Tag: Approved

So last season

NEAR the end of the antitrust trial over AT&T’s $109bn acquisition of Time Warner, Richard Leon, the presiding judge, asked Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, what the pay-television market would look like in seven years’ time. Mr Stephenson mused in his folksy Oklahoma drawl that seven years ago his predictions for today would have missed “so hard” when it came to the decline of pay-TV and the rise of competition from Silicon Valley.

The exchange sounds self-deprecating but it highlighted what AT&T argued was a crucial weakness in the government’s case. The Department of Justice, which is seeking to block the deal, has chiefly looked back to the past, not forward to a video and advertising market increasingly shaped by Netflix, Google and Facebook. Many analysts agree, and are cautiously optimistic about AT&T’s chances of a favourable settlement or ruling in time for the deal’s closing deadline of June…Continue reading

SWEEP past the cash machines at the Sumitomo Mitsui bank in Tokyo’s Sangenjaya shopping district and instead enjoy the personal service. Uniformed concierges welcome every customer with a bow. A dozen tellers are watched over by a manager who leaps up to meet elderly patrons. Transactions are concluded with carved signature seals stamped on paper contracts, and another round of bows.

Japan’s high-street banks are not just overstaffed. They are also overbranched. According to the World Bank, high-income countries have on average 17.3 commercial-bank branches per 100,000 adults. Japan has 34.1. If you include branches of the post office, a popular place for people to save, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) reckons the country is the world’s most overbanked.

Retail banks across most rich countries struggled to make money after the financial crisis. But Japan has been close to or in deflation for most of the past two decades. The result, according to a report last year by the BoJ, is…Continue reading

WARFARE has been transformed by drones. Using pilotless aircraft armed with precision weapons America can kill its enemies—in, say, the Hindu Kush or Syria—with a click of a mouse. There is a similar shift in economic diplomacy, where Uncle Sam has perfected new weapons that exploit its power over the world’s financial plumbing and over the brainiest parts of the tech industry. In April these weapons were used in anger on big, important firms for the first time. The targets were Rusal, a Russian metals firm, and ZTE, a Chinese electronics company. The results have been devastating—and alarming.

In 1919 Woodrow Wilson called international sanctions a “silent, deadly remedy” and over the next 70 years America deployed them about 70 times, reckons Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute. America achieved its geopolitical objectives only a third of the time, he says. But there was little doubt that it could meet its narrower goal of inflicting pain by halting trade with other countries and by…Continue reading

IN 2013 Codere, a Spanish gaming firm, owed money it could not repay. Its bonds were trading at just over half face value. Blackstone, a private-equity firm, offered it a cheap $100m loan. But there was a catch. Blackstone had bought credit derivatives on Codere’s debt that would pay out about €14m ($19m) if Codere missed a bond payment. So Codere delayed a payment by a couple of days to prompt a “technical default”. Blackstone got its payout; Codere got its loan and stayed afloat.

On the satirical “Daily Show”, Jon Stewart, the then host, likened the scheme to the insurance fraud in “Goodfellas”, in which mobsters insure a restaurant before blowing it up. But that missed an important point. Blackstone did not blow Codere up—quite the opposite. As it said at the time, it “provided capital when no one else would, which allowed the company to live and fight another day”. The investors who sold Blackstone credit-derivative contracts had in effect bet that Codere would…Continue reading

Blue-skies regulation

AS BRITAIN’S prime minister between 2010 and 2016, David Cameron championed financial transparency, targeting anonymous shell companies as the getaway cars of tax-evaders and money-launderers. On his watch Britain became the first G20 country to commit to a publicly accessible register of company owners. Mr Cameron tried to make British territories with big offshore financial centres do likewise. The arm-twisting stopped when he stepped down in 2016. But campaigners, led in Parliament by Labour’s Margaret Hodge, vowed to keep going. This week their persistence paid off.

Ms Hodge and Andrew Mitchell, a Conservative MP, had tabled an amendment to an anti-money-laundering bill, which was designed to force “overseas territories” in the Caribbean and Atlantic, among them the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, to set up public registers, if they had not already done so, by the end of 2020. Faced with defeat in…Continue reading

A CYNIC, says one of Oscar Wilde’s characters, is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But, as philosophers have long known, assigning values to things or situations is fraught. Like the cynic, economists often assume that prices are all anyone needs to know. This biases many of their conclusions, and limits their relevance to some of the most serious issues facing humanity.

The problem of value has lurked in the background ever since the dismal science’s origins. Around the time Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations”, Jeremy Bentham laid out the basis of a utilitarian approach, in which “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. In the late 19th century Alfred Marshall declared the correct focus of economics to be the “attainment and…use of material requisites of well-being”. Or, as his student, Arthur Pigou, put it, “that part of social welfare that can be brought directly or indirectly into…Continue reading

IN THE mining world the bout has the drama of a heavyweight title fight. In one corner is Ivan Glasenberg, billionaire boss of Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities-trading firm. In the other is Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire accused by America of corruption related to his dealings with Joseph Kabila’s government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The prize is a battery mineral, cobalt, which Glencore produces in the DRC and whose value has almost tripled since the electric-vehicle revolution accelerated at the start of 2017. It will be a tough fight. In the DRC Glencore is currently facing the potential loss of one of its biggest mines and sharply higher mining levies, as well as a costly lawsuit. “It’s a shakedown of Glencore,” says an analyst in London.

The clash between Messrs Glasenberg and Gertler, two former business partners, dates back to December, when the American government slapped sanctions on Mr Gertler, accusing him of amassing hundreds of…Continue reading

AFTER just 18 days as Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, Christian Sewing had two tasks to perform on April 26th. The easy one, inherited from his ousted predecessor, John Cryan, was to report predictably glum first-quarter results. Net profit dropped by 79%, year on year, to only €120m ($147m). Harder was indicating where he might lead Germany’s troubled leading lender. The rough answer is: back towards Europe, and away from any aspiration to be a global investment bank.

Mr Sewing intends to concentrate more on raising finance and managing payments and currencies for big European companies, and less on America and Asia. He plans to cut the small swaps-repurchasing business in America and to focus the buying and selling of shares for hedge funds and other investors on the most profitable clients. By 2021 corporate and investment banking’s share of total revenues will be trimmed to 50%, from 54% last year. As a result, Mr Sewing said, earnings should become more…Continue reading

IT WAS not the sort of do-it-yourself activity that Castorama, a French home-improvement chain, usually promoted. The search engine on the firm’s website started offering customers puerile responses to their inquiries. Its auto-complete text function suggested such intriguing products as a “bollock hammer” or “cock sander”. It also returned offensive anti-Semitic phrases. The firm blamed manipulation by unnamed actors and had to briefly scrap its search function.

That incident, two years ago, was a reminder that much online search occurs within websites. Internet giants such as Google excel at bringing users to sites but once there customers often rely on websites’ own search functions to find products or services. Some firms build their own engines; others use open-source software, such as Elasticsearch, to supply them. The results can sometimes be painfully slow and undiscerning.

As e-commerce grows, so does demand for search systems that are fast, accurate and…Continue reading

POPULAR concern about free trade with China has focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs in America and Europe. Policymakers have an additional worry: that China’s rise is hurting innovation in the West. This fear is among the small set of issues that unites American Democrats and Republicans. In 2016 Barack Obama’s commerce secretary said that China’s state-driven economy would weaken the world’s innovation ecosystem. Donald Trump’s advisers allege that China makes it harder for foreign firms to invest in innovation by squeezing their returns. Mr Trump’s trade team was expected to raise this complaint, among others, with Chinese officials during talks in Beijing on May 3rd and 4th, as The Economist went to press. There is one problem. Data suggest that competition with China has coincided with more innovation in America, not less.

The relationship between competition and innovation is complex, even before considering trade with China. Economists agree that the…Continue reading