Tag: Business and finance

IN THE pharma business, Juno Therapeutics, a small firm based in Seattle, is just a stripling. It is three years old, has not a single drug approval to its name but is nonetheless valued at $2.8 billion. That value is derived from the fact that it is on the forefront of the most promising area of cancer treatments in decades: immuno-oncology.

Juno’s edge comes from its attempts to master one of the most important parts of the immune system: the T-cell. It is developing a so-called CAR-T therapy, in which its scientists extract T-cells from a cancer patient, modify them with gene therapy so that they can recognise cancer cells, and then put them back in the patient’s body ready to attack. The process has a reputation for inducing rapid remissions in cancers of the blood for patients who have exhausted all other options.

Small, innovative biotech firms such as Juno are intriguing because nowadays they are the main engine of global drug innovation. Alexis Borisy, a partner in Third Rock Ventures, a venture-capital firm in Boston, notes that pharma companies now buy in three-quarters of their pipelines, and develop only…Continue reading

THE most striking battle in modern business pits the techno-optimists against the techno-pessimists. The first group argues that the world is in the middle of a technology-driven renaissance. Tech CEOs compete with each other for superlatives. Business professors say that our only problem will be what to do with the people when the machines become super-intelligent. The pessimists retort that this is froth: a few firms may be doing wonderfully but the economy is stuck. Larry Summers of Harvard University talks about secular stagnation. Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, says that the American economy has eaten all the low-hanging fruits of modern history and got sick.

Until recently the prize for the most gloom-laden book on the modern economy has gone to Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, published in January, Mr Gordon argues that the IT revolution is a minor diversion compared with the inventions that accompanied the second industrial one—electricity, motor cars and aeroplanes—which changed lives profoundly. The current information upheaval, by contrast, is merely altering a narrow range of…Continue reading

JAMES CARVILLE, political adviser to Bill Clinton, the former president, famously said that he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market so he could “intimidate everybody”. He was frustrated by the administration’s inability to push through an economic stimulus for fear of spooking investors and pushing bond yields higher.

More than 20 years later, the world looks very different. Many developed countries have been running budget deficits ever since the global financial crisis of 2008; their government debt-to-GDP ratios are far higher than they were in the early 1990s. Yet the bond market looks about as intimidating as a chihuahua in a handbag; in general, yields are close to historic lows.

In the 1990s “bond-market vigilantes” sold their holdings when they feared that countries were pursuing irresponsible fiscal or monetary policies. In Britain even fear of a “hard Brexit” is only now being reflected in rising gilt yields—and they are still below the (very low) levels seen before the vote to leave the EU in June. Even developing countries with big budget deficits can borrow easily. This week, for example, Saudi Arabia…Continue reading

AMERICANS who want a comfortable retirement, and who work in the private sector, have to look after their own interests these days. No longer can most rely on their employer to pay a pension linked to their final salary; such defined-benefit promises are too expensive.

Instead, workers are promised something called a defined-contribution (DC) pension which, truth be told, isn’t a pension at all. It is a savings pot to which employers and employees contribute, with some tax advantages. How big that pot will be, and what kind of income it will provide, is unknown.

Most of those savings will probably be invested in mutual funds. Yet as William Birdthistle, an academic lawyer, writes in an entertaining new book*, small investors need to become better informed about the way mutual funds work.

One might think, for example, that all investors in a fund are treated equally. But Mr Birdthistle cites a set of JPMorgan equity funds which have seven different types of shares, with opaque names such as Class R5. The main difference tends to be the fees that funds charge. Small investors usually pay most, even those in some DC schemes. These fees…Continue reading

AMERICA’S presidential contest offers voters a stark choice. Hillary Clinton represents continuity with the Obama administration—not a bad pitch to voters, given low unemployment, steady job growth and a recent upturn in the rate of increase of real incomes. In the opposite corner is Donald Trump, standing on a radical platform of protectionism, draconian immigration restrictions, massive defence spending and construction of a big, beautiful wall along the Mexican border. Mr Trump’s dangerous economic nationalism demands an explanation. Is he the predictable consequence of years of hardship for many Americans?

Two broad theories vie to explain Mr Trump’s ascent. One camp sees him as an inevitable backlash against economic-policy priorities that have left many Americans behind. As America and the world have grown more economically integrated, growth in household incomes has stagnated and inequality soared. The costs of freer trade were borne most acutely in Southern and Mid-Western manufacturing towns exposed to competition from cheap Chinese imports. A series of recent papers shows that the most affected labour markets have…Continue reading

Hot property

AS HIS chances of making it to the White House have narrowed in recent weeks, another avenue has opened for Donald Trump. The notion that he might start his own media network has been the subject of speculation for months. Now industry executives are discussing the possibility in some detail.

In September the Republican candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, owner of the New York Observer, asked his friend Aryeh Bourkoff, a banker who has been a dealmaker in the media industry, for advice. (A spokeswoman for Mr Bourkoff said he personally had no interest in such a project). Mr Trump himself has denied any intention to start a network. But a look at the numbers suggests that Trump TV could be a success, media folk say—far from a juggernaut like Fox News, which has revenues of more than $2 billion a year, but lucrative nonetheless.

Such a product would have a good shot at going mainstream because Mr Trump could sell it directly to consumers over the internet, as a subscription streaming service. The Trump brand may now be too toxic for a publicly-owned media company to go…Continue reading

I HAVE not yet had an opportunity to read Sebastian Mallaby’s new biography of Alan Greenspan (pictured), The Man Who Knew. I have heard great things about it; you can read Martin Wolf’s review of the book in The Economist here. (Full disclosure: Mr Mallaby is a former Economist journalist and is married to our editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes.) In reading coverage of the book, I have been intrigued by one of Mr Mallaby’s judgments of Mr Greenspan: that he was insufficiently committed to keeping control of asset prices. Mr Wolf quotes the book as follows:

The tragedy of Greenspan’s tenure is that he did not pursue his fear of finance far enough: he decided that targeting inflation was seductively easy, whereas targeting asset prices was hard; he did not like to confront the climate of opinion, which was willing to grant that central banks had a duty to fight inflation, but not that they should vaporise citizens’ savings by forcing down asset prices. It was a tragedy that grew out of the mix of…Continue reading

GULLIVER tried an experiment the other day: he visited Kayak, a price-comparison website, plugged in some random dates in December, and looked for flights between New York and Berlin. The lowest fare that came up was a modest $387, with Norwegian Air Shuttle. The second-lowest fare was $419, also with Norwegian. After that came several flights combining legs on Norwegian and other airlines, including easyJet and Iceland’s WOW air, and a full itinerary on WOW. Only after scrolling through nearly two pages of results did the cheapest fare not involving one of these low-cost airlines appear: a $742 itinerary on Aer Lingus.

The lowest fare on an American airline didn’t show itself until page 19 of the results. That round-trip flight, with United, was selling for $2,123—more than five times the cheapest fare, with Norwegian.

That, to put it mildly, is a problem for American carriers. The big American airlines used to compete only with their European equivalents—the likes of Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways—on transatlantic flights. It was a reasonably friendly fight, since they co-operated through codeshare alliances. The…Continue reading

IN THE pantheon of economic clichés, the concept of “short-term pain for long-term gain” is surely a contender for top spot. It is trotted out again and again when discussing why Country X must undertake such and such difficult reforms to reap untold benefits down the road. For those analysing or reporting on the Chinese economy, it has become a familiar refrain. This does not mean it is wrong; China’s old growth model of credit-fuelled investment has led to a vast accumulation of debt and a big drop in productivity. Change is needed, even though there will be costs. But being a cliché, it can obscure details. What exactly is this short-term pain?

To start, one thing that should be clear: China has so far felt little in the way of pain. Although some regions, especially the north-east, have endured a tough few years, China has kept defaults to a minimum and held its credit spigot wide open. Thanks in large part to that, the economy grew 6.7% in the third quarter from a…Continue reading

Patrick Foulis joins host Simon Long to take a look at the financial gymnastics keeping Elon Musk’s business empire afloat. Also: the shadow economies that need a fuse of transparency and private equity’s socialist secret