Tag: Business and finance

GULLIVER is rarely fazed by what happens below the line of his posts. Receiving the occasional shoeing from readers—sometimes insightful, sometimes not—goes with the job. And he has certainly found his views swayed by well-reasoned arguments he finds there.

But he was truly gobsmacked at the discussion that ensued from a piece last year about the sexualisation of flight attendants. The post noted a few of the seedier airline hiring practices, such as asking potential recruits, some just 15, to take part in a bikini competition, or carriers refusing to employ married women. It then concluded with what seemed to be an an uncontroversial suggestion: female cabin crew should be chosen for their abilities, not for their allure.

It turns out that such woolly liberal thinking is merely the product of the bubble he lives in, according to some readers. “A mixture of silly puritanism and pseudo-egalitarianism,” said one. “Boo hoo why do pretty…Continue reading

DR WHO, the long-running British science-fiction hero, has a long-standing device to get him out of tricky situations; a piece of «psychic paper» that lulls the viewer into accepting the doctor’s credentials. Apparently blank, the paper says whatever the Doctor wants it to say.

The British government under Theresa May apparently thinks the 2016 EU referendum ballot paper had psychic qualities. The question merely asked «Should the UK remain a member of the EU or leave the EU?». But on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Damian Green, who is (in effect) deputy prime minister, said Britain had to leave bodies like Euratom because the people voted for it. 

The argument seems to be that Britain must rid itself of all traces of the EU like someone leaving an area of intense radiation needs a complete detox. So no EU means no single market, no customs union, no free movement and no regulation by the European Court of Justice. It is the ECJ’s role that dooms Euratom, apparently.

Euratom governs the Continue reading

HOW do you best judge the success of an airline? One obvious way is to ask whether lots of people fly with it, and if it makes pots of money for shareholders. Judged on these metrics, few can quibble with the direction that British Airways is heading. Last year 42.1m people flew with the airline, nearly 10m more than in 2011. In 2012, IAG, the airline’s parent firm, posted a loss of €716m ($816m). In 2016 it made a profit of €1.9bn.  

Shareholders, then, have little to grumble about. One of the ways that the airline has prospered is by focusing on its costs. When Willie Walsh, himself an avowed cost-cutter, moved from the hot seat at BA to running IAG in 2011, he appointed Alex Cruz from Vueling to carry on his work. As befits the former head of a budget carrier, Mr Cruz has continued to strip many of the frills from the once full-service airline.

Passengers and staff are not so happy with the changes. The airline has suffered four computer failures over the past year. The last one, in May, knocked out many…Continue reading

JUSTIN WILLIAMS takes off a virtual-reality (VR) headset and wobbles away from a demo area at E3, the world’s largest gaming convention, in Los Angeles. The bottoms of his feet and calves are “on fire,” he says. Mr Williams, a 32-year-old former marine, was playing “Sprint Vector”, a VR running game: players swing hand-held controllers to simulate motion. Though he has been standing in one place, his brain believes he has just run for several miles.

This sensation of complete immersion is called “presence”. Boosters of VR say it is what will drive the technology’s mass adoption, in time. When Facebook bought Oculus, a VR startup, for $2bn in 2014, and sent interest in the technology rocketing, it was this feeling of being present that Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s boss, described as “incredible”.

Yet despite many pronouncements that 2016 was the year of VR, a more apt word for virtual reality might be absence. Of the 6.3m headsets that were…Continue reading

HE WAS back in favour, or so it appeared. After spending several months under house arrest in late 2014, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, a Russian oligarch, relinquished control of Bashneft, a midsized oil firm, to the state. “If you like another company tomorrow and want to take it, you are welcome,” he told Vladimir Putin at the time, he later recalled. The president publicly gave his approval to Sistema, Mr Yevtushenkov’s conglomerate, shares in which had plunged. Mr Yevtushenkov subsequently appeared at annual Kremlin receptions and late last year joined a presidential delegation to Crimea.

Now he is under pressure again, facing a lawsuit from Rosneft, a state-run oil giant, which is demanding 171bn roubles ($2.8bn) in damages. Rosneft’s boss is Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant, who many in Moscow reckon orchestrated the initial 2014 case against Mr Yevtushenkov as well. (Rosneft and Mr Sechin have denied any involvement in it.) Late last year, Rosneft purchased Bashneft from the state…Continue reading

Over a barrel

JULY 4th is a day to celebrate American independence, first and foremost, but also to grill meat and swill beer. For American beer lovers in particular, the pint-glass runneth over in terms of choice. They had 5,000 breweries to pick from this year; 35 years ago there were under 100. Drinkers can enjoy time-honoured traditions, guzzling Budweiser to wash down all that sizzling beef, and newer ones such as sipping ale “finished with fennel, liquorice and anise” at Tørst, a Brooklyn bar.

For the producers of beer, the mood is darker. Though the number of brands has proliferated, the number of drinkers has not. Sales have been flat for a few years and 2017 has been especially slow so far. The volumes of beer sold at stores for the three months to June 17th were 1% lower than in the same period last year, according to Nielsen, a market-research firm. Brewers are now waiting with some anxiety for data about sales during the July 4th…Continue reading

A FAMOUS brand in the world’s fastest-growing aviation market, sitting on valuable slots at international airports and able to borrow cheaply thanks to being state-owned: Air India ought to be hugely profitable. But under state ownership it has guzzled public funds as hungrily as its jets consume kerosene. Last week the authorities threw in the towelette and announced an “in principle” cabinet agreement to privatise it. The chances of that going ahead rose on June 30th when IndiGo, a well-run private low-cost carrier, said it wanted to bid.

Whoever seizes the controls can expect a hard task. Air India has struggled since private rivals were first allowed in 1994 to fly in India’s skies. Together with Indian Airlines, another state-owned carrier with which it merged in 2007, it has a domestic market share of just 13% and is shedding one percentage point or so every six months. A bail-out of 300bn rupees ($4.7bn) agreed in 2012 was meant to stop losses, but has…Continue reading

For your eyes only

OUTSIDE a squat grey building in Santa Monica, the California sun melts the tar. Inside, in a dark room roughly the size of a small shipping container, two men are exploring the world by means of virtual reality (VR). They squash spiders in an abandoned temple, hit a home run at Yankee Stadium and float through a Blade Runner-esque landscape, all in the span of eight minutes. It feels much longer than that, and also shorter—time is hard to grasp in VR.

The creator of the experience is Walter Parkes, a former boss of DreamWorks Pictures, a film studio, who last year co-founded Dreamscape Immersive. The startup plans a chain of VR multiplex cinemas offering ten-minute interactive experiences for around $15 each. The first will open at a shopping mall near Beverly Hills at the end of the year; another 14 are planned for 2018. Mr Parkes says it costs about $2m to make a ten-minute VR experience, compared with around $200m for a big-budget…Continue reading

IN JANE AUSTEN’S novel, “Sense and Sensibility”, Henry Dashwood’s death plunges his wife and two daughters, Elinor and Marianne, into financial distress, because his heir grants them only a meagre allowance. Bond-market investors have started to worry that something similar is about to happen to them.

Since 2009 central banks have been incredibly supportive of the financial markets—keeping short-term interest rates at historic lows and buying trillions of dollars worth of bonds. But in recent weeks, several of them have been hinting at reducing their largesse.

The Federal Reserve has been slowly pushing up interest rates and has talked about reducing the size of its balance-sheet, by not reinvesting the proceeds of bonds when they mature. There have been suggestions that the Bank of Canada might push up rates when it meets on July 12th. Both Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England and Andrew Haldane, its chief economist, have hinted that a rate rise may be on…Continue reading

JUST what is the point of a minimum wage? It seems a straightforward enough question to answer. Minimum wages are designed to protect vulnerable workers who might otherwise lack the bargaining power to command a decent pay package. They are a means to limit severe poverty among those in work.

Yet they also attract opposition from critics who see wage minimums as price controls that discourage firms from hiring as many workers as they otherwise might. For decades, feuding camps of dismal scientists have tussled over whether the good done by minimum wages outweighs the bad. A series of recent minimum-wage increases in America will shine a light on that question and others as well. Indeed, the time may have come for economists to broaden their view of just what a minimum wage is meant to accomplish.

As voter frustration at stagnant pay has grown, politicians on the American left have spotted an opportunity to court popularity by calling for higher minimum wages. Democrats are united behind a demand for a national minimum…Continue reading