Finanzas

THE CONVICTION that the secrets of commerce can be taught in a classroom, whether real or virtual, shows little sign of fading. In America, more master’s degrees are awarded in business than in any other discipline—over 189,000 in the 2013-14 academic year, the latest for which figures are available. Business is the most sought-after master’s qualification in the world. The majority are masters of business administration (MBA), covering a broad range of business skills, a qualification that is close to a mandatory requirement for a budding tycoon. At any one time, around two-fifths of chief executives at Fortune 500 companies are likely to hold an MBA.

Yet a fresh case study on the MBA may be in the making. Interest in the full-time variety has waned markedly in recent years. Applications to most programmes are either falling or static, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), an association of business schools. Data from The Economist’s own latest ranking of full-time MBA programmes tell the same story. Five years ago, a business…Continue reading

He’s got the moves

HAVING just received the latest PlayStation console from Sony, Dele Alli, an English footballer, posts a photo of it to his Instagram account. He dutifully thanks his benefactor and concludes the message: “#ad”.

It is the latest frontier of a rapidly growing industry. Since January, more than 200,000 posts per month on Instagram, a picture-sharing app owned by Facebook, have been tagged with “#ad,” “#sp” or “#sponsored”, according to Captiv8, a firm that connects brands to people like Mr Alli. Most are reaching Instagram users via such celebrities. Hiring “influencers”, as they are known, connects brands to a vast network of potential customers. Kim Kardashian West, a reality-TV star, for example, reaches 160m people across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Consumers love the unprecedentedly deep access to the lives of the rich and/or famous that platforms offer. DJ Khaled, a music producer and prolific poster on Snapchat (another picture-messaging app), delighted millions of his followers with live video updates of himself lost at sea at night on a jet ski. He is also an…Continue reading

AT A bar called “University” in San Giovanni a Teduccio, a rundown suburb of Naples, two blown-up photos adorn the walls: Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. Nelson Ciarravolo, the owner, put them up when the bar opened two years ago, long before the news came that Apple would open its first European iOS (its mobile operating system) developer academy in the district. Locals joke that Mr Jobs’s photo may have gone up more recently. Either way, it signals that Naples has embraced the American tech giant. On October 6th Apple held the opening event for the new academy, which it will run in collaboration with Federico II University, after which the bar is named.

“We go to places nobody thought were possible”, explained Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives at Apple, at the inaugural event. Naples lags far behind northern Italy for transport and digital infrastructure, and criminality is rife. The Camorra, a mafia gang, runs one of the biggest drug-trafficking enterprises in the world from the city. The neighbourhood in which Apple has opened the academy (it is located inside a new campus of Federico II University) used to be more dangerous. “We used to see our friends die on the ground,” recalls Davide Varlese, a cousin of Mr Ciarravolo. But things have improved over the past decade as authorities have…Continue reading

Better reality

AT THE heart of an emerging technology cluster in London’s Shoreditch lies the Stage, a big mixed-use building complex that is being developed by Vanke, a Chinese real-estate company, among a few others. A potential Chinese buyer of one of the flats in its 37-storey residential tower recently had a look around. She went from room to room, observing the furnishings and fittings. She marvelled at the city views from the balcony and peeped inside the refrigerator. There was no need for a flight to London. She toured the property using virtual reality (VR) goggles at Vanke’s global marketing centre in Shanghai.

The use of VR kit is quickly becoming widespread in China’s property industry. Few real-estate firms in other countries are as advanced. China is fast emerging as the world’s most important VR market, thanks to rapid adoption by property firms and by companies in other industries. The prompt take-up is not because Chinese firms make the best VR headsets, which they do not. In fact, the pioneers in cutting-edge hardware are America’s Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, Japan’s Sony, South Korea’s…Continue reading

TO CELEBRATE its 40th birthday, Vinamilk, a big Vietnamese dairy firm, filmed a children’s choir crooning adorably from the helipad of one of the country’s tallest towers. In truth the company hardly needs to sing its own praises. Vinamilk is probably Vietnam’s most familiar consumer brand, and it is widely considered to be the country’s best-run firm. Over a decade its profits have grown by close to one-third each year.

Hence the interest among foreigners in a 9% share to be sold by the government this year—the first tranche in a disposal which should eventually see Vietnam’s communist government give up its entire 45% stake in the firm. It is one of several big companies which the ruling party now promises to part with; two others are the Hanoi and Saigon beer companies, known as Habeco and Sabeco. After years of divesting mainly small slivers of unappealing enterprises, Vietnam is at last offering foreigners a slice of its best assets.

Vinamilk meets much of Vietnam’s daily demand for dairy products, including four-fifths of its condensed milk (most often found lurking sweetly at the bottom of the country’s famous…Continue reading

WHEN Samsung Electronics announced on October 11th that it would discontinue its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 7, one crucial event in the history of the world’s second-biggest technology company by revenues (after Apple) sprang to mind. In 1995 Lee Kun-hee, then its boss, ordered 150,000 mobile phones burned and bulldozed in front of 2,000 weeping employees. Business partners who had received the devices as gifts from him had reported back that they did not work properly.

The South Korean auto-da-fé is said to have helped create a culture of permanent crisis at the firm, which drives employees to work incredibly hard. Now the question is how the ignominious end of the Galaxy Note 7 handset, which some hardware aficionados had called the best “phablet” (or large smartphone) ever made, will change Samsung, which is going through a leadership transition. In the midst of the crisis, the firm announced that Lee Jae-yong, the son of Mr Lee, would join the board of Samsung Electronics later this year, taking another step towards succeeding his father, who two years ago suffered a debilitating heart…Continue reading

ONE of the gentler quips uttered by the writer and thinker H.L. Mencken was that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. By the same token, nobody ever went broke overestimating the anger of the American people. The country is in an unusually flammable mood. This being America, there are plenty of businesspeople around to monetise the fury—to foment it, manipulate it and spin it into profits. These are the entrepreneurs of outrage and barons of bigotry who have paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise.

The very first of them was Rush Limbaugh who, back in the 1980s, transformed himself from a disc jockey into a radio commentator. Mr Limbaugh shook up the ossified talk-show format by dispensing with the tedious call-ins and adding anarchic humour. Soon an army of “ditto-head” followers hung on his every word. He has 13m regular listeners and hundreds of imitators, ranging from national stars such as Sean Hannity to local ranters.

The second entrepreneur of outrage was Roger Ailes, a Republican operative who teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to build Fox News. Mr Ailes took talk radio and added TV…Continue reading

Hasta agosto las rentas patrimoniales del instituto público han sumado 1.110 millones

HERE is a funny little story about the history of economics. John Maynard Keynes called his landmark economics text «The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money». The «general theory» in the title was doing double duty. It modestly suggested a comparability between Keynes and Albert Einstein, a genius whose work revolutionised his field. It was also meant to convey that this was the big—one might say macro—idea shaping how employment, interest, and so on all work. Keynes’s peers, while impressed by the book, weren’t quite sure about its generality. John Hicks helped to turn Keynes’s great work into the models that would form the basis of macroeconomics textbooks, and shape policy thinking, for decades to come. Yet he also needled Keynes, writing that the great man’s economics provided a novel way of thinking about depressions but not much else:

[I]t is not the General Theory. We may call it, if we like, Mr. Keynes’ special theory. The General Theory…Continue reading

El acta de la reunión de septiembre revela las diferencias internas que persisten en el banco central