Tag: Business and finance

COMPANY bosses who get the sack react in different ways: some quietly leave, others graciously wish their successor luck, most try to nurse hurt pride as best they can. Not Cyrus Mistry, who on October 24th was ousted as chairman of the Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate. Bemused and angered at having his predecessor, Ratan Tata, suddenly seize back control, he has refused to go. The schism at the heart of Tata has drawn attention to what made it possible in the first place: an overly complex structure trying to oversee too many businesses, deficient corporate governance and a penchant for opacity. Whether these problems are addressed, and how, will shape the group and its reputation for decades to come. 

Tata’s reasons for sacking Mr Mistry are unclear. He is from a family that has had a nearly 20% shareholding in the group for decades (most of the other shares are controlled by charities that are chaired by Mr Tata). Allies say that after four years in the job, Mr Mistry had got to grips with the inner workings of the company. He was ready to start changing it.

His critics, on the other hand, never believed that any executive…Continue reading

DONALD TRUMP’S grandfather, Fred, got his start in the hotel industry at the turn of the 20th century supplying rooms, food, booze and female company to prospectors flocking to north-western Canada in the so-called Klondike gold rush. It may be part of this legacy that gave America’s president-elect his taste for golden fixtures and fittings. But it may also make miners a bit wary of Mr Trump. After all, their pockets have been “mined” by a Trump once before.

So the world’s biggest mining companies are downbeat about the rally in commodities prices that accompanied Mr Trump’s election victory, which briefly pushed up prices of copper at their fastest rate in five years and sent iron-ore prices to two-year highs close to $80 a tonne. On November 15th Rio Tinto, one of the world’s biggest mining companies, told 440 workers at an iron-ore mine in Western Australia to take two weeks off at Christmas, not as a celebration, but as a precautionary measure to reduce supply. It expects conditions to get much tougher in 2017. Its main rival, BHP Billiton, is also nonplussed. It predicts economic uncertainty, political instability and a…Continue reading

So they hope

IT WAS on November 16th that the International Energy Agency (IEA), an organisation that represents oil- and gas-consuming countries, announced its prediction that over the next quarter of a century renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and natural gas will hugely eclipse the traditional role that coal and oil have played in satisfying the world’s growing demand for energy (see chart). That is the base case for what it says is a powerful shift in the global energy landscape towards cleaner fuels.

The trouble is that after the projections were calculated, Donald Trump, who is both a climate sceptic and a fossil-fuel fan, was elected as America’s next president. As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, pointed out this week, no one knows what his energy policies will be. Yet he will run the world’s biggest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas.

Many…Continue reading

FOR the moment, the policy priorities of the Trump administration-in-waiting are a basket of unknowables. Plans to scrap Obamacare or re-deregulate America’s financial sector, though dear to Republican hearts, are easier to champion on the campaign stump than to implement. A step away from globalism—Donald Trump’s most consistent campaign theme—could make for an awkward opening gambit given pockets of Republican resistance to overt protectionism. Tax cuts and infrastructure spending, on the other hand, look like an easy and unifying win for the new administration. And indeed, market moves since Mr Trump’s victory seem to imply an expectation of a Ronald Reaganesque turn in American fiscal policy; government-bond yields have risen, seemingly in expectation of bigger deficits, faster growth and higher inflation. Yet any resemblance that Mr Trump’s plans may bear to Reaganomics is as much a cause for concern as for optimism.

The president-elect’s tax proposals are easily the boldest since Reagan’s. Mr Trump’s plan would slash the highest marginal income-tax rates, cut rates of tax on corporate income and on capital…Continue reading

ON NOVEMBER 11th, Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, posted nearly $18bn in sales for the day. This broke last year’s record for Singles’ Day, an anti-Valentine’s Day that has become a love affair with spending. The popularity of the company’s virtual credit-card, Huabei (roughly translating as “Just spend”), may have helped. Consumers who spend less than 1,000 yuan ($146) online a month spend 50% more once they get one, according to Ant Financial Services, an Alibaba affiliate. To older generations, taught to save, borrowing is shameful. But financial habits are changing: Chinese consumers are being encouraged to develop credit histories.

Last year, the government awarded eight companies consumer credit-rating licences. Their pilot programmes are an attempt to flesh out thin financial records and get people thinking about their credit scores. This is new for most Chinese, who do not use credit cards and have never had credit scores. As of 2014, the People’s Bank of China maintained credit histories for around 350m citizens—less than one-third of the adult population. In America 89% of adults have credit scores. Without a credit history,…Continue reading

No eruptions on the horizon

GOOD times are rolling again in Iceland. In June it beat England in a football match. On The Economist’s “glass-ceiling index”, it is the world’s best country for working women. And the economy is purring. After a thumping crash in 2008-09, GDP is expected to grow by 5% this year, faster than any other rich economy. The ruling (conservative) Independence Party has been rewarded: it won 30% of the vote in the election in October, more than any other party. But some fret that Iceland’s economic stability is, again, built on molten lava.

The biggest worry is over its treatment of foreign creditors. When the crisis hit, the country slapped on capital controls, protecting the krona by preventing investors from pulling capital from the country. Recently the government has been loosening restrictions. Icelanders may soon no longer have to present airline tickets in order to buy foreign currency for their holidays.

One group of foreign investors, however, accuses Iceland of, in effect, defaulting on its debts. They own offshore, krona-denominated, assets worth…Continue reading

IN ITS never-ending quest to rein in profligate local officials, China this week ordered its indebted cities and provinces to draw up detailed repayment plans. But for these rules to work, the central government must prove that it is willing to let the miscreants default. Creditors doubt its resolve and expect it to go on bailing out the spendthrifts. As a result, they systematically give more generous lending terms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than to their private peers.

The bias is not immediately obvious. Looking at interest costs, China seems to have a level playing field. A 2011 survey, for example, revealed that the median interest rate on bank loans to private firms was 7.8%, just above the 7.5% average at the time. Borrowing rates for both SOEs and private firms have remained in line with each other since then, declining in tandem.

But this appearance of parity is superficial. Borrowing costs only tell half the story. The other half is the borrower’s quality. When investors assess the risk of lending to Chinese companies, they price in the assumption that the state will stand behind SOEs. How much is this…Continue reading

THE fines paid to America’s financial regulators by errant bankers vary enormously these days: from sky-high to stratospheric. Deutsche Bank is fighting a demand for $14bn. BNP Paribas paid $9bn last year for facilitating the evasion of American sanctions. So eyebrows were raised at the final settlement disclosed this month between the state-controlled Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) and New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). The fine imposed on the bank was a mere $215m.

The comparative leniency towards ABC is probably a consequence of a failure to prove that many illegal transactions took place. But that by itself produced unresolved suspicions; compliance systems made transfers untraceable. In 2014 a new compliance officer at the two-year-old New York branch reported finding an “alarming” pattern of transactions; 20-30% were “virtually impervious to screening” for sanction violations.

In the “alarming” category were large transfers between Chinese companies and companies in Russia and Yemen; dollar-denominated payments from the United Arab Emirates; and dollar transfers from a Turkish bank to an Afghan one…Continue reading

SINCE Donald Trump won the election, American bank shares have surged on traders’ hopes of a bonfire of financial regulations. So a proposal from Neel Kashkari, head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, vastly to increase capital requirements looks ill-timed. On the other hand, the plan mimics the direction—if not the extent—of one backed by congressional Republicans.

Mr Kashkari is an experienced financial firefighter. An alumnus of Goldman Sachs, best-connected of investment banks, he spent much of 2008 and 2009 in the Treasury department overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, under which the American government bought more than $400bn of toxic assets to prop up teetering financial institutions. In 2014 he ran to become governor of California as a Republican. He now says that, despite the efforts of regulators since the crisis, much more needs to be done to avoid future bail-outs of banks that are “too big to fail”.

Using an IMF database, the Minneapolis Fed logged the levels of bank capital that would have been needed to avert 28 financial crises in rich countries between 1970 and 2011. Based on the historical…Continue reading

IN A world of low investment returns, many a pension scheme is in trouble. In both Britain and America employers who have promised to pay workers a pension based on their final salary are struggling to cope with huge deficits.

But the problem is not confined to those with so-called defined-benefit (DB) pensions. It also affects those saving for retirement via a defined-contribution (DC) scheme, where both employer and employee contribute, and the worker takes charge of the pot when his career ends. In America the most popular form of DC savings are called 401(k) schemes after a section of the tax code.

In an article* in the Journal of Retirement, three authors from AQR Capital Management, an investment group, argue that workers in 401(k) schemes are simply not putting enough money aside.

What you get out of a pension depends on what you put into it. One would expect a DC pension to deliver a smaller income than a DB scheme because less money tends to be put in the pot. Total DC contributions average around 9% of payroll (6% from employees; 3% from employers). But figures from the Centre for Retirement Research at…Continue reading