidential campaign as “Build that wall!”. The construction industry is almost as enthusiastic. Last week America’s Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) issued two invitations for companies to bid to build the wall on the border with Mexico, which is expected to cost anywhere between $12bn and $25bn. The deadline for designs falls on March 29th. One request is for a solid concrete border wall, and the other for a wall using “alternatives” to reinforced solid concrete, suggesting the government has yet to decide what the barrier should be made of.

More than 700 companies, from big general contractors to firms selling materials to niche providers of lighting and surveillance systems, have registered to try to become suppliers. To the surprise of some, about one in ten of the firms bidding are local ones with Hispanic owners, drawn by the scale of the earnings on offer. Cemex, a Mexican cement giant that has plants on both sides of the border, said it would not sell cement for the project, though it had earlier expressed interest in joining the bidding. Another, tiny, Mexican firm…Continue reading

CARS can be objects of desire and the bonnet badge an indicator of wealth and status. Yet the four small patches of rubber that do the vital job of attaching them to the road stir little emotion. A third of drivers cannot name the make of tyre on their car. Nor do they know that the dominant global brands have been fighting a losing battle for 15 or so years against Chinese competitors and now have a chance of winning back ground.

The established tyremakers have advantages over the industry they serve. They have margins that outstrip even Germany’s luxury carmakers. Supplying manufacturers accounts for only a third of revenues of a typical tyre firm and even less of the profits. The rest comes from replacing tyres on vehicles on the road, which wear out every four years or so.

The expansion of the global vehicle fleet, forecast to grow by around 3.5% a year, helps gradually to reduce firms’ dependence on the cyclical market for new cars. Tyremakers also benefit by selling most of their wares to thousands of distributors. They are fragmented and weak compared with carmakers, and less inclined to drive hard bargains.