Tag: Business and finance

“PLEASE don’t leave us.” From the dozens of e-mails in people’s inboxes, begging them to give their consent to be sent further messages, you could deduce that the senders of newsletters and the like are hardest hit by the European Union’s tough new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on May 25th. But the main loser may well be an industry that few have ever heard of but most have dealings with every day: advertising technology, or ad tech. In fact, the GDPR would probably not exist at all were it not for this collection of companies, which have an insatiable hunger for personal data.

Ad tech emerged because advertising is the internet’s default business model. Since targeted ads tend to be more efficient and targeting requires personal data (sites previously visited, searches in online stores and the like), these data became the fuel of a new industry to automate online advertising. It is so complex that even experts often resort to what is…Continue reading

ITALY’S next government, a coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right Northern League, is giving investors plenty to worry about. Leaked plans, hastily abandoned, suggested it might want to leave the euro or ask the European Central Bank to forgive €250bn ($292bn) of Italian debt. But less attention has been paid to what it might mean for Italian banks, and in particular for their biggest burden: non-performing loans (NPLs). Over €185bn of NPLs were outstanding at the end of 2017, the most for any country in the European Union (see chart).

By comparison with Greece, where NPLs are 45% of loans, Italy looks manageable, with just 11.1%. And it has made progress: in late 2015 NPLs were 16.8% of loans. But any wild policy lurches would put that progress in question. The clean-up of banks’ books has relied on openness to foreign investors. Huge volumes of NPLs (€37bn in 2016 and over €47bn in 2017, according to Deloitte, a consultancy) have been sold by banks, often to…Continue reading

ONE of the more extreme recent cases of corporate bribery is that of LafargeHolcim, a giant Swiss-French cement-maker which was accused in 2016 of funnelling money to armed groups controlling roads and checkpoints around a factory in Syria. The firm still cannot be sure who pocketed its payoffs, via middlemen, that were intended to keep its facility running at all costs. The money may well have ended up funding Islamic State terrorists.

The investigation into LafargeHolcim is one sign of a wider change. The era when European firms could talk up lengthy “ethics codes” at home and behave badly abroad is over. Long gone are the days when German law counted bribes paid by the country’s industrial champions as tax-deductible. A spate of scandals in Europe suggest that prosecutors, as well as the politicians who influence how much freedom judicial investigators enjoy, are becoming ever less tolerant of corporate corruption.

Another big firm under pressure is Novartis, a Swiss drugmaker….Continue reading

IN 2005 and 2006, in northern Pakistan, some 900 pregnant women took part in an unusual experiment. All were in their third trimester and suffering from depression. Most families in the area rely on subsistence farming. Almost none of the women worked outside the home. This kind of life is hard. Perinatal depression (depression around the time of giving birth) is more common in poor countries than in rich ones.

As part of one of the largest psychotherapy trials ever run, the women were split randomly into two groups. Those in one received weekly visits from a health worker for the month before the birth, and less frequent visits during the ten months after. The rest received the same number of visits, but from health workers who had been trained to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) during the visits, too.

CBT is a talking therapy that aims to break the cycle of self-reinforcing negative thoughts. It focuses on the present, rather than trying to uncover the causes of…Continue reading

WORK is like a capricious lover whose incessant demands are resented but who is missed terribly when they are not there. The relationship is long-term; an average person spends more than half their life at work. Work defines people’s social status, sets income levels and generates a circle of friends.

Attitudes to management, as to work, are double-edged. The modern economy has become immensely complex. Coordinating the production of goods and services across international supply chains represents a huge achievement. Becoming a manager is usually seen as a promotion, yet the role of a “middle manager” is often despised as a useless layer of bureaucracy. Workers simultaneously blame managers for not providing enough leadership and for interfering too much with their daily tasks.

For their part, managers desperately want to improve their performance. Enter “management books” as a search term on Amazon and you get more than 100,000 results. Budding executives solemnly learn the…Continue reading

A RECESSION strikes. Central banks leap into action, cutting interest rates to perk up investment. But what if, as now, there is not much cutting to do, with rates already at or close to zero? In such cases the manual calls for purchases of government bonds with newly printed cash—quantitative easing, or QE—swelling the reserves each bank keeps at the central bank. Imagine instead that people also kept accounts at the central bank. New money could be added to their accounts, providing a direct, equitable boost to spending. That is one of several potential benefits of individual central-bank accounts, which are among the more intriguing of the radical policy ideas in circulation.

Central banks deal in two sorts of currency: cash, which anyone can hold, and digital money, accessible only to financial institutions through their accounts at the central bank. Individuals hoping to spend digital money must use a bank card or transfer (or a service, like Apple Pay, linked to a bank account), or a private…Continue reading

REPUBLICANS in the House of Representatives had hoped to cut a swathe through the Dodd-Frank act, a titanic set of financial regulations passed in 2010 in the wake of the 2007-09 crisis. The “Financial Choice Act”, drafted last year, would have lessened bureaucratic oversight and relied more on stiff capital requirements. Responsibilities and penalties would have been made clearer and regulators’ discretionary powers would have been reined in. President Donald Trump, who had promised on the campaign trail to “do a number on Dodd-Frank”, was effusive when the House endorsed the Choice Act last year.

But the bill approved by the House on May 22nd, and expected soon to be signed into law by Mr Trump, is a distinctly tamer affair. It moves the line between big, systemically risky banks and the rest, set in Dodd-Frank at $50bn in assets, to $250bn. That cuts the number of institutions subjected to stress tests and stricter supervision from 38 to 12. It also eases some restrictions on proprietary trading. But only the very smallest banks will be allowed to substitute higher capital for strict regulation. Even as bold thinking was thrown out, one truly bad idea made it in, presumably under pressure from representatives from heavily indebted states. Municipal bonds will be granted special treatment in the composition of bank capital, incentivising lenders to load up…Continue reading

FEW firms have more power to heat up the cauldron of global geopolitics like Gazprom, the state-backed Russian energy producer. It supplies more than a third of the natural gas that Europeans use for power generation, heating and cooking, creating what many—especially Americans—see as an unhealthy dependence (see chart). It has used its strength to bully countries which are out of favour with the Kremlin, such as Ukraine and Poland. And it is engaged in a growing rivalry with American exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe and China, a competition which potentially adds to the world’s trade tensions.

The firm also revels in its bad-boy image. When its…Continue reading

AS A citizen, Dave Jones worries that climate change may imperil his two children, and theirs in turn. What exercises him, as California’s insurance commissioner, is the way in which a transition to a low-carbon economy might affect the financial health of his other charges—the state’s 1,300-odd insurers. On May 8th Mr Jones unveiled an examination of how well the investment portfolios of the 672 insurers with $100m or more in annual premiums align with the Paris climate agreement of 2015, in which world leaders vowed to keep global warming below 2°C relative to pre-industrial times.

The answer is, not very. In the next five years carbon-intensive firms in the insurers’ portfolios plan to produce more internal combustion engines and coal-fired electricity than the maximum the International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons is compatible with meeting the 2°C goal (see chart). Meanwhile, investment plans in renewable energy and electric vehicles lag behind the IEA’s projections of what is needed.

The results echo those of a study last…Continue reading

OVER the past year, there have been myriad stories in the press about airlines mistreating passengers. Last April David Dao, a passenger on a domestic United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville, was violently dragged off the plane to accommodate crew for another flight. This month United hit the headlines again when a Nigerian passenger accused it of racial discrimination after she was thrown off a flight. But among the sea of shocking headlines about how flight crews abuse passengers, it is easy to forget that the reverse occurs far more frequently.

A new study published earlier this month shows just how common the harassment of flight attendants by flyers is. The Association of Flight Attendants, the union representing American cabin crew, asked more than 3,500 flight attendants from 29 airlines about their experiences. In the past year alone, one-third of flight attendants said that they have experienced verbal sexual harassment by passengers and one-fifth said that they have experienced the physical…Continue reading