Noticias

La deuda emitida para el colchón anticrisis no servirá como colateral. Leer

Tener el teléfono móvil cerca siempre y en todo lugar se ha convertido en un hábito. En el trabajo, sin embargo, reduce nuestra concentración y productividad. Leer

La Reserva Federal comenzará a presionar con ligeras subidas de tipos. Leer

Según el periódico alemán Handelsblatt, el Gobierno de Berlín vería con buenos ojos una posible participación del sector privado. Leer

El presidente de Bankia, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, ha asegurado hoy que las prácticas bancarias actuales «no tienen nada que ver con las del pasado», y ha defendido que si un banco es multado por mala praxis es «lógico» que sus gestores sufran también algún tipo de repercusión en sus remuneraciones. Leer

LIKE many Londoners, your correspondent does not possess a car. Thanks to the Underground, buses, taxis, shared bikes and the gift of upright bipedal motion (to say nothing of the impossibility of street parking) it has always seemed more trouble than it is worth. But unlike most other functioning adults, this Gulliver also lacks the licence—and indeed the ability—to drive.

Which made the prospect of reporting a story from deepest Florida daunting. Never mind the snakes, alligators and Florida men; without a car I worried more about negotiating America’s creaky public transport system than fending off local fauna. Few American cities outside New York offer the possibility to get around without driving. As for unincorporated towns and rural areas in poor counties? Forget it.

It is not as if I have never reported outside conurbations. But much of that reporting has been in developing countries where rented cars tend to come with people to drive them. As it turns out, Florida offers something similar.

The presence of Uber, a ride-hailing service, is…Continue reading

A FAILED turnaround and then, last month, the biggest data breach from a single site in history. Yahoo, an online firm, has had a bad run of news. On October 4th came a fresh blow when Reuters, a newswire, reported that the company had written customised software to scan all incoming e-mail for certain keywords, complying with a request either from America’s National Security Agency or the FBI.

The company’s first response was to say that it is a law-abiding company. It later issued a statement saying that the Reuters article was “misleading” and that the “mail scanning” the article described “does not exist on our systems”. But that is only a partial denial, and does not rule out the possibility that Yahoo did some kind of scanning. According to Reuters, Yahoo’s chief information-security officer, Alex Stamos, left Yahoo in 2015 because of a decision by Marissa Mayer, its chief executive, to obey an order from a government agency. (He now does the same job at Facebook.)

Even the possibility of a real-time wiretap raises important questions. If the government has demanded such bulk scanning it may represent an expansion…Continue reading

WHEN Marco Polo travelled to China in the 13th century, he found that among its wonders was “the secret of the alchemists”. Its imperial court could turn mulberry bark into money. It simply printed paper notes, decreed that people must accept them and killed counterfeiters. For a Venetian used to gold coins, the world’s first fiat currency was a marvel. Its value derived not from precious metal but from the credibility of the regime issuing it. This month China achieved another kind of monetary alchemy: to fashion a global reserve currency out of one that, by a range of criteria, does not yet merit such status.

On October 1st the yuan became the fifth entrant in the basket of currencies that forms the Special Drawing Right, a reserve asset created by the IMF. Immediate implications are limited. SDRs are a unit of account, not a real currency; inclusion in the basket does not force anyone to acquire the yuan. Symbolically, though, it is a big deal: the IMF’s seal of approval for China’s monetary system. It has deemed it safe for central banks around the world to add the yuan to their reserves. Dozens of central banks in fact already do so,…Continue reading

AMONG the proud titans humiliated in the financial crisis of 2007-08 was GE, forced to take a government bail-out in 2008. In response it swiftly slimmed down its lending arm, GE Capital. But the regulators were still not happy. In 2013 they labelled it a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI), ie, one big enough to pose a global risk. That imposed costly regulatory burdens and encouraged GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, to announce in April 2015 that he would wind down most of GE’s finance division within three years.

In a remarkable corporate transformation, he is ahead of schedule. The disposal to Wells Fargo this week of GE’s global inventory-financing business means that GE has sold $193 billion of “ending net investment”, or ENI (an adjusted asset figure), in the past 18 months, covering more than 25 lending units.

It has taken almost a decade. But GE is, almost, an ex-bank. As Mr Immelt promised last year, it is also much simpler. It shed its SIFI status in June. Lending, in ENI terms, is down by 85% from its peak in 2008 (see chart) and now focuses on its core industrial businesses. Its reliance…Continue reading

Best-sellers from Tokyo to Texas

IT HAS become a staple story in the local American press: a Daiso store opening near you. Last month it was the turn of Plano, Texas, to get a branch of the Japanese chain of shops where everything costs ¥100. (In America it actually charges $1.50 per item, giving it a premium over the current exchange rate of 97 cents per ¥100.) The Plano store is the second of 44 shops planned for the state. To date California has 49 branches.

America is far from alone. As well as its 3,000-odd stores in Japan, Daiso has 1,500-plus outlets abroad. Its bargain range of products, from value-for-money bags to Japanese “kawaii” or “cute” figures, are sold around the world, from countries in Latin America to the Gulf states and throughout the rest of Asia. (As yet there are no ¥100 stores in Europe.)

This roll-out is orchestrated from a headquarters in the eastern suburbs of Hiroshima. The building looks bland from the outside. But its interior is decked out in Daiso’s trademark pink. One floor is abuzz with buyers examining packs of wet wipes and plastic toys;…Continue reading