Tag: Business and finance

Gardell, smiling butcher

“SCLEROTIC companies abound in Europe,” says Christer Gardell, co-founder and managing partner of Cevian Capital, an activist hedge fund based in Sweden. That is an uncommonly pugnacious statement for a firm that operates behind the scenes and uses public pressure as a last resort. Unlike its louder American peers, such as Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square, Paul Singer’s Elliott Management or Dan Loeb’s Third Point, Cevian has never written a pointed open letter to a chief executive or waged a proxy battle (although Carl Icahn, an activist who has been known to call bosses “morons”, is one of its investors).

Its calm approach seems to suit corporate Europe. Cevian is the region’s largest activist fund, and one of the world’s biggest, with over $15.4bn in assets. It was founded by Mr Gardell and Lars Forberg in Stockholm in 2002; both still run it. Its “constructive” activism, focusing on only a dozen companies at a…Continue reading

“IF THEY accept that they stole from us and seek forgiveness in front of God and the angels and all Tanzanians and enter into negotiations, we are ready to do business.” As conciliatory gestures go, that one by John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president, to Acacia Mining, the country’s largest foreign investor, could hardly have been more fork-tongued.

Nonetheless, two days later John Thornton, head of Barrick Gold, Acacia’s largest shareholder, met Mr Magufuli to start talks on ending a dispute that has halved Acacia’s market value since the government in March imposed a ban on the export of gold- and copper-concentrates. It is a mark of the seriousness of the stand-off that he is ready to negotiate on all points of contention between the two sides.

The context of the row is increasingly typical of Africa’s mining industry. The Tanzanian government is seeking more tax revenue from a foreign mining firm that was initially wooed into the country by generous tax…Continue reading

WHEN Jeremy Corbyn unveiled his Labour manifesto ahead of the recent British election, opponents gawked at pledges to renationalise the postal and rail systems. Such enthusiasm for state ownership smacks of a philosophy long since abandoned by leaders on both left and right. Despite Labour’s decent electoral performance, nationalisation is not everywhere on the march; on June 5th Donald Trump made public his desire to privatise air-traffic control. But the rise of Mr Corbyn and Bernie Sanders hints at a weakening of the rich-world consensus that the less of the economy owned by government, the better. That is a pity. Expanded state ownership is a poor way to cure economic ailments.

For much of the 20th century, economists were open to a bit of dirigisme. Maurice Allais, an (admittedly French) economist who won the Nobel prize in 1988, recommended that the government run a few firms in each industry, the better to observe the relative merits of public and private…Continue reading

Thinking inside the box

WHEN members of a private club in Manhattan suddenly start dropping dead at an alarming rate, Matt Scudder, a private detective, suspects more might be at play than bad luck to explain the bizarre series of suicides and violent accidents. If this sounds like the back-flap of a murder mystery, your deduction skills are as sharp as Mr Scudder’s. In Lawrence Block’s “A Long Line of Dead Men,” the cunning detective eventually uncovers the motive for the killing spree: the club of 31 men were all part of a tontine.

These ancient financial instruments are built on members paying money into a pool, which is invested and then pays out dividends once they reach a pre-agreed age. Those who live longest will see their income increase as others die; the last one standing receives the most. They are essentially a form of insurance against an unexpectedly long life.

Although most people will know them from the works of Agatha…Continue reading

ONE of the hottest debates in economic policy at the moment is how to ensure companies are paying the optimal amount of tax. On the right, politicians think that a lower corporate-tax rate will lead to more business investment and thus faster economic growth. Hence the initial stockmarket enthusiasm after President Donald Trump was elected on a platform that included cuts in business taxes. On the left, the belief is that business is not paying its “fair share” of tax and that it can be further squeezed to pay for spending commitments. Hence the promise of the Labour Party in Britain’s recent election campaign to push the corporate-tax rate up to 26% (from 19%).

How do these theories translate into practice? To find out the effect on business investment, The Economist took the corporate-tax rates in OECD countries and divided them into quartiles from highest (1st) to lowest. Then we calculated the five-year average in each quartile for gross…Continue reading

THE Brexit devils will be in the details. That much is clear from the European Commission’s latest plans for euro-denominated clearing, a crucial bit of financial plumbing. Clearing-houses sit in the middle of a securities or derivatives transaction, and make sure that deals are honoured even if one side defaults. Clearing has become a much bigger business in the wake of the financial crisis, after which the G20 group of large economies mandated that over-the-counter derivatives should be cleared: 62% of a notional $544trn global market is now settled in this way.

London houses have an outsize role, clearing 97% of dollar interest-rate swaps and 75% of those in euros. Britain’s largest clearing-house, LCH, owned by the London Stock Exchange, alone clears over 50% of interest-rate swaps across all currencies. This has long had EU regulators worried about systemic-risk implications, and led them to consider their post-Brexit options. On June 13th the commission proposed a law that would set up a new system of direct supervision for clearing-houses that handle transactions in euros or other EU currencies, but are located outside the EU, as those in London will be.

Under this proposal, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), a regulator, would have direct oversight over non-EU clearing-houses deemed systemically important. Such oversight…Continue reading

TEN days after he became America’s 45th president in January, Donald Trump vowed to “do a big number on Dodd-Frank”, the elephantine law that recast financial regulation after the crisis of 2007-08. Soon after, he asked his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, to measure all America’s rules (not just Dodd-Frank) against seven broad principles, including the prevention of bail-outs by the taxpayer and making regulation more efficient.

On June 12th Mr Mnuchin gave the first part of his answer, in a 147-page report on banks. Later instalments will cover capital markets, insurance and asset management, and non-bank institutions and financial technology. Banks of all sizes will be cheered by its proposals to ease regulation, make “stress tests” of their resilience less onerous and tame the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a watchdog born of the Dodd-Frank act. To allay the confusion caused by America’s many regulators, Mr Mnuchin wants to give co-ordinating power to the…Continue reading

The fear of being crushed

ALUMINIUM smelting is sweaty work. Inside the Hawesville plant of Century, an American aluminium producer, it can get so hot that the workers lie outside in the blazing summer sun to cool off. Dennis Harbath, the plant manager, oversees operations. He is worried about the workers. “They have mental fatigue,” he says.

The source of the stress is a number scrawled on a wall in white chalk. That is the dollar price of a tonne of aluminium, set on the London Metal Exchange (LME). The workers keep track of it on their smartphones. Their wives ask about it, too. “It’s hard to stay on the LME rollercoaster when trying to support a family,” says one.

A few years ago, they weren’t particularly aware of the price, says Andy Meserve, the local union president. That changed after 2015, when the price plunged to below $1,500 per tonne, prompting Century to shut down 60% of the plant’s capacity and lay off hundreds of…Continue reading

ONE factor behind the rise of income inequality in America over the past four decades is that the labour market has increasingly favoured the well-educated. Real wages for college graduates have risen by over a third since 1963, whereas wages for those without high-school diplomas have dropped. As more of the economy becomes automated, doomsayers worry that the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow. History shows, however, that this need not be so.

The recent rise in earnings for skilled workers is a rare historical phenomenon. Compiling records from churches, monasteries, colleges, guilds and governments, Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has put together a comprehensive dataset of English wages that stretches back to the 13th century. Mr Clark notes that in the past the skilled-wage premium, defined as the difference in wages between craftsmen, such as carpenters and masons, and unskilled labourers has been fairly stable, save for two sharp…Continue reading