Finanzas

La red, que operaba desde Marbella, defraudó a cada víctima entre 7.000 y 80.000 euros

La entidad discrepa del Banco de España, que ya ve una ralentización del gasto de los hogares a finales del primer semestre

Jeff dispenses more disruption

FOR roughly a year speculation has been feverish: would Amazon, an online retail giant, muscle into America’s prescription-drugs market? On June 28th that uncertainty ended when it bought a small online pharmacy, PillPack, based in Manchester, New Hampshire, for about $1bn. When the deal is completed later this year, Amazon will be able to sell prescription drugs to customers in the 50 states where PillPack has licenses.

The news of Amazon’s entry had a predictable effect on incumbent firms. Shares of three large bricks-and-mortar pharmacy chains, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Rite Aid and CVS Health, lost $11bn in value. Drug distributors such as Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen were also hit. Amazon gained $19.8bn. Michael Rea, boss of Rx Savings Solutions, a health-technology firm, says the purchase increased the speed with which Amazon can get into the prescription-drug market, making slimmer profit margins…Continue reading

IT IS rare to see the words “Canada” and “world domination” in the same sentence. The country’s cannabis producers want to change that. With an eye on October 17th, the date on which recreational marijuana will become legal, medical-cannabis firms have been expanding at home and talking up their global ambitions in a most un-Canadian way. Lots of joint ventures—in the legal sense—are being signed abroad. The hope is that having a base in the first large country to make pot legal for adults (Uruguay legalised cannabis in 2017) will give them an unbeatable lead.

To date firms have financed their expansion plans largely by selling shares, supplemented by funding from smaller investment banks and credit unions. Enthusiastic investors have pushed share prices to stratospheric levels (see chart)—many warn of a bubble. But the biggest banks, without whom nothing substantial is financed in Canada, have been wary. That changed on June 26th when the Bank of Montreal agreed to loan Aurora Cannabis up…Continue reading

Straight outta South Carolina

THE menace to Americans from immigration of the wrong sort is immense, according to President Donald Trump. The list of items he wants to deter from crossing the border includes objects as well as people, and one in particular holds his attention. In trade terms, he told Fox News on July 1st, “the cars are the big one.” With good reason, he views auto tariffs as a far deadlier weapon than the duties already imposed on steel and aluminium when it comes to extracting trade concessions from other countries.

That is dire news for all carmakers, which are among the world’s most globalised firms. But Germany’s are the most dependent on exports. Most well-off Americans long ago traded in Lincolns and Cadillacs for the refinement of Teutonic marques. A tweet from Mr Trump on June 22nd reaffirming his tariff plans sent the shares of Daimler, which makes Mercedes, and of BMW into a nosedive.

Mr Trump fumes that American cars exported…Continue reading

Here’s to carbon capture

IN THEORY, the world has too much carbon dioxide. In 2015 the Paris climate agreement set limits on emissions of the gas to prevent global temperatures rising by more than two degrees Celsius above those of pre-industrial times. But in practice, makers of food and drink in Europe have found that they cannot find enough of the gas. And this unlikely shortage is likely to get worse in future.

Food-grade CO₂ is a vital ingredient: it puts the fizz in carbonated drinks and beer, knocks out animals before slaughter and, as one of the gases inside packaging, delays meat and salad from going off. A shortage of the stuff has therefore created havoc in foodmakers’ supply chains. Heineken, a Dutch brewer, and Coca-Cola, an American drinks giant, have been forced to close some of their European plants. JD Wetherspoon, a British pub chain, ran out of some beers. Scotland’s largest pig slaughterhouse was forced to shut. On June 29th Warburtons,…Continue reading

IT EMERGED on July 2nd that Hollywood may make “The King of Oil”, a film about Marc Rich, an American-Swiss commodities trader who became a fabulously rich fugitive from American justice. On July 3rd Glencore, the firm founded by Mr Rich, said America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) had requested documents regarding its compliance with corruption and money-laundering laws. Depending on the outcome, the film may have a good sequel.

It has been a year of pain for Glencore, a mining and trading giant. News that the DoJ wanted over ten years of documents related to activities in three countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria and Venezuela, knocked its market value by 8.5%, or $4.3bn (on July 5th it announced a $1bn share buyback). Its shares had already lagged its peers this year because of its exposure to the DRC and Russia, where it has suffered collateral damage from American sanctions.

Glencore, whose boss, Ivan Glasenberg, is its second-biggest…Continue reading

THE story of China Merchants Group began in the 1870s. After its defeats in the Opium wars, the Qing government tried to learn from the West by adopting foreign technology and encouraging new commercial ventures, including China Merchants. The banking-to-shipping conglomerate, based in Hong Kong, has since evolved into one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises, with $1.1trn in assets.

Fittingly, its latest endeavour again involves looking westward for new technologies. On July 1st it announced that its investment arm and other China-based investors would put 40bn yuan ($6bn) into a 100bn yuan venture-capital (VC) fund, the China New Era Technology Fund.

That total pot is a nod to the much larger project that it aims to replicate: the $100bn Vision Fund, formed by Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, a Japanese telecoms and internet firm, to invest in flashy startups. It borrows a little of its aura by partnering with Centricus, a British investment company that helped Mr…Continue reading

“Our people crave, more than anything else, to know the extent of the nation,” says the narrator in “Do You Love Me?”, a short story by Peter Carey set on an imaginary world that lionises cartographers. To satisfy that craving, the country carries out a regular, exhaustive census: a “total inventory of the contents of the nation”. Helpful householders even move their possessions—furniture, appliances, utensils, heirlooms—into the street for easier counting.

China, like many countries, is keen to know its own extent. This year it is preparing its latest economic census, a twice-a-decade undertaking. Like the census in Mr Carey’s fable, it is a “mammoth task”. The most recent one employed 3m people, counted more than 8m enterprises and estimated a GDP of almost 59trn yuan ($9.5trn at the time). This year’s census may find that GDP per person has exceeded $10,000, enough to form a tidy pile of possessions on the street.

But why, many people will ask,…Continue reading

TWO contests are under way in which titans holding billions in their thrall vie for global domination. One is unfolding on Russian football pitches and features the likes of Neymar and Harry Kane. The other is playing out on the smartphone screens of consumers in India, Indonesia, Brazil and other emerging economies. There, American online superstars such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are pitted against a Chinese dream team led by Alibaba and Tencent.

The geopolitics of business means that the world’s biggest tech firms have swelled to combined market capitalisations of over $4trn without really going head to head. China blocked Google et al with its Great Firewall, preventing American firms (Apple is an obvious exception) from taking on Chinese rivals on the mainland. Chinese giants have stayed out of America; Europe fell under the spell of Silicon Valley before Chinese tech had matured.

Time, and capabilities, have changed. Chinese tech firms once simply mimicked Silicon Valley…Continue reading