Tag: Approved

WHEN China was gripped by political turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s, Cao Dewang cut his teeth as an entrepreneur. Mao’s chaotic rule forced him out of school and he took to the street, a scrappy teenager selling fruit and cigarettes. Looking back, Mr Cao has said that it was actually a good time to do business: the government was too busy waging ideological campaigns to enforce its regulations. Mr Cao went on to become a billionaire, as China’s biggest manufacturer of automotive glass. Last month he sparked controversy by complaining that life was tough for businesses in China. There are, he said, far too many regulations—especially taxes and fees. These days the government is much more effective in enforcing them.

Mr Cao hit a nerve with his claim that it was more costly to run a business in China than in America. He should know. His company, Fuyao Glass, bought an old General Motors factory in Ohio in 2014 and announced plans to invest $200m there. Mr Cao claimed that the overall tax on manufacturers is 35% higher in China than in America. Once China’s higher land and energy costs are factored in, the advantages of its lower labour costs…Continue reading

FOR fans of bitcoin, a digital currency, the year got off to a volatile start. On January 5th one bitcoin changed hands for nearly $1,150—almost as much as the record set three years ago. It has since dropped by 33%. Elsewhere in the land of monetary bits, things move more slowly but trouble is brewing: a potential patent war looms over the blockchain, a distributed ledger that authenticates and records every bitcoin transaction.

Heated fights over intellectual property are nothing new in promising technology markets. But given that the blockchain is expected to shake up everything from the way precious diamonds are safeguarded to the way shares are traded, the legal fights could be especially fierce.

On the face of it, the blockchain does not lend itself easily to staking out intellectual-property claims. Bitcoin’s creator, known only by his pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, published a paper about his invention, coded the first implementation and then disappeared—meaning that the core of the technology is now part of the public domain and only important additions and variations could be patented. And the blockchain’s components are widely known. In America court decisions as well as a new law on the granting of patents make it difficult to claim ownership for such financial innovations.

This hasn’t stopped firms from trying to get patent…Continue reading

IN AN era when architectural masterpieces curve and bloom (Zaha Hadid), or shimmy and fold (Frank Gehry), designers of central-bank buildings remain reassuringly fond of right angles. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city-state’s central bank and financial regulator, is housed in a boxy tower just south of the central business district. But tucked into one corner is a room called “LookingGlass@MAS” that desperately wants to be Silicon Valley: witness the scruffily dressed young men, whiteboards on wheels covered in buzzwords and the kitchen along one wall.

This is the MAS’s fintech lab, where Singapore is trying to put its own twist on the technologies disrupting the financial sector. A report from Citigroup published in 2016 warned that as fintech lets customers do more online and cuts into banks’ lending and payments activities, European and American banks could lose almost 2m jobs in the next ten years. Similar fears stalk Singapore, home to more than 200 banks, and dependent on finance for 12.6% of GDP.

In London, Berlin and San Francisco, many fintech innovators are betting against the big banks. Singapore,…Continue reading

“HELICOPTER parent” may sound like an insult, but given the chance, most parents would probably opt for the help of a chopper to zoom little ones between school, football practice and piano lessons. Getting children where they need to go is a huge hassle and expense, especially in homes where both parents work. Hailing rides through firms like Uber and Lyft has made life more convenient for adults. But drivers are not supposed to pick up unaccompanied minors (although some are known to bend the rules).

Youngsters represent a fresh-faced opportunity. Ride-hailing for kids could be a market worth at least $50bn in America, hopes Ritu Narayan, the founder of Zum, one of the startups pursuing the prize. These services are similar to Uber’s, except they allow parents to schedule rides for their children in advance. Children are given a code word to ensure they find the right driver, and parents receive alerts about the pick-up and ride, including the car’s speed. These services promise more rigorous background checks, fingerprinting and training than typical ride-hailing companies.

Annette Yolas, who works in sales at AT&T, a wireless…Continue reading

Still waiting for the invoice approval

GROWING up on a sugar-cane farm in Australia, Lex Greensill had a front-seat view of the strains suppliers suffer as they wait to be paid. After harvesting his crops, Mr Greensill’s father had to wait a year or more to receive payment. Across industries, buyers are eager to conserve their cash. Delaying payment is one way to do it: among the most important for some, such as big retailers, says Mr Greensill. Many buyers expect their suppliers to accept payment months after delivery. Even so, many still pay late—47% of suppliers surveyed by Taulia, a fintech firm, said they had this problem. In 2011 Mr Greensill founded Greensill Capital, one of a cluster of new fintech firms overhauling how supply chains are financed.

The details vary but their basic approach is to take advantage of buyers’ low credit risk to pay suppliers’ invoices promptly. The buyer—a large supermarket chain, say—approves a supplier’s invoice and transmits it to the fintech lender. (The lender can raise money in different ways: Greensill raises funds in the capital markets.) The lender pays the supplier on…Continue reading

Now everyone sees red

ON THE flanks of the Simandou mountains in south-eastern Guinea live remote colonies of West African chimpanzees. They alone should be grinning over the fate of those who have sought to turn their tropical habitat into Africa’s biggest iron-ore mine. No one else is laughing. Rarely has such a group of billionaires, hedge-fund barons, mining firms, government officials and go-betweens been snagged in such a woeful saga.

In theory, the prospect of digging up 2bn tonnes of ore from a country that is among the poorest on Earth should be encouraging, if corruption is kept in check. The government of Alpha Condé promised to do so upon taking office in 2010. But in reality the line between paying go-betweens to help win concessions and lining officials’ pockets is so blurry that it can cause mining firms endless trouble.

In recent months the plotline has shifted. During the past half-decade the businessman painted as the saga’s pantomime villain has been Beny Steinmetz, a globe-trotting Israeli diamond merchant, worth billions, whose lurid battles over Simandou with Rio Tinto, one of the…Continue reading

IT WAS telling that Germany, a country with a phobia of rising prices, in the first week of 2017 reported a jump in inflation. Its headline rate rose from 0.8% to 1.7% in December. After two years of unusually low price pressures, inflation across the rich world is set to revive this year. Much of this is because of the oil price, which fell below $30 a barrel in the early months of 2016 but has recently risen above $50 (see chart). Underlying inflation, too, seems poised to drift up. That is good news. The story for 2017 is not of inflation running too hot but rather of a welcome easing of fears of deflation.

To understand why, consider the three big drivers of inflation in the rich world: the price of imports, capacity pressures in the domestic economy and the public’s expectations. Start with imported inflation. A year ago, global goods prices were falling because of a slide in aggregate demand and a seemingly endless glut of basic commodities and manufactures. China’s economy wobbled. Emerging markets in general were in a funk; two of the largest, Brazil and Russia, were deep in recession.

Things look perkier now. Emerging markets…Continue reading

EMERGING markets have not been the same without Argentina, a country that embodies the promise and peril, the romance and the rockiness of the asset class. In 1988 it was one of the ten original members of the most popular emerging-market equity index, introduced by MSCI. In the late 1990s it was also the biggest member of the benchmark-bond indices compiled by JPMorgan Chase. But once it defaulted at the end of 2001, Argentina was exiled from global debt markets. And after it subsequently imposed capital controls on “hot money”, its shares suffered a similar banishment, ejected from MSCI’s index in 2009. It became a remote “frontier market”, like countries such as Bangladesh.

Since Mauricio Macri succeeded Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as president at the end of 2015, Argentina has been finding its way back from the financial periphery. It has floated its currency and lifted capital controls, recently abolishing a remaining requirement that foreign investors keep their money in the country for at least 120 days. In April the government sold $16.5bn of dollar bonds to international investors in a single day (a record for an…Continue reading

HOW do you solve a problem like Marine? Ms Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, has indicated that she hopes to reintroduce a national currency if she is elected president in May. In a recent speech, she suggested that government bonds would be redenominated in francs instead of euros.

The proposal was dressed up in technicalities. The franc would be revived as a “parallel” currency for official transactions and used alongside the euro in a version of the systems (the snake and the exchange-rate mechanism) that existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Such schemes tied European currencies together but were subject to regular crises, with France periodically devaluing the franc.

Investors would pretty quickly see through the façade. There is not much point in bringing back a national currency unless you want the right to devalue it. And there is not much point in redenominating government bonds in francs unless you want to pay creditors back less than they expected. (This might technically count as a default, according to Moody’s, a rating agency; it depends on the exact circumstances.) If that happened, it…Continue reading

EVERY January more than 10,000 economists meet for the annual conference of the American Economic Association (AEA). This year, the shindig was in balmy Chicago, a stone’s throw from its second-tallest building, the name TRUMP stamped in extra-large letters across its base. Most papers had been written months in advance; few sessions tackled the electoral earthquake in November. Yet there was no mistaking the renewed sense, following its failure to foresee the 2007-08 financial crisis, of an academic field in a crisis of its own. The election was seen as a defeat for liberalisation and globalisation, and hence for an economics profession that had championed them. If economists wish to remain relevant and useful, the modest hand-wringing at this year’s meetings will need to yield to much deeper self-reflection.

Their theories had always shown that globalisation would produce losers as well as winners. But too many economists worried that emphasising these costs might undermine support for liberal policies. A “circle the wagons” approach to criticism of globalisation weakened the case for mitigating policies that might have protected it from a…Continue reading