Tag: FINANCE
Why national accounts might be like corporate balance-sheets
THE easiest way to get an economist to laugh sardonically is to compare a country’s finances to those of a family. It is both simplistic and wrong, they will argue, for politicians to say that a country “must live within its means”.
But in a new working paper* from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Patrick Bolton and Haizhou Huang make a different comparison; between the finances of a government and those of a company. A business can finance itself in three ways: through internal funds (its revenues); through borrowing; and through equity (the issuance of new shares). In the first two cases, it is easy to see the analogy with a nation state; governments can raise money from taxes or borrow in the form of government bonds.
But the paper’s most striking idea is that the national equivalent of equity is fiat money. Governments are able to issue money that can be used to settle debts and pay taxes—the term “fiat” comes from the Latin for “let it be done”….Continue reading
How crisis-hit economies become investment darlings
NAWAZ SHARIF is the ex-prime minister of Pakistan again. His third stint in the job ended on July 28th after the Supreme Court disqualified him from office. Yet he could justifiably claim that he left Pakistan’s economy in a better state than he found it. When Pakistan last went to the polls, GDP had been growing at around 3%, a dismal rate for a poor country with a burgeoning population. Inflation was above 10%. The budget deficit had ballooned. A crisis loomed. Four years on, inflation is in the low single digits. The budget deficit has shrunk to a little above 4% of GDP. The GDP growth rate is closing in on 6%. Investors too have taken notice. Since 2012, Pakistan’s stockmarket capitalisation has doubled in dollar terms (see chart).
Tech stocks have regained their dotcom-era highs
CAST your mind back to when Bill Clinton was president, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin were fresh-faced new leaders and tweeting was strictly for the birds. That was when technology stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 tech index, last traded at their current levels.
The horrendous decline in share prices that followed the peak in 2000 was the first financial calamity of this millennium. The dotcom crash had much less impact on the broader economy than the mortgage and banking crisis of 2007-08. Nevertheless, the tech revival has caused some twitchiness among investors. Might history be repeating itself?
In the intervening years the world, and the tech industry, have changed a lot. In the late 1990s enthusiasm for tech shares was so great that the sector’s market value rose far faster than its earnings. The gap is nothing like as great today (see chart). Back then, leading firms like Microsoft and Oracle were valued at more than 20 times their annual revenues, let alone earnings….Continue reading
Making Bitcoin work better
IN DIFFERENT circumstances the two people could be good friends. Each is rather shy and very smart. And each is passionate about bitcoin, a digital currency. One invented hashcash, which foreshadowed components of the crypto-currency; the other is the author of the first Chinese translation of the white paper in which Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of bitcoin, first described its inner workings.
Adam Back is the chief executive of Blockstream, a British startup, which employs some of the main developers of the software that defines bitcoin’s inner workings. Jihan Wu is the boss of Bitmain, a Chinese firm, which makes about 80% of the chips that power “miners”, specialised computers that keep the bitcoin network secure, confirm payments and mint new digital coins. But far from being fellow-travellers, each represents one of the two main camps in what has come to be called a “bitcoin civil war”, fought over how, if at all, the system should grow.
The worst seems…Continue reading
The closing of American bank branches
WINDSOR, a community of 6,200 people two hours outside Albany in New York state, offers many of the amenities commonly found in a small town, including a bakery, a car-repair outfit and several restaurants. There is just one thing missing: a bank. The town’s only financial institution, First Niagara Bank, shut its doors in October.
Towns like Windsor are becoming ever more common in America. Since the financial crisis, banks have closed over 10,000 branches, an average of three a day. In the first half of 2017 alone, a net 869 brick-and-mortar entities shut their doors, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a research firm. Some fret that branch closures risk turning poorer neighbourhoods into “banking deserts”, cut off from current accounts, loans and other basic services.
The link between poor harvests and violence
LAST year over 102,000 people died in nearly 50 armed conflicts across the world, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank. Much of this violence is caused by tensions between ethnic groups—two-thirds of civil wars have been fought along ethnic lines since 1946. Yet historians differ over whether cultural differences or economic pressures best explain how tensions explode into violence.
A new study* by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama suggests that, historically, economic shocks were more strongly associated with outbreaks of violence directed against Jews than scholars had previously thought. The authors collected data for 1,366 anti-Semitic events involving forced emigration or murderous pogroms in 936 European cities between 1100 and 1800. This was then compared with historical temperature data from a variety of sources, including tree rings, Arctic ice cores and contemporary descriptions of…Continue reading
Pandemic bonds, a new idea
WHEN the Ebola virus hit west Africa in 2014, it took months to get together the money needed to combat the outbreak. Donors ended up committing more than $7bn. But the money came too late and too inefficiently, says Tim Evans, who directs the World Bank’s global health practice. Lives that could have been saved were lost. The bank estimates that GDP in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone was reduced by $2.8bn.
Such outbreaks are likely to become more common: they have increased in frequency and diversity over the past 30 years, in step with the increased mobility of people, products and food. The World Bank says the probability of another pandemic in the next 10 to 15 years is high. That is why it has issued $425m in pandemic bonds to support its new Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which is intended to channel funding to countries facing a deadly disease.
The bonds cover six viruses likely to spark outbreaks: new…Continue reading
America’s uncompetitive markets harm its economy
“THE best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life,” wrote Sir John Hicks, a British economist. Without competitors breathing down their necks, monopolists find it easy to make large profits: just ask the 46m American households served by only one fast-broadband provider, who pay high prices for poor service. As a result, trustbusting is one of those rare causes that can unite raging populists with sober academics. So the wonks may well have agreed with the sentiment, if not the fine detail, when Senate Democrats unveiled a fresh pledge on July 24th to make America competitive again as part of their economic agenda. “This economy is rigged,” insisted Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. It is not quite that bad. But more than three-quarters of industries are more concentrated than they were two decades ago, and the economy is also seeing less turnover of firms (see charts).
It is easy enough for consumers to see the consequences when monopolists entrench themselves in one…Continue reading
Reform of China’s ailing state-owned firms is emboldening them
ACCORDING to company lore, Yunnan Baiyao, a musty-smelling medical powder, played a vital role during the Long March. As China’s Communist troops fled from attacks in the 1930s, trekking thousands of miles to a new base, they spread its yellow granules on their wounds to stanch bleeding. To this day, instructions on the Yunnan Baiyao bottle recommend application after being shot or stabbed. Many Chinese households keep some in stock to deal with more run-of-the-mill cuts. But the government has recently put its maker into service to treat a different kind of ailment: the financial weakness of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Yunnan Baiyao has emerged as a poster-child of China’s new round of SOE reform. The company, previously owned by the south-western province of Yunnan, sold a 50% stake to a private investor earlier this year. The same firm had tried to buy a slice of Yunnan Baiyao in 2009 but was blocked. Its success this time has been held up in the official press as proof that a…Continue reading
Could bond funds break the market?
GOOD generals know that the next war will be fought with different weapons and tactics from the last. Similarly, financial regulators are right to worry that the next crisis may not resemble the credit crunch of 2007-08.
The last crisis arose from the interaction between the market for mortgage-backed securities and the banking system. As investors became unsure of the banks’ exposure to bad debts, they cut back on their lending to the sector, causing a liquidity squeeze. Since then, central banks have insisted that commercial banks improve their capital ratios to ensure they are less vulnerable.
Might the next crisis originate not in the banking system, but in the bond market? That is the subject of a new paper* from the Bank of England. The worry centres on the “liquidity mismatch” between mutual funds, which offer instant redemption to their clients, and the corporate-bond market, where many securities may be hard to trade in a crisis. The danger is that forced…Continue reading