Tag: Business and finance
Thomas Schelling, economist and nuclear strategist, died on December 13th, aged 95
WITHIN half an hour of waking up on October 10th 2005, Thomas Schelling received four phone calls. The first was from the secretary of the Nobel Committee, with news that he and Robert Aumann had jointly won that year’s prize for economics. During the fourth call, when asked how winning felt, he answered: “Well, it feels busy.” He was nothing if not truthful. He also confessed to feeling confused about which bit of his work had won the prize.
It might have been his work on addiction—flicked off like ash from his own struggles with smoking. Economists must understand, he wrote, the man who swears “never again to risk orphaning his children with lung cancer”, yet is scouring the streets three hours later for an open shop selling cigarettes. Mr Schelling’s work laid (largely unacknowledged) foundations for future behavioural economists. In his thinking, addicts have two selves, one keen for healthy lungs and another craving a smoke. Self-control strategies involve drawing battle lines between them.
The prize could also have been for his work on segregation, showing how mild individual preferences could lead to extreme group…Continue reading
We wish you a merry reorganisation
In a Money talks special, Anne McElvoy brings in Suzane Heywood and Stephen Heidari-Robinson, authors of Reorg: How to get it right. They delve into the art and science of reorganising a business
The best cities for some last-minute Christmas shopping
CHRISTMAS in New York is a time when, in the words of Meyer Berger, the city tries “to match the gems from her endless treasure chest against the winking and sparking brilliants in Heaven’s vault”. Only grinches fail to succumb to the seasonal spirit when the snow is falling in Manhattan, the steam is rising from the pavements and the lights twinkle. For many, though, Christmas means one thing: the chance to shop. New York may be magical, but is it the best place to stock up on gifts? Gulliver decided to compare the Big Apple with other shopping draws around the world.
To be a good place to shop, a city first needs a wide selection of things to buy. We used a ranking by CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate firm, to assess the penetration of global retailers in cities around the world. Second, it must not break the bank. So we applied cost-of-living data from The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, both on the average cost of a night’s stay and the price of the sort of items Christmas…Continue reading
Keep the costs of trade in perspective
ECONOMISTS are realising that they have got some things about trade wrong in the past. Just because trade can make everyone better off, doesn’t mean it will, for instance (at least without some help from politicians). That new research, and this year’s political ructions, are generating some reflection on these issues among economists is a good thing. But it is important to maintain one’s perspective. Tim Duy has not done that, I think, in this stemwinder of a post on the effects of American trade policy. He quotes Noah Smith, who says:
[I]n the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S opened its markets to Chinese goods, first with Most Favored Nation trading status, and then by supporting China’s accession to the WTO. The resulting competition from cheap Chinese goods contributed to vast inequality in the United States, reversing many of the employment gains of the 1990s and holding down U.S. wages. But this sacrifice on the part of 90% of the American populace enabled China to lift its…Continue reading
Many airlines shamelessly exploit female sexuality
EVERY December, more than 1,000 female high school students, some as young as 15, take part in a “bikini competition” held in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao. The event, hosted by Oriental Beauty, a modelling agency, provides a platform for aspiring flight attendants to show off their bikini bodies to eager recruiters from the Chinese airline industry. Those deemed the most attractive are invited to join a fast-track flight attendant trainee scheme, which can open the door to a dream job at one of China’s big airlines.
Many Chinese and other Asian airlines shamelessly exploit female sexuality. At China Southern Airlines, air hostesses must be 25 or younger and must not have “X or O shaped legs”. Stewardesses at Japan Airlines need to have “good skin complexion”. Indonesia’s flag carrier, Garuda Indonesia, which Skytrax declared had the world’s best cabin staff in 2016 (not a single Western airline made the shortlist), refuses to hire older, married women. VietJet…Continue reading
Dorothy meets the Mnuchins
DOROTHY was unhappy. Life on the Kansas farm seemed dull, and her pocket money hadn’t risen in real terms for years. It was time for a change; time to make Kansas great again. Then, as she was sitting in the farmhouse with her dog Toto, a tornado came along, sweeping them up and taking her away, far from reality.
With a bump, the farmhouse landed on a woman. As Dorothy emerged, she saw a crowd of cheering little people.“You have killed the wicked witch of the east wing” they shouted. “We could not abide her charitable foundation or lax e-mail security procedure. But you have saved us.”
“Who are you?” asked Dorothy.
“We are the Mnuchins” they proclaimed “and we raise all the finance for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, who lives in a giant tower with his name on the side.”
“What’s it called?” asked Dorothy.
“Ozterity” came the reply.
“Can the Wizard of Oz restore prosperity to my Kansas farm?” she asked.
“Of course” they cried.
“Can the Wizard help me and my dog Toto?” she asked.
“It depends. Is Toto a Hispanic name?” said one Mnuchin. “And…Continue reading
The management style of Amancio Ortega
IT IS a short walk from a tiny shop with peeling yellow paint in downtown La Coruña, in northern Spain, to a dazzling five-storey store, opened in September by Zara, by far the world’s most successful purveyor of “fast fashion”. In this stroll across three city blocks, the career of Amancio Ortega unfolds: from teenaged apprentice in the corner shop, Gala, a men’s clothing business, to Europe’s richest entrepreneur, the majority owner of one of its best-performing firms.
According to one employee of Zara who works with him, “the true story of Amancio Ortega has not been told.” Mr Ortega, the son of an itinerant railway worker, who started at the corner shop aged 13, had a basic upbringing: an ex-colleague says he talks of meals of “only potatoes”. He has lived mainly in Galicia, a relatively poor region with no history in textiles. Yet there, in 1975, he founded Zara—a manufacturer-cum-retailer that, along with its sister brands, has over 7,000 shops globally.
Mr Ortega (pictured) is now 80 but he remains energetic and involved in the business (if uninterested in wearing trendy clothes). He owns nearly 60% of…Continue reading
European insurers and the curse of low interest rates
INSURANCE is banking’s boring cousin: it lacks the glamour, the sky-high bonuses and the ever-present whiff of danger. So European stress tests for insurers, whose results were due to be published on December 15th after The Economist went to press, have attracted far less attention than those for banks in July. Yet insurance also faces a grave threat, from prolonged low interest rates.
Insurers invest overwhelmingly in bonds, so low interest rates make their lives difficult. The last time the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) conducted an insurance stress test, in 2014, a quarter of participants scored poorly: they would not have met their capital requirements in the test’s long low-interest-rate scenario. The proportion jumped to 44% in an alternative scenario involving an asset-price shock. The new results are unlikely to be better. Each year of low interest rates worsens the problem. Higher-yielding bonds mature and insurers end up with ever more newer ones with low, or even negative, interest rates.
Insurers are focused on the problem. One strategy is to outsource more to external…Continue reading
In Germany mature workers are answering to young supervisors
Who’s the daddy?“IF THEY resented me they didn’t talk to me about it,” says a young German manager at a media firm in Frankfurt. Still, he says it was noticeable that when a subordinate 20 years older than him thanked him for buying lunch he had to swallow twice before adding the word “boss”.
Older workers sometimes begrudge being managed by a callow colleague. Precocious youngsters, too, can feel awkward about bossing their elders around. But in Germany a shortage of skilled workers means that such situations are becoming ever more common.
The country’s population is projected to shrink. Among rich-world countries, only in six nations including Japan and Greece are populations expected to decrease faster. As more Germans retire, fewer youngsters are entering the workforce to replace them. As a share of the working population the number of 15-to-24-year-olds has fallen by ten percentage points since the 1980s, says the German Federal Employment Agency. Firms competing to retain young talent are tempted to promote them earlier as a result. A paper by professors at the University of Cambridge and WHU, a…Continue reading
A cheaper currency does not always boost economic growth
IN SEPTEMBER 2010 Brazil’s then-finance minister, Guido Mantega, gave warning that an “international currency war” had broken out. His beef was that in places where it was difficult to drum up domestic spending, the authorities had instead sought to weaken their currencies to make their exports cheaper and imports dearer. The dollar had recently fallen, for instance, because the Federal Reserve was expected to begin a second round of quantitative easing. The losers in this battle were those emerging markets, like Brazil, whose currencies had soared. Its currency, the real, was then trading at around 1.7 to the dollar.
These days a dollar buys 3.4 reais, but no one in Brazil or in other emerging markets with devalued currencies is declaring a belated victory. A cheap currency has not proved to be much of a boon. Indeed new research from Jonathan Kearns and Nikhil Patel, of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a forum for central banks, finds that at times a rising currency can be a stimulant and a falling currency a depressant. They looked at a sample of 44 economies, half of them emerging markets, to gauge the effect of changes in the exchange rate on exports and imports (the trade channel) and also on the price and availability of credit (the financial channel).
They found a negative relationship between changes in GDP and currency shifts…Continue reading