Tag: FINANCE

…and remember to claim the tax deduction

JEFF POWERS was raised as “a good Catholic boy”. So when he sold his wall-fastener business in 2012 for $225m, he wanted to give back. And, like many philanthropists, he started close to home. He donated to the hospital where his son had spent months recovering from a car accident. He helped pay for a swimming pool at his children’s school. Today he supports all sorts of causes, from scholarships in Florida to soup kitchens in New York.

The way Mr Powers finances these projects would strike old-school charitable types as odd. Traditionally, a budding philanthropist would either give directly to a charity or set up a foundation. But Mr Powers uses a donor-advised fund (DAF), a type of account held by a non-profit entity, in this case Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund, an arm of the bank. DAFs are taking root in Britain and Canada, but they are primarily an American phenomenon.

DAFs are way-stations for donor dollars. Mr Powers deposits some money into his DAF and, while he ponders where it should go, Bank of America invests it for him. At some point he will suggest a beneficiary and, as…Continue reading

A YEAR after one of the most spectacular robberies of modern times, the authorities in Bangladesh are still trying to crack the case. Hackers into the country’s central bank sent instructions through SWIFT, a messaging network for cross-border payments, to transfer funds from the bank’s account with the New York Federal Reserve to private accounts in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Much of the stolen $101m has yet to be retrieved; the masterminds are yet to be identified. But the probe reveals the strikingly sophisticated, and international, nature of the crime.

After sifting 60 hard drives and thousands of pieces of paper, and interviewing dozens of people, investigators, talking anonymously in Dhaka, say they are confident about some details of the heist. They believe foreign hackers acted with inside help. The attackers’ coding style has raised suspicions of involvement by North Korea. This week the New York Times reported that American federal prosecutors were examining this possibility.

Egregious violations of the bank’s security procedures have also been uncovered. On the day of the robbery, its security cameras were…Continue reading

AMERICAN workers without college degrees have suffered financially for decades—as has been known for decades. More recent is the discovery that their woes might be deadly. In 2015 Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two (married) scholars, reported that in the 20 years to 1998, the mortality rate of middle-aged white Americans fell by about 2% a year. But between 1999 and 2013, deaths rose. The reversal was all the more striking because, in Europe, overall middle-age mortality continued to fall at the same 2% pace. By 2013 middle-aged white Americans were dying at twice the rate of similarly aged Swedes of all races (see chart). Suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse were to blame.

Ms Case and Mr Deaton have now updated their work on these so-called “deaths of despair”. The results, presented this week at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, are no happier. White middle-age mortality continued to rise in 2014 and 2015, contributing to a fall in life expectancy…Continue reading

IN THE world of investing, everyone is always looking for a better mousetrap—a way to beat the market. One approach that is increasingly popular is to select shares based on specific “factors”—for example, the size of companies or their dividend yield. The trend has been given the ugly name of “smart beta”.

A recent survey of institutional investors showed three-quarters were either using or evaluating the approach. By the end of January some $534bn was invested in smart-beta exchange-traded funds, according to ETFGI, a research firm. Compound annual growth in assets under management in the sector has been 30% over the past five years.

The best argument for smart-beta funds is that they simply replicate, at lower cost, what fund managers are doing already. For example, many fund managers follow the “value” approach, seeking out shares that look cheap. A computer program can pick these stocks more methodically than an erratic human. A smart-beta fund does what it says on the tin.

But does it work? The danger here is “data mining”. Carry out enough statistical tests, and you will always find some strategy that worked in the…Continue reading

EVERY time the Federal Reserve has raised rates since the financial crisis, as it did on March 15th, it has done so in part by increasing “Interest On Excess Reserves” (IOER). This obscure policy rate is surprisingly controversial. Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chair of the congressional committee that oversees the Fed, has called it a “subsidy” to some of the largest banks in America.

To understand the argument, consider the Fed’s year-end financial statement. In 2016 it earned $111.1bn in interest income on its vast portfolio of securities. But it also paid JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and other mostly big banks $12bn in interest on excess cash deposited at regional Federal Reserve banks. Such IOER payments are both woefully unpopular and critical to the Fed’s monetary policy.

Over a decade ago, to give the Fed better control of short-term interest rates, Congress authorised it to pay interest on funds in excess of those banks need to meet reserve requirements. The policy was first used during the financial crisis in 2008. But today, IOER is the Fed’s primary monetary-policy tool, essential to its setting of…Continue reading

IT SHOULD have been a happy anniversary. On March 15th 2012, KORUS, a trade deal between America and South Korea, came into effect. It slashed tariffs, tightened intellectual-property rights and opened up South Korea’s services market. When it was signed, the head of an American manufacturing lobby hailed it as meaning “jobs, jobs and jobs”. Wendy Cutler, its American negotiator, calls it “the highest standard deal we have in force”.

Five years on, jubilation has given way to anxiety. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump referred to the deal as a “job-killer”. On March 1st his administration’s official trade-strategy document singled it out for criticism. America’s trade deficit in goods with South Korea has more than doubled since 2011. “This is not the outcome the American people expected,” it lamented.

Trade between America and South Korea has indeed fallen short of expectations. When the deal was signed, the United States International Trade Commission predicted that it would boost American goods exports to South Korea by around $10bn. In fact they fell by $3bn between 2011 and 2016. The deal suffered…Continue reading

SCRATCHING around for money to pay for free secondary schools, a government minister in Ghana last month floated an idea: raid the Heritage Fund. At least 9% of the country’s annual oil revenues are stashed there for future generations. The minister was rebuffed. But the row highlighted a trade-off: saving for tomorrow’s children makes it harder to help today’s.

Such dilemmas are acute in sub-Saharan Africa. The region has about a dozen sovereign-wealth funds, most of them established in the past decade. They have few models to emulate. A Norwegian approach—build a fund, invest abroad, and spend only the annual returns—works in places that are small, ageing and rich. Most African countries, unfortunately, are none of those things.

The oldest and largest African fund, Botswana’s $5.3bn Pula Fund, was created in 1994 from diamond revenues. Angola and Nigeria, the biggest oil exporters, have both established funds in the past few years; governments from Kenya to Zambia are talking of doing the same. Even Rwanda, with no great commodity riches, is soliciting patriotic donations to build its own (civil servants coughed up $2.5m last…Continue reading

Hope springs eternal

IT WAS one of the worst-hit casualties of the financial crisis 0f 2007-08, but Iceland this week took steps that symbolised its recovery. The last remaining controls on capital outflows were lifted, allowing pension and investment funds to invest their money abroad. And the central bank struck another deal with offshore holders of frozen krona-denominated assets—buying more of them back at a discount.

The country’s crisis experience was a cautionary tale of an over-exuberant financial sector. Three of its banks, with assets worth 14 times GDP, keeled over within a week; the krona fell by 70% on a trade-weighted basis in a year; Iceland was the first rich country since Britain in 1976 to need an IMF rescue.

To stem capital outflows and further falls in the krona, the government in 2008 slapped restrictions on money leaving the country. The measures also froze offshore holdings of krona-denominated assets, which at the time amounted to 40% of GDP. Even the IMF, usually in favour of more orthodox free-market policies, supported the move. The country nonetheless experienced a severe recession,…Continue reading

IT SOUNDS like a scene from “The Big Short”, a film about financial speculation. Light aircraft fly photographers close to America’s oil-storage facilities, using infra-red imaging and photographs to gauge the rise and fall of levels of crude in 2,100 storage tanks, in an attempt to work out whether oil futures are overvalued or not.

In fact, it is less mischievous than that. The intelligence-gatherers work for a company, Genscape, that sells the information to traders everywhere, giving them a few days’ jump before storage surveys are published by the government.

These data are particularly useful at a time when near-record levels of oil inventories in America are weighing on oil prices and frustrating attempts by OPEC, the producers’ cartel, to prop up the market. The high level of inventories is vital to an understanding of why crude prices suddenly plummeted this month, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster. West Texas Intermediate is back below $50 a barrel, its level before OPEC in November agreed to cut output (see chart).

Three reasons explain why the tanks are so full….Continue reading

Correction. We made a mistake in last week’s article on green-shipping finance. The oxides of sulphur and nitrogen emitted by shipping are very harmful; but they are not, as we asserted, much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide. Sorry.