Tag: FINANCE

THE post-war system of global trade has been close to expiring, seemingly, for most of the post-war period. It tottered in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan muscled trading partners into curbing their exports to America. It wobbled with the end of the fruitless Doha round of trade talks. The system now faces the antediluvian economics of President Donald Trump, who seems bent on its destruction.

Mr Trump’s mercantilism is gaining steam. Straight after saying he would slap hefty tariffs on aluminium and steel imports, he is setting his sights on China, a favourite stump-speech bogeyman. This week he blocked the takeover of an American chipmaker by a Singaporean rival, because of fears of Chinese technological leadership. He is poised to act against China over its theft of intellectual property and its trade surplus.

And yet global trade has proven itself to be remarkably resilient. An optimist could argue that, historically, it is big political realignments that overturn trade-policy…Continue reading

IN THE run-up to the presidential election of 2016, investors were nervous about Donald Trump. They liked his tax-cutting, anti-regulation promises, but fretted about his foreign and trade policies. Some dubbed the two agendas “Trump lite” and “Donnie Darko”.

Almost as soon as it became clear that Mr Trump would become president, the markets decided to believe in the optimistic version. His tweeting and decision-making may have been erratic, but investors seemed to forgive the president his peccadilloes as a wife might her errant husband: “He may not be faithful but he’s a good provider.”

Fears about trade conflict almost disappeared. In last month’s survey of global fund managers by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, just 5% regarded a trade war between America and China as the biggest risk facing the markets, compared with 45% who worried about a return of inflation or a crash in the bond markets.

The announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminium on March 1st thus…Continue reading

AS COMPUTING power has grown, it has become easier to uncover information hidden inside datasets that seem totally unconnected. Some recent studies have used this approach to reveal business-related information flows. One linked the movements of 18th-century share prices with the arrival of ships bringing news. Another looked at the relationship between business activity and the movements of corporate jets. A third mined White House visitor logs for the names of executives and examined their companies’ subsequent stockmarket returns.

A paper in this vein published on March 5th pores over a dataset released by New York City’s government covering more than 1bn cab rides between 2009 and 2014. David Finer, a graduate student at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, analysed trips connecting the headquarters of big banks and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He extracted trips starting at commercial banks and at the New York Fed that converged on the same destination around…Continue reading

THE past decade has been tough for conventional “active” fund managers, who try to pick stocks that beat the market. They have been losing business to “passive” funds—those that try to replicate a benchmark, like the S&P500 index. Passive funds have much lower fees.

Figures from Inalytics, a company that analyses fund managers’ portfolios, suggest that active managers are changing strategy in response. The average number of stocks in global equity portfolios has halved, from 121 to 61 (see chart). In a sense, active managers have become more active, making bigger bets on individual stocks. This makes their portfolios less like the index, meaning they can beat the market by a larger margin. But they can also do a lot worse. The portfolios examined by Inalytics have outperformed, but in the long term the average manager is unlikely to do so, since the index reflects average performance.

Moreover, managers incur costs and the index does not. The result of more active management…Continue reading

MOST banks gush about digital technology, fearing all the while that some born-digital usurper, large or small, will do to them what Amazon has done to retailers, Uber to taxi-drivers and Airbnb to hoteliers. Some have reorganised themselves to become nimbler, copying startups by forming small teams to generate, test, reject and improve ideas at speed. Apps are improving, new products are appearing and online marketplaces are being built. Only a few are turning enthusiasm into money. One of those is DBS.

Singapore’s (and South-East Asia’s) biggest bank is a stockmarket darling. Its share price has roughly doubled in the past two years, outstripping the gains of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) and United Overseas Bank (UOB), its main local rivals (see chart). The price exceeds DBS’s net book value per share by 50%. That owes something to the city-state’s buoyant economy—GDP rose by 3.6% last year, the most since 2014—and recovering housing market, and to the doubling of the dividend when DBS reported fourth-quarter results…Continue reading

SEVENTY years ago America passed the Economic Co-operation Act, better known as the Marshall Plan. Drawing inspiration from a speech at Harvard University by George Marshall, America’s secretary of state, it aimed to revive Europe’s war-ravaged economies. Almost five years ago, at a more obscure institution of higher learning, Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, China’s president, Xi Jinping, outlined his own vision of economic beneficence. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as it has become known, aims to sprinkle infrastructure, trade and fellow-feeling on more than 70 countries, from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Mr Xi’s initiative, which also has geopolitical goals (see Banyan), has invited comparison with America’s mid-century development endeavour. Some even suggest it will be far bigger. But is that credible? The Marshall Plan,…Continue reading

MARCH 8th, International Women’s Day, always brings a flood of reports about gender inequalities in everything from health outcomes to pay and promotion. But one gap is gradually narrowing: that in wealth. As money managers seek to attract and serve rich women, and as those women express their values through their portfolios, the impact will be felt within the investment industry and beyond.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, between 2010 and 2015 private wealth held by women grew from $34trn to $51trn. Women’s wealth also rose as a share of all private wealth, though less spectacularly, from 28% to 30%. By 2020 they are expected to hold $72trn, 32% of the total. And most of the private wealth that changes hands in the coming decades is likely to go to women.

One reason for women’s growing wealth is that far more of them are in well-paid work than before. In America, women’s rate of participation in the labour market rose from 34% in 1950 to 57% in 2016. Another is that women are…Continue reading

AFTER 25 hearings, thousands of pages of comments and many unworkable bipartisan working groups, America’s Senate has finally produced a possible consensus bill to tweak the Dodd-Frank Act, the vast swathe of banking regulation passed soon after the 2008-09 financial crisis. On March 6th, in a technical move that counts as significant progress in Washington’s creaky bureaucracy, 16 Democrats and one independent joined Republicans in voting to allow several hours of debate before passing the bill on to the Senate leadership.

Amendments may yet be added and the entire edifice could fracture, but the vote, after years of effort, suggests a bill might now pass. If it does, it would then have to be reconciled with a different bill passed by the House of Representatives. But this now seems possible as well, if only because the alternative would be no amendment to Dodd-Frank at all.

One certainty is that, whatever the bill’s fate, there will be disappointment. Bernie Sanders, a socialist who ran for the Democratic Party’s…Continue reading

ACCORDING to President Donald Trump, money is pouring into America from abroad. The tax reform he signed into law in December means American firms can no longer defer paying taxes on profits left sitting in foreign subsidiaries. The change has led to some uplifting headlines. Apple said that it would make a one-off tax payment of $38bn relating to its past accumulation of $252bn in foreign earnings. Presumably, it will now start to bring this cash home. “Huge win for American workers and the USA!” tweeted Mr Trump. Yet despite the prospect of large-scale profit repatriations, the dollar has been strangely weak of late. Since the start of November, when tax reform began looking likely to pass, the greenback has fallen by about 3%. What is going on?

Start with the fact that repatriations are mostly not true capital inflows. An analysis by Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse finds that, as of March 2017, American corporations had amassed around $2.2trn of earnings in overseas subsidiaries. About half was…Continue reading

AGUS SACCHAL sells sheets and blankets from a warehouse in Buenos Aires, for which he is paid in Argentine pesos. While the pesos go into his wallet, two other banknotes are stuck to his office window. One is a ten-yuan note from a visit to China, where he went in search of cheap textiles. The other is a $5 bill, pinned next to an invoice, also in dollars. Though he does not trade with America directly, when importing he uses the greenback.

Argentina’s rocky financial history makes the dollar’s dominance there unsurprising. Still, it is an extreme case of a wider phenomenon. After gathering data on 91% of the world’s imports, by value, Gita Gopinath of Harvard University found that America accounts for nearly 10%. But its currency is used in over 40% of invoicing.

Recent research suggests that this creates a link between a weak dollar and buoyant trade flows—and vice versa. Trends since 1999 are suggestive (see chart). During 2017 the dollar depreciated by 7% against a basket of other currencies, as global trade flows surged…Continue reading