Tag: Finance and economics

THIRTY-ONE years ago, The Economist created the Big Mac index as a way of gauging how different currencies stacked up against the dollar. The index is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity, the idea that in the long run, exchange rates should adjust so that the price of an identical basket of tradable goods is the same. Our basket contains one item, a Big Mac.

The latest version of the index shows, for example, that a Big Mac costs $5.30 in America, but just ¥380 ($3.36) in Japan. The Japanese yen is thus, by our meaty logic, 37% undervalued against the dollar.

In…Continue reading

An inspector Quarles

DONALD TRUMP promised to unshackle America’s financial firms from mounds of stultifying regulation and the grip of bureaucrats with little practical experience of capitalism. One way to put that pledge into practice is to appoint officials with business backgrounds and deregulatory agendas. This element of the Trump strategy was on show this week, with a presidential nomination for a critical job at the Federal Reserve and the first public address by the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), another financial regulator.

Buried in the voluminous pages of the Dodd-Frank act, an Obama-era law passed in response to the financial crisis, was the creation of a new supervisory job at the Fed. Thus far, this powerful post has been informally delegated to an existing Fed board member, first Daniel Tarullo and, since his departure, Jerome Powell. That is set to change. Randal Quarles was formally nominated for the…Continue reading

A WIDELY read cover story on the impact of global warming in this week’s New York magazine starts ominously: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It goes on to predict temperatures in New York hotter than present-day Bahrain, unprecedented droughts wherever today’s food is produced, the release of diseases like bubonic plague hitherto trapped under Siberian ice, and permanent economic collapse. In the face of such apocalyptic predictions, can the world take solace from those who argue that it can move, relatively quickly and painlessly, to 100% renewable energy?

At first glance, the answer to that question looks depressingly obvious. Despite falling costs, wind and solar still produce only 5.5% of the world’s electricity. Hydropower is a much more significant source of renewable energy, but its costs are rising, and investment is falling. Looking more broadly at energy demand, including that for domestic heating, transport and industry, the share of…Continue reading

ON JULY 12, the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica disgorged a chunk of ice the size of Delaware, a small state on America’s east coast. America’s government seems unfazed by the possibility that such shifts might one day threaten Delaware itself. Its climate defiance grows not only from the power of its fossil-fuel industry and the scepticism of the Republican party, but also from a sense of insulation from the costs of global warming. This confidence is misplaced. New research indicates not only that climate change will impose heavy costs on the American economy, but also that it will exacerbate inequality.

Calculating the economic effects of climate change is no simple matter. It means working out how a given increase in global temperature affects local weather conditions; how local weather affects things like mortality and crop yields; how those changes add to or subtract from regional GDP; and how thousands of local-level changes in GDP add up nationally or globally. No…Continue reading

WHAT is the best way to kill a zombie? Fans of Daryl Dixon, a character in “The Walking Dead”, a television series, will know the answer: a crossbow bolt to the brain. Getting rid of corporate zombies, however, is a much more complicated process.

Ageing populations mean that the workforces in developed economies are likely to stagnate, or even shrink, in coming decades. That means almost all the burden of economic growth is likely to fall on productivity improvements. There has been a lot of focus on labour-market flexibility as the key to solving this problem, but the flexibility of the corporate sector may be just as important. Indeed, there is a growing belief that the persistence of zombie firms—companies that keep operating despite a poor financial performance—may explain the weak productivity performance of developed economies in recent years.

An inability to kill off failing companies seems to have two main effects. First, the existence of the…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

Purchasing power

A BIDDING war was briefly but eagerly anticipated. In the end, not a shot was fired. On July 4th the share price of Worldpay, a British payments processor, leapt by 28% after the company said it had received preliminary approaches from JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, and Vantiv, an American payments firm. The next day Worldpay said it had accepted a cash-and-shares bid from Vantiv, worth £7.7bn ($10bn), giving its shareholders 41% of the combined group. JPMorgan Chase, sniffily explaining that it had considered a bid after an “invitation” from Worldpay, which is a client, declined to proceed. Under Britain’s takeover code that refusal rules out a counter bid for six months. The shares slipped back by nearly 9%.

Vantiv and Worldpay are “merchant acquirers”: companies that have contracts with sellers of goods and services, and licences from credit- and debit-card companies, to accept and process card payments. They also provide…Continue reading

THE story of the European Union is in part that of the steady accretion of power by its central bodies. But until now the politically touchy business of running pensions has, like taxation, been zealously guarded by national governments. No longer: on June 29th the European Commission presented a long-awaited proposal for a pan-European personal-pension product, the snazzily named “Pepp”.

Any attempt to encourage Europeans to make adequate provision for their old age is welcome. The combination of ageing populations, falling birth rates and generous state pensions could leave future generations footing the bill, unless people work for longer. Especially in countries such as Italy and Greece, where the state is the main pension provider, encouraging people to make personal savings for their retirement would be sensible (see this week’s Continue reading

OVER a year has passed since Britons voted to leave the European Union. More than three months have gone by since Britain gave formal notice to quit. Less than 21 months remain until March 29th 2019, the scheduled date of Brexit. Yet banks, insurers, asset managers and other financial firms that use London as a base from which to serve the entire EU are little wiser than they were on referendum day about what Brexit will entail. They must plan for it nonetheless.

The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), Britain’s financial supervisor, wants to see their contingency plans by July 14th. The European Central Bank (ECB) has also asked the banks it watches to lay out their post-Brexit strategies. This is probably not demanding for big banks, which are in constant touch with their overseers and already operate both in London and elsewhere in the EU. But some smaller lenders, especially, have work to do. “I think it is fair to say that most banks are not where they should be,” said…Continue reading