Tag: Business and finance

BULL markets always climb a wall of worry, or so the saying goes. For much of 2017, the main concerns were political and the markets seemed to surmount them as easily as a robot dog opens doors (the latest internet sensation).

But February has shown that the market is still vulnerable. The immediate trigger seems to have been the fear that inflationary pressures would cause bond yields to rise and central banks to push up interest rates; this week’s surprisingly high American inflation numbers will only add to the worries. In a narrow sense, that makes bonds look cheaper, compared with equities. In a broader sense, it increases the discount rate investors apply to future profits, lowering the present value of shares. (A caveat is needed: if higher rates reflect stronger growth, then estimates of future profits should rise, offsetting the discount-rate effect.)

The immediate effect has been to create uncertainty for investors about the direction of central-bank policy, after many years in which it could reliably be assumed that rates would stay low. This translates into a more volatile market, as illustrated by the sharp jump in the Vix, or volatility index, in early February.

The danger is that many investors seem to have treated volatility as an asset class, and have organised their portfolios accordingly. Eric Lonergan of M&G, a…Continue reading

“PRESS for progress” is the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8th. As our sixth glass-ceiling index shows, disparity between countries remains wide. But women have made some progress towards equality in the workplace in the past year.

The index ranks the best and worst countries to be a working woman. Each score is based on average performance in ten indicators: educational attainment, labour-market attachment, pay, child-care costs, maternity and paternity rights, business-school applications and representation in senior jobs (in managerial positions, on company boards and in parliament).

Equality-conscious Nordics typically do well while workplace parity for women in Japan, South Korea and Turkey still lags badly. America under President Donald Trump rose from 20th to 19th place thanks in part to a higher female labour-force participation rate. This year Sweden ranks first, scoring well in female labour-force participation, which is over 80%, and the share of…Continue reading

FROM quantum computing and smartphones to self-driving cars, home thermostats and delivering the internet by balloon, Google or, technically, Alphabet, the holding company that the firm established in 2015, has its fingers in many pies. But the company’s main business, which pays for all of its dabblings elsewhere, is digital advertising, which in 2017 accounted for more than 86% of its $111bn revenue. It may seem odd, then, that Google’s latest move is to aid ad-blocking. On February 15th Chrome, its web browser, which has a 59% market share, switched on code to block certain online advertisements. 9

In doing so it joins an established trend. By last year around 27% of American internet users had installed ad-blockers, according to eMarketer, a research firm (see chart). Third-party ad-blocking software is available already for Chrome but only for its desktop version. As well as being built in and thus on by default, the new blocker will work on smartphones.

Web publishers will not…Continue reading

A CHINESE new-year message from the American embassy in Beijing looked innocuous. It welcomed the Year of the Dog on Weibo, a microblog, with photos of the embassy staff’s pooches and a video greeting from the ambassador and his wife, each with a dog in hand. But it soon attracted 10,000 angry responses. The post had become an unlikely lightning rod for public discontent about the stockmarket.

A plunge on February 9th had left Chinese shares down by 10% on the week, their steepest fall in two years. Some punters found solace in blaming the American embassy for the rout, which started on Wall Street. For others it was a matter of convenience, because their real target, the Chinese securities regulator, knew to disable comments on its Weibo account on such a grim day for stocks.

Even so, their protests seem to have been heard. Before the market reopened this week, Chinese officials urged big shareholders to buy stocks to restore confidence. The Shanghai Stock Exchange warned…Continue reading

BARS and pubs have not usually been the non-drinker’s friend. Knocking back pint after pint of juice or fizzy drink quickly gets boring. But beverage manufacturers are now showing more sympathy for their plight. Many companies regard non-alcoholic drinks as the “biggest opportunity in the market”, says Frank Lampen, who runs Distill Ventures, which helps small producers with investment and advice, and is backed by Diageo, a British drinks giant.

One of the fund’s recent investments, for example, is in Seedlip, a British firm that makes distilled, non-alcoholic “spirits” flavoured with botanicals, and which last year launched in America. Low-alcohol beer, once maligned for its paucity of flavour, is also in fashion. Technological advances mean alcohol can be filtered out of the beer without ruining its taste; other breweries use “lazy” yeast, which produces less alcohol to start with. Over the past couple of years, non-alcoholic craft breweries, such as Nirvana Brewery in London, or…Continue reading

Spot the $1.8bn

OF LATE Indian bankers have felt an unfamiliar sensation: optimism. A 1.3trn-rupees ($21bn) bail-out from the government seemed to have cleaned up the bad lending decisions of years gone by. A new bankruptcy law gave them an edge in long-standing battles with recalcitrant borrowers. It seemed a few Indian companies, having for years eschewed fresh investment, might even start borrowing again.

This week woes linked to mismanagement at India’s three biggest partially state-owned lenders plunged the bankers back to their habitual gloom. On February 14th Punjab National Bank (PNB) announced it was investigating a fraud worth 114bn rupees, equivalent to about a third of its market capitalisation. A few days earlier the State Bank of India (SBI) unveiled its first quarterly loss since 1999. And Bank of Baroda has hastily announced the closure of its South African operation, accused of having shady business associations there.

The Punjab heist is…Continue reading

MEN may hail from Mars and women from Venus. But economists, surely, inhabit planet Earth, surveying it dispassionately. Alas, a new paper suggests that even dismal scientists divide on gender lines. Ann Mari May and Mary McGarvey of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and David Kucera of the International Labour Organisation surveyed economists from 18 European countries, and found that differences in the wider population can survive even an economics education. Male economists are more likely than female ones to prefer market solutions to government intervention, are more sceptical of environmental protection, and are (slightly) less keen on redistribution (see chart).

A similar study of American economists by Ms May and others also found men more sceptical of government regulation, more comfortable with drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more likely to believe that a higher minimum wage would cause unemployment. Women were 14 percentage points less likely to agree that Walmart…Continue reading

IN THE political cacophony surrounding America’s new tax law, the voice of the private-equity industry has been muted. This is perhaps unsurprising. The industry has managed in large measure to retain its favourable tax treatment, despite a threat from President Donald Trump to close the “carried interest” loophole on which it had grown fat.

So few expected the announcement on February 8th from KKR, a big private-equity firm, that the new law was prompting it to consider converting its status from that of a partnership to a “C corporation” (a corporate-tax-paying firm). As The Economist went to press, a competitor, Ares Management, was expected to make a similar announcement. The new law may have a lasting impact on private equity after all.

Tax has always been central to private-equity business models. The industry uses large amounts of debt, interest on which is tax-deductible, to acquire companies. So it has long been adept at minimising tax, both by…Continue reading

EVERYONE knows that interest rates are rising—except, perhaps, one group: American savers who have put $12trn in bank accounts. They have seen the government’s deposit guarantee, purportedly designed to protect them, become a ticket for banks to receive free money. For evidence, look no further than the ubiquitous bank branches dotting America’s high streets.

Those seeking a home for their money find that, unlike petrol stations or grocers, banks are not required to post their most important price, the interest rate. Ask and you will be referred to a specialised member of staff. After a wait, numbers are typed into a computer, followed by pauses for thought, a bit of throat clearing and, often, comments that the current rates on offer may not exceed inflation. Then come hints, doubtless filtered through a compliance department, of the higher returns available on the bank’s investment offerings, which, of course, carry risks (and fees).

Only then is the diligent customer told the…Continue reading

“DEFICITS don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, then the vice-president, in 2004. He may have meant what he said, yet the administration he belonged to showed a decided lack of conviction when it came to borrowing, with the federal deficit never rising above 3.4% of GDP. Not so the current Republican government. In 2019 and 2020 the deficit is likely to rise to nearly 6% of GDP, the largest, outside of times of economic crisis, since the second world war. In his first term, Donald Trump’s deficits will be nearly as large, on average, as those run by Barack Obama during his presidency, according to analysis by JPMorgan. That is impressive given that Mr Obama faced the worst economic downturn since the Depression. In budgeting, as in so many areas, America is wandering into uncharted territory. What might it find there?

Orthodox economics suggests two ways in which things could go wrong. When an economy is running at close to full tilt, so that firms are borrowing and investing as much as banks are…Continue reading