Tag: Approved

TO GAUGE an issue’s importance, a guest list is a good place to start. The one for a conference in Brussels on March 22nd to discuss the European Union’s “action plan” on sustainable finance features heavy-hitters including Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, and Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York who campaigns on climate change. Given that sustainable finance is well-established, what action does the EU think is needed?

Investing with an eye to environmental or social issues, not just financial returns, has become mainstream in the past decade. According to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), $23trn, or 26% of all assets under management in 2016, were in “socially responsible investments” that take account of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. New asset classes have sprung up. According to SEB, a Swedish bank, the issuance of green bonds, the proceeds of which are invested in environmental projects, reached $163bn in 2017, up from less than $500m in 2008.

Yet standards are a…Continue reading

SCOTT GOTTLIEB, the thoughtful head of America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has had a busy first year. He has launched the process of lowering nicotine levels in cigarettes, approved self-testing kits for breast-cancer genes and waved through the most new medicines in two decades, as well as a record number of copycat drugs (see article). There is one thing he and his regulatory agency are doing less of, however—regulating. New rules were at a 20-year low in 2017, according to analysts at PwC, a consultancy. Instead, the FDA is providing more guidance to industry. This approach, Mr Gottlieb hopes, will help pharmaceutical firms in America develop drugs more efficiently. Since that is where most drug development happens, the FDA’s philosophy matters beyond American borders.

Given the rapid pace of scientific advances in…Continue reading

A SINGLE pill of Abilify, a drug used to treat manic depression, costs $30 or so in America. Or you could try gAbilify (the g stands for “generic”), better known to chemists as Aripiprazole. Thrifty pharmaceutical companies, many of them in India, can provide it for less than $1 a pop since the drug’s patent expired in 2015. That is bad news for Otsuka and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the two labs that formulated Abilify and got it approved by authorities in the 1990s. Everyone else, from patients to insurers to the public purse, is correspondingly better off. Generics-makers have thrived, particularly in India. But the prognosis for the industry is less rosy.

India became the world’s biggest exporter of generics almost by accident. Lax intellectual-property rules in the 1980s allowed its firms to crib drugs patented elsewhere for its huge domestic market. Trade deals gradually opened markets abroad. As patents for a wave of drugs from the 1980s expired two decades later, sales of Indian generics…Continue reading

It never walks. But does it run?

IT USED to be the world’s two biggest makers of airliners that would invariably deliver new designs late and over budget. A decade ago the cost of Airbus’s A380 superjumbo soared by about €5.5bn ($6.6bn) after engineers got its 330 miles of cables in a jumble. Boeing’s rival 787 Dreamliner exceeded its forecast costs by a whopping $20bn, give or take; its parts, once assembled, did not fit together properly. But just as both planemakers are mending their ways—Airbus’s A350 and A320neo and Boeing’s 737 MAX arrived in a much more timely and economical manner—manufacturers of the engines which power the aircraft are beginning to stall.

On March 15th Boeing revealed that the new engines, the largest ever made, for its new 777X wide-body airliner had completed their first test flight. But GE, the American engineering giant that built them, is already three months behind with their development, because of hiccups with the…Continue reading

FEW measures of stockmarket valuation are as controversial as the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, or CAPE. American equities have looked expensive on this measure for most of the past 20 years, which is why many bulls tend to dismiss its usefulness. It is pretty clear that the CAPE does not help investors to time the market.

But a new paper* from Research Affiliates, a fund-management group, explains why many criticisms are overblown. The strongest case for the measure is that a higher ratio tends to be associated with lower long-term returns. A study of 12 national markets shows that a 5% increase in the CAPE, from 20 to 21, say, tends on average to reduce the total ten-year expected return by four percentage points.

The attraction of the CAPE is that it smooths out the vicissitudes of the profit cycle. In a recession, profits can plunge even faster than share prices. So if you look only at the ratio of a share price and the previous year’s profits, the market can look very expensive….Continue reading

LIKE teenagers, central bankers long to feel normal. For many of them (the central bankers, that is), the past decade has been an unusually angst-ridden one. They stumbled through it, confused by the way their policymaking bodies were changing, unsure what to do with their interest rates, embarrassed by their burgeoning balance-sheets. Teenagers often seek to quell their anxiety and insecurity by imitating behaviour they regard as normal. So too for central bankers.

But the desire to normalise policy, and leave crisis-era measures behind, could distract central bankers from their main goals, namely to support growth and control inflation. The Bank for International Settlements, a global club for central bankers, recently urged officials not to let market jitters discourage them from raising interest rates. Yet at worst, chasing some elusive notion of normal could put the global recovery at risk.

What central bankers mean by normalising policy is clear enough. As Peter Praet, the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), explained in a recent speech, to normalise is to end their reliance on “unconventional” or “non-standard” tools such as quantitative easing (QE, the printing of new money to buy assets). It means returning to a familiar world in which adjustments to interest rates are their main policy lever.

Central bankers make no…Continue reading

COBALT derives its name from Kobold, a mischievous German goblin who, according to legend, lurks underground. For centuries it vexed medieval miners by lookinglike a valuable ore that subsequently turned into worthless—and sometimes noxious—rubble. Once again it is threatening to cause trouble, this time in the growing market for batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), each of which uses about 10kg of cobalt. The source of mischief is no longer in Germany, though, but in China.

It is widely known that more than half of the world’s cobalt reserves and production are in one dangerously unstable country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. What is less well known is that four-fifths of the cobalt sulphates and oxides used to make the all-important cathodes for lithium-ion batteries are refined in China. (Much of the other 20% is processed in Finland, but its raw material, too, comes from a mine in Congo, majority-owned by a Chinese firm, China Molybdenum.)

On March 14th concerns about…Continue reading

Dockumentary evidence

THE enormous ships steaming into and out of the world’s ports do not only carry cargo. They also represent paperwork: bills of lading (BOLs), packing lists, letters of credit, insurance policies, orders, invoices, sanitary certificates, certificates of origin. Maersk, the world’s biggest container-shipping line, found that a shipment of avocados from Mombasa to Rotterdam in 2014 entailed more than 200 communications involving 30 parties. A giant container vessel may be associated with hundreds of thousands of documents. “A Venetian merchant…would recognise some of our documentation,” says John Laurens, head of global transaction services at DBS, a Singaporean bank.

According to the World Economic Forum, the costs of processing trade documents are as much as a fifth of those of shifting goods. Removing administrative blockages in supply chains could do more to boost international trade than eliminating tariffs. Full digitisation of trade…Continue reading

AN ANTITRUST trial over AT&T’s $109bn acquisition of Time Warner, which begins on March 19th, will have more keen observers than one courtroom can handle. Disney, Comcast, 21st Century Fox, Verizon, Charter Communications, CBS and Viacom will be watching. So will Netflix, Amazon and Google.

The reason is simple. If AT&T wins the case against the Justice Department, and the “vertical merger” of the distribution and content businesses goes through, a wave of consolidation deals will follow. Companies that rely on large numbers of people to watch video will want to bulk up to compete with each other and Silicon Valley’s mightiest.

Comcast may make a hostile bid for Fox’s assets, setting off a bidding war with Disney, which has already agreed a $66bn deal with Fox. (Comcast already wants to buy Sky, a European satellite provider that is part of the Disney-Fox transaction.) Other pay-TV and mobile firms, like Charter and Verizon, will feel emboldened to go after content companies such as CBS or Lionsgate. All are…Continue reading

“The Next Steve Jobs”

“THE Next Steve Jobs” is how Inc., an American business magazine, described Elizabeth Holmes when her photograph appeared on its cover in 2015. They may share an affinity for black turtlenecks but the reputations of Ms Holmes and Apple’s celebrated late boss could not be more different. On March 14th Ms Holmes was accused of fraud by America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She has agreed to pay a $500,000 fine, not serve as an officer of a public company for ten years and turn over much of her stake in Theranos, the startup she founded (she has neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing).

Only a few years ago Ms Holmes, who is 34 years old, was touted as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, a shatterer of Silicon Valley’s reinforced-glass ceiling. She graced magazine covers and speechified about Theranos, which was trying to upend diagnostic testing by using pinprick amounts of blood rather…Continue reading