Tag: Finance and economics
In developing countries, many people cannot afford not to work
AMERICA’S unemployment statistics attract close attention, even from presidents. Early on June 1st President Donald Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the latest figure (3.8%), released that morning. China’s unemployment numbers, by contrast, attract mostly ridicule. They have barely budged since 2011 despite the upheavals of the period.
Many China-watchers therefore hoped that a new measure of unemployment, dating from 2016 but published monthly since April, would be more revealing. Unlike the older statistic, which counts only those registered as jobless at local labour offices, the new measure draws on a survey of the labour force, collected by trained enumerators and beamed directly to Beijing beyond the grasp of local officials. It now covers 120,000 households across urban China (on top of a longer-running survey of 31 cities), providing, in theory, a representative snapshot of the biggest unemployed population in the…Continue reading
A referendum on the way money is created
TO ITS opponents, the Vollgeld initiative is “suicidal” and a “dangerous experiment”. To its supporters, it is the ticket to a “fairer and more stable banking system”. Swiss voters will decide for themselves on June 10th, when the proposal for sovereign money, which would rewire the country’s banking system, are put to a referendum that, in theory, would be binding.
The heart of the argument is whether private-sector banks should be able to create money. In modern economies, most money takes the form of deposits in commercial banks, rather than the cash in circulation and the reserves determined by the central bank. And bank deposits are mainly created through bank lending. Lenders can thus lend far more than they hold in central-bank reserves.
Vollgeld supporters want to take such money-creating powers away from banks. Bank deposits are not as safe as sovereign money, they say. If a bank collapses, depositors lose…Continue reading
Two Asian stock exchanges tussle over market data
BUYING and selling shares in India is not for the faint of heart. Its own central-bank governor reckons equity capital is taxed up to five times. Never fear. There is a well-established alternative. Investors can just as easily buy financial instruments that track share prices but are not themselves shares. Such “derivatives” are used across the world to mirror markets in everything from platinum to pork bellies. But they also raise awkward questions: can the exchange that generates prices by matching buyers and sellers stop a rival using the data to create its own derivatives?
A quarrel between the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in Mumbai touches that very issue. Since 2000 global investors wanting exposure to Indian shares but not Indian red tape and tax have gone via SGX. Under a licence from NSE, punters could trade a derivative linked to the Nifty 50, an index which is to India what the FTSE 100 is to Britain or the S&P 500 is to…Continue reading
The market for driverless cars will head towards monopoly
THE race to bring driverless cars to market is fierce and crowded. All the leading carmakers are in the field: on May 31st SoftBank’s Vision Fund said that it would invest $2.25bn in the autonomous vehicle (AV) arm of General Motors. So are tech upstarts, from Uber to Tesla to Waymo, Alphabet’s self-drive division and the leader in driverless technology, which recently announced plans to add 62,000 minivans to the fleet of cars that will make up its autonomous ride-hailing service. Intense competition has both benefits and costs, but will probably prove short-lived. Thanks to powerful economies of scale, the roads may soon be ruled by no more than a handful of firms.
The advantages of scale begin with data. Like humans, the computers which power driverless cars improve with experience. The computers sitting in AVs are essentially in the business of learning and improving on what a good human driver would do, write Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb in their new book, “Prediction…Continue reading
American firms will be hit hard by retaliatory tariffs
“LOOK at all these bikers…we love the bikers!” declared the pre-presidential Donald Trump, surveying a crowd of motorcycle-owners gathered by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in 2016. Riders of Harley-Davidsons, in particular, have been among Mr Trump’s noisiest supporters since the early days of his campaign. Riders of “hogs” often see themselves as rowdy rebels. Perhaps this is why many have identified with Mr Trump’s disdain for conventional politics.
Alas, the love affair may be heading for trouble. Mr Trump’s trade policies have put Harley-Davidson in a double bind. The company uses a lot of steel and aluminium to make its bikes. Although much of that is domestically sourced, Mr Trump’s tariffs on imports have led to higher prices for locally made metals, too, thus raising costs. And the European Union is poised to impose retaliatory tariffs on a variety of American exports, including motorcycles and whiskey. Harley-Davidson…Continue reading
President Trump’s tariffs have united his opponents at home and abroad
“HOW am I going to compete?” asks Sohel Sareshwala. He runs Accu-Swiss, a Californian company making customised components for the manufacture of semiconductors and cars. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium, both of which he uses as inputs, are eating into his profit margins and delaying his orders. Meanwhile, Mr Sareshwala’s competitors abroad, free of such concerns, can undercut him.
Mr Sareshwala is not alone in his frustration. On June 1st Mr Trump extended tariffs to countries that supplied 81% of America’s steel imports and 96% of aluminium imports in 2017, arguing that this was necessary to protect national security. Tight quotas apply to most of the rest. Only Australia was let off, perhaps because of a friendship between the president and Greg Norman, an Australian golfer, who lobbied on his government’s behalf. Mr Trump’s tariffs and quotas have drawn a chorus of disapproval from American buyers of metal, the governments of Mexico, Canada and the European…Continue reading
Britain’s government cuts its losses on Royal Bank of Scotland
IF YOU are selling shares, they are worth not what you paid for them, but what someone else will offer. For the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the sum that counts is £2.71 ($3.62). On June 5th UK Government Investments, which manages the state’s stakes in companies, said it had placed 7.7% of RBS at that price—10p below the previous day’s market close—with institutional buyers, reducing its holding to 62.4%. The government paid £5.02 per share to rescue the bank in 2008. So on those 925m shares, taxpayers have lost £2.1bn.
The state has long looked unlikely to recoup its fivers, let alone the £6.25 per share that the National Audit Office, a public-finance watchdog, reckoned last year was a fair benchmark after adding the cost of financing the bail-out. (In 2015 it sold 630m shares, or 5.4% of RBS, for £3.30 a pop.) Even if the stockmarket valued RBS as highly as the book value of its assets—which is true of few big European banks—the price would still be only £4, a level…Continue reading
In investing, as in poker, following rules works best
AT THE annual World Series of Poker, which begins this week in Las Vegas, the main event is the no-limit Texas hold ’em tournament. In the course of two weeks of gruelling knock-out play, several thousand players are whittled down to just two, playing “heads-up” for one of the WSOP’s coveted bracelets.
In last year’s final hand, both players had pushed all their chips in, with five shared cards yet to be dealt. Scott Blumstein, who held Ace-Deuce, was a big underdog against Daniel Ott, who held Ace-Eight. With one card to come, Mr Blumstein’s hand had not improved. His chances had narrowed to 7%. Of the remaining 44 cards, only one of the other three deuces could give him victory.
The cards—and thus the odds of winning or losing—were known to both players, because they had already committed all their chips. Poker is not usually like this. Winning depends not only on your cards but on the unseen cards held by other players, on your ability to deceive them by…Continue reading
The number of new banks in America has fallen off a cliff
THE single-storey main branch of the Texas Hill Country Bank, in Kerrville, sits at the back of a tired shopping centre, in the shade of a six-storey Wells Fargo building. When Roy Thompson, the chief executive, was hired (from Wells) in 2012, three years after it opened, he ran a radio ad campaign to alert locals to its existence. It asked listeners to help a mother (his) to find her child (Roy himself), who had gone missing after joining a community bank.
If Mr Thompson had shared the fate of many small-town bankers, he would have remained missing. Since 2012 more than 2,000 American banks have closed (see chart). Almost all were small, operating in the shadows of big banks with big budgets for marketing, technology and regulatory compliance. For the same reasons, almost no new banks have opened. Before the crisis the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) approved hundreds of bank charters each year. Since 2009 there have been only a dozen in total.
So sudden has been the stop that the FDIC is seeking to…Continue reading
Turkey’s central bank has streamlined its fight against inflation
THE baroque era in Turkish architecture lasted deep into the 19th century, leaving behind lavish buildings, such as the Lily Mosque in Istanbul and waterside pavilions that seem to float on the Bosphorus. The baroque period in Turkish monetary policy will last until June 1st, when the central bank will simplify its equally ornate monetary-policy framework. It will henceforth rely on a single interest rate (the one-week repo rate), which it will raise to 16.5%. This will supersede a jumble of interest rates (see chart) that has left the Turkish currency perilously close to submersion.
Turkish baroque mingled Western and Ottoman…Continue reading