Tag: Business and finance

TRYING to stop Britons from boozing can be a forlorn task. Drinking has been woven into the nation’s culture for centuries, from the “loose-tongued” pilgrims of Chaucer to the apprentices who ran amok on London’s streets in the 16th century. According to Susie Dent, a lexicographer, English has 3,000 words for being drunk. Some take that list as a challenge. Whether at football matches or funerals, children’s parties or cheese-rolling, Britons turn almost any occasion into an excuse to get ramsquaddled (thanks, Ms Dent).

A visit to a British airport is a crash course in this culture. Regardless of the time of morning, the bars are full and the English breakfasts come accompanied with pints of Guinness. That is an increasing problem for airlines….Continue reading

A GOOD business name can be pricey. An entrepreneur looking for the perfect one can hire a naming agency to offer ideas, but that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That may explain why many founders follow the example set by the American President and name their businesses after themselves. A recent article* by academics from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in North Carolina suggests that doing so does not just save money—it can also boost profits.

The study looked at small businesses in western Europe. It relied on a sample of almost 2m firms, data for which are contained in a commercial database called Amadeus. The database includes information about owners, managers and financial performance from 2002 to 2012. Firms in the sample tended to be, on average, fairly young, with few shareholders and employees. Checking against the surnames of the largest shareholders, the authors found…Continue reading

AT 30,000 feet the skies may be clear, but the oxygen certainly is not. Anyone who has wheezed his way through a long plane journey will know that cabin air is hardly pristine. Nearly all aircraft draw in air by way of the plane’s engine compressor. It is common for a small amount of oil to leak over the engine, which then contaminates the stuff that passengers and crew members breathe. Most of the 3.5bn passengers who traveled by plane in 2015 were probably exposed to at least a low level of contamination. But frequent exposure can come with debilitating symptoms, including memory impairment, dizziness and vision problems.

A recent study from the University of Stirling and the University of Ulster reveals the scale of the problem. Researchers examined hundreds of aeroplane crew members and discovered a direct link between air contamination and respiratory, cognitive and even neurological health…Continue reading

EUROPEAN markets have started the day with losses of 1% or so, following a 2% decline in Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index and the 1% loss in the S&P 500 index on Thursday. The Vix, a much used measure of market fear, jumped to 16, its highest level since the presidential election.

These are significant moves by the standards of recent months but, to anyone who lived through 2008 (or 1987) they are hardly signs of outright panic. Gold is at $1,288 an ounce, up 2% or so over the week. The Japanese stockmarket was barely changed today, and Japan is right in the firing line of North Korea’s missiles. South Korea would suffer terribly in any war but the Seoul market was down just 1.7% today, and 3.2% on the week.

Clearly, the markets are more worried than they were on August 9th, when President Trump warned of “fire and fury” against Kim Jong-Un’s regime. Investors did not take too seriously the statement from the president, who is known for his intemperate (and often factually inaccurate) tweets….Continue reading

IT IS not a number to tweet about. President Donald Trump plans to plough $1trn of spending into America’s crumbling infrastructure. And a dearth of capital is not a problem: investors are keen on such assets. But investment seems to be falling.

Government infrastructure spending in the second quarter fell to 1.4% of GDP, the lowest share on record (see chart). According to Thomson Reuters, investment by American municipalities in the first seven months of this year, at $50.7bn, was nearly 20% below the same period in 2016. Private-sector infrastructure funds show a similar trend, according to Preqin, another data provider: deal volume in the first half of 2017 fell by 7.5%, year on year, to $36.6bn; the number of deals fell by a quarter.

Not long ago optimists were expecting an infrastructure-spending boom. In May Blackstone, a private-equity firm, announced with much fanfare a new $40bn fund for American infrastructure, with a $20bn investment from one of Saudi Arabia’s…Continue reading

FINANCIAL markets are supposed to be the font of all wisdom, weighing up the information available and condensing it into a set of prices. Investors are presumed to have an insight into the future—falling bond yields are seen as a sign that the economy is slowing, for example.

But are investors that clever when it comes to politics? Gambling markets show how they assess political risk. They expected the Remain campaign to win the Brexit referendum and Hillary Clinton to become America’s president, and were proved wrong. Indeed, on Brexit, the mass of gamblers (the general public, in other words) backed Leave, but the odds were skewed by some wealthy punters who favoured Remain. Those rich gamblers were probably people who trade in financial markets; the plunge in the pound after the result suggests that most investors were caught on the hop.

Before the presidential election, most people on Wall Street to whom Buttonwood spoke thought that a victory for Donald Trump would be…Continue reading

WHERE can you find a 7% interest rate on a sovereign dollar-bond? You would have to take a time-machine to the mid-1990s to find such a yield on a ten-year American Treasury. Alternatively, you could slip back a few days to August 2nd and bid for the $1bn of five-year bonds sold by the government of Iraq. The yield was expected to be 7%, but it was trimmed to 6.75% once orders rose above $6bn.

Such eagerness for hard-currency debt from a country still reeling from a civil war shows just how far bond investors will now go to get a decent yield. Oversubscribed issues for risky sovereign bonds have become almost normal. The Iraqi sale came just a week after Greece (whose privately held debt was partly written off in 2012) raised €3bn ($3.5bn) in its first bond sale for three years. In June Argentina was inundated with bids for its 100-year eurobond, as dollar-denominated bonds are known. Sceptics noted that Argentina had defaulted on its debts six times in the previous century, with the most…Continue reading

A head for figures

FOR football clubs, August is often the costliest month, when they make vast bids for each other’s players. This year has been particularly lavish. On August 3rd Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), a French team, signed Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, a Brazilian forward, from Barcelona for €222m ($264m), more than double the previous record price for a footballer.

With three weeks of the transfer “window” left, teams in Europe’s “big five” leagues—the top divisions in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France—have paid €3.2bn, just short of the record of €3.4bn set last year. The €179m splurged by Manchester City, an English club, on defenders outstrips 47 countries’ defence budgets. Arsène Wenger, a veteran manager of Arsenal, a London team, and an economics graduate, describes the modern transfer market as “beyond calculation and beyond rationality”.