Tag: Business and finance
A case for owning euro-zone shares
IN AN episode of “Seinfeld”, a 1990s television comedy, George Costanza, a serial failure played by Jason Alexander, decides that every instinct he has is wrong. So he resolves to do the opposite. He is soon squiring a new girlfriend and is up for a dream job. “It’s all happening because I’m completely ignoring every urge towards common sense and good judgment I’ve ever had,” he says.
Success in investing often means going against the grain—and your own feelings. To do otherwise is to be swept along by the general greed and fear. Still, fear is a useful emotion. It would be unwise, for instance, to ignore the recent turmoil in Italy, where bond yields spiked in response to concerns that the country might be on the road to leaving the euro. Though the worst fears have subsided, the coalition that was eventually given the president’s blessing to form a government looks capable of causing trouble.
A natural inclination in the circumstances is to turn away from euro-zone…Continue reading
The world's first commercial drone-delivery service takes flight
LATE on a Monday morning the village of Zhangwei is quiet. Chickens scratch and cluck at the side of the road. Workers use wooden spades to spread grain on the highway to dry, using half its width so that traffic can still pass on the other side. Yet at the community centre at the village’s heart, two objects hint at a feat of ultra-modern logistics about to unfold: a circle of green astroturf laid down in the central courtyard, and a billboard on the front of the building bearing the logo of JD.com, China’s second-largest online retailer.
A low whirr breaks the stillness as a spiky dot appears on the horizon. The drone arrives overhead with a roar, hovers for a moment, then lowers itself towards the green circle like a mantis, three sets of propellers churning the air into whorls of straw and dust. Slung beneath it is a red cardboard box branded with JD’s cheery dog mascot. Just a few feet above the ground, the drone drops the box then zips back…Continue reading
In developing countries, many people cannot afford not to work
AMERICA’S unemployment statistics attract close attention, even from presidents. Early on June 1st President Donald Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the latest figure (3.8%), released that morning. China’s unemployment numbers, by contrast, attract mostly ridicule. They have barely budged since 2011 despite the upheavals of the period.
Many China-watchers therefore hoped that a new measure of unemployment, dating from 2016 but published monthly since April, would be more revealing. Unlike the older statistic, which counts only those registered as jobless at local labour offices, the new measure draws on a survey of the labour force, collected by trained enumerators and beamed directly to Beijing beyond the grasp of local officials. It now covers 120,000 households across urban China (on top of a longer-running survey of 31 cities), providing, in theory, a representative snapshot of the biggest unemployed population in the…Continue reading
Buying GitHub takes Microsoft back to its roots
ALMOST to the day 17 years ago Steve Ballmer, then boss of Microsoft, the world’s biggest software firm, called Linux a “cancer”, meaning that the open-source operating system would spell the death of proprietary software. On June 4th, his successor, Satya Nadella, announced that the firm would take over GitHub, the main source of such tumours today, for $7.5bn. The deal is yet another sign of Microsoft’s startling recent metamorphosis.
GitHub is no household name, but among programmers it is as important as Facebook—which explains the impressive price tag for a firm that earned only an estimated $200m of revenues last year. More than 28m developers globally keep their code on the website, which offers all kinds of tools and services. Most important of these is allowing software projects, whether open-source or not, easily to pull together code from different contributors.
For Microsoft the deal is a homecoming. It used to be a kind of GitHub itself. When Windows,…Continue reading
A referendum on the way money is created
TO ITS opponents, the Vollgeld initiative is “suicidal” and a “dangerous experiment”. To its supporters, it is the ticket to a “fairer and more stable banking system”. Swiss voters will decide for themselves on June 10th, when the proposal for sovereign money, which would rewire the country’s banking system, are put to a referendum that, in theory, would be binding.
The heart of the argument is whether private-sector banks should be able to create money. In modern economies, most money takes the form of deposits in commercial banks, rather than the cash in circulation and the reserves determined by the central bank. And bank deposits are mainly created through bank lending. Lenders can thus lend far more than they hold in central-bank reserves.
Vollgeld supporters want to take such money-creating powers away from banks. Bank deposits are not as safe as sovereign money, they say. If a bank collapses, depositors lose…Continue reading
A judge blames many parties in the Gulf’s biggest-ever corporate scandal
THE glitzy Gulf states take pride in superlatives. They have the world’s tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, even (for a time) the most expensive cocktail. To that list, add a slightly less glamorous entry: what a judge has called one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. On June 1st a court in the Cayman Islands issued a verdict in the long-running saga of Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi & Brothers Company (AHAB), a conglomerate. When the Saudi company defaulted in 2009, its creditors scrambled to recoup billions in losses. The effective bankruptcy touched off lawsuits from Saudi Arabia to Switzerland. At last, after the longest trial in Cayman Islands’ history, it is one step closer to resolution.
No one emerged from court looking good. Central to the case was whether the founding Gosaibi family knew about fraud carried out by Maan al-Sanea, one of their firm’s executives. Born to a Kuwaiti family, Mr Sanea married into the family in 1980 and…Continue reading
Two Asian stock exchanges tussle over market data
BUYING and selling shares in India is not for the faint of heart. Its own central-bank governor reckons equity capital is taxed up to five times. Never fear. There is a well-established alternative. Investors can just as easily buy financial instruments that track share prices but are not themselves shares. Such “derivatives” are used across the world to mirror markets in everything from platinum to pork bellies. But they also raise awkward questions: can the exchange that generates prices by matching buyers and sellers stop a rival using the data to create its own derivatives?
A quarrel between the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in Mumbai touches that very issue. Since 2000 global investors wanting exposure to Indian shares but not Indian red tape and tax have gone via SGX. Under a licence from NSE, punters could trade a derivative linked to the Nifty 50, an index which is to India what the FTSE 100 is to Britain or the S&P 500 is to…Continue reading
Rent the Runway is taking clothes-sharing mainstream
AT ABOUT 4.30am the first of thousands of black garment bags arrive by truck at a vast warehouse less than ten miles (16km) from Lower Manhattan. The bags brim with designer dresses and other trendy clothing and accessories. Workers begin inspecting the garments. A billowy, patterned blouse smells a bit ripe. A floor-length red gown has a tear. A stain sullies the floral pattern of a silk sundress.
Turnaround is quick. The blouse is sent to washing machines, the gown goes to one of the 75 seamstresses lined up next to a wall of thread, zippers, buttons and other adornments in every imaginable colour and the silk dress makes its way to the “spotters”: experts who know how to get tough stains out of delicate fabrics. Most items are in and out in less than a day.
Such efficiency is essential for Rent the Runway (RTR), a New York-based, privately-owned startup with a value of almost $800m that rents out…Continue reading
How e-commerce with drone delivery is taking flight in China
LATE on a Monday morning the village of Zhangwei is quiet. Chickens scratch and cluck at the side of the road. Workers use wooden spades to spread grain on the highway to dry, using half its width so that traffic can still pass on the other side. Yet at the community centre at the village’s heart, two objects hint at a feat of ultra-modern logistics about to unfold: a circle of green astroturf laid down in the central courtyard, and a billboard on the front of the building bearing the logo of JD.com, China’s second-largest online retailer.
A low whirr breaks the stillness as a spiky dot appears on the horizon. The drone arrives overhead with a roar, hovers for a moment, then lowers itself towards the green circle like a mantis, three sets of propellers churning the air into whorls of straw and dust. Slung beneath it is a red cardboard box branded with JD’s cheery dog mascot. Just a few feet above the ground, the drone drops the box then zips back…Continue reading
A tax-evasion scandal ensnares Chinese film-production companies
IT IS hard to go a day in China without seeing Fan Bingbing. The doe-eyed starlet gazes from film posters (she has averaged four films a year for the past decade), airbrushed ads for global brands and glossy magazine covers. But in the past week she has graced articles about tax evasion. Shares in a film-production firm that she partly owns fell by 10% on fears that it might be ensnared in a scandal in which actors have allegedly concealed their salaries. Ms Fan has denied wrongdoing. On June 3rd the government began a probe into tax compliance in the entertainment industry.
The controversy began when Cui Yongyuan, a TV presenter, described two anonymous contracts on Weibo, a microblog, one for 10m yuan ($1.6m) and another, linked to the first, for 50m yuan. He said it was a case of the “yin-and-yang” payments prevalent in the film business: reporting a low salary for taxation and pocketing a larger sum. Share prices of big film…Continue reading