Hope I save before I get old

IF YOU reach the age of 65 in the OECD, you can expect to live for another 19 years  or so (more if you are a woman, less if you are a man). If you stop work earlier than 65, and live a bit longer than average, you could easily be retired for 25-30 years, almost as long as you were in work. But people find it very hard to get interested in pensions, even though their financial future depends on them; retirement is too distant a prospect and the issue seems too complicated.

This blog has written a lot on the subject so it is time to summon some farewell thoughts. The executive summary: pensions are more expensive to fund, employers are less willing to do so, so you will need to save more (a lot more) and/or retire later. 

All pensions are paid for by the next generation. This may seem counter-intuitive; aren't we contributing money every month? State pensions are paid for by current taxpayers (yes, there is a US Social Security...Continue reading

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Fearing Brexit, Irish cheesemakers mull a switch to mozzarella

THE herd of water buffalo ambling over rolling hills may look like a scene from southern Italy. In fact the beasts roam in southern Ireland. Johnny Lynch, who owns a 150-acre farm in County Cork, makes plump balls of mozzarella from their milk, and bids customers a cheerful, Irish-accented “Buongiorno!” in online advertisements for his produce.

Of the 200,000 tonnes of cheese made each year in Ireland, 90% is cheddar. That could soon become a problem. Apart from America, which has plenty of cheesemakers of its own, the only country with a big appetite for cheddar is Britain. It buys more than half of Ireland’s cheddar exports, for upwards of €250m ($300m) a year. But its impending exit from the European Union could cause the dairy trade to turn sour.

If Britain leaves the EU’s single market and customs union, as it intends to, Irish exporters can expect to face regulatory hurdles and perhaps tariffs. Conor Mulvihill of Dairy Industry Ireland, a lobby...Continue reading

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China’s holy sites list on the stockmarket

BENEATH a lustrous 33-metre bronze statue of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, a young monk on Mount Putuo tallies the cash donated by visiting faithful: “Daily, anywhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of yuan,” he says (100,000 yuan is a little under $16,000). Over 8m trips are made yearly to the tiny islet in Zhoushan city, about a four-hour drive from Shanghai (11m visited Shanghai Disneyland in its first year, after it opened in 2016). When it comes to temple fundraising, the monk is resolute. “The traditional way is the best way,” he says.

The Putuoshan Tourism Development Company has other ideas. A state-owned enterprise whose biggest shareholder is controlled by the government of Zhoushan and some state asset-management firms, it manages tourist facilities in the location, such as ferries, cable cars and joss-stick shops. Since 2012 it has mulled an initial public offering (IPO) of these services on Shanghai’s stock exchange; last year it...Continue reading

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Into the sands

“THIS port is for the Togolese,” says Sherif Tchedre, a mechanic standing among containers that line the shorefront in Lomé, Togo’s capital. “But it is Bolloré who runs everything.” He thinks little of the port’s French operator, Bolloré Group, or the conglomerate’s eponymous owner-boss, Vincent Bolloré. They do “nothing for Togo”, he says, adding that the Frenchman is too cosy with African presidents.

The French police seem to think so, too. On April 24th they arrested Mr Bolloré and some of his firm’s senior staff in Paris on suspicion of paying bribes a decade ago to win bids to run the Lomé port and one in Conakry, in Guinea. The next day he and two others were placed under formal investigation, one step short of being charged. The authorities suspect that Havas, a communications firm that Bolloré then owned, gave African politicians heavily discounted help in their election campaigns. Mr Bolloré and Bolloré Group deny the allegations.

Bolloré is bigger...Continue reading

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Antitrust with Chinese characteristics

GLOBAL deals may be growing at a rapid clip, but they seldom offer instant gratification. Qualcomm, an American chipmaker, first bid for NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company, in October 2016. The union has since been blessed by eight regulators worldwide, but one hurdle remains: China. With no decision yet from its regulator, the companies, which were expecting to have closed the $44bn deal this week, now hope to conclude it by July. The purchase of the chip unit of Toshiba, a troubled Japanese company, by a consortium led by Bain Capital, an American private-equity firm, is similarly awaiting sign-off from China.

Some suspect the delays stem from the threat of a trade war with America. Holding back regulatory approval, particularly on sensitive high-tech deals, could be part of the arsenal in any trade conflict. Organisational change may also be to blame. Fay Zhou, who works in Beijing for Linklaters, a law firm, points out that a recent reshuffle, which took merger reviews away from the commerce ministry...Continue reading

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The euro area’s economy loses momentum

ECONOMISTS have spent the past decade wringing their hands over the health of the euro area’s economy. Last year, in a welcome respite, it expanded by a robust 2.3%, outstripping forecasts and matching America’s growth rate. But it has appeared less rosy-cheeked since.

Symptoms include moderation in a number of monthly indicators. Industrial production fell in January and February, as did business confidence; retail-sales growth was disappointing. The purchasing managers’ index (PMI), an output survey regarded as a good early indicator of GDP growth, has fallen from exuberant—and perhaps unsustainable—levels at the turn of the year, though it still points to decent growth (see chart).

Germany, the bloc’s largest economy, has not been immune. A summary indicator compiled by the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, a German think-tank, which includes production, sentiment and interest-rate data, suggests that the probability of a recession has risen, from 7% in March to 32% in April. A...Continue reading

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America’s antitrust apparatus prepares to act against big tech

THE rise of the big tech firms is easy to spot in downtown Chicago. Apple’s minimalist store looms over the riverfront, close to a skyscraper carrying the name of another omnipresent brand—Trump. At a bus stop a Facebook advertisement promises that its new algorithm will combat fake news. On the Magnificent Mile’s digital hoardings Google urges pedestrians to swoon into the arms of its voice-activated assistant.

Inside the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-market thinkers and of free speech, tech has become more prominent, too. On April 19th and 20th most of America’s antitrust establishment—officials, economists and lawyers—as well as a smattering of Silicon Valley types, gathered to discuss whether big tech needed to be tamed. The conclave came just days after Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, testified before Congress.

One Facebook executive was brave enough to show his face in Chicago, bearing the smile of someone stuck at the dentist for two days without...Continue reading

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The lapsing of Finland’s universal basic income trial

THE concept of a universal basic income (UBI), an unconditional cash payment to all citizens, has in recent years captured the imagination of a wide spectrum of people, from leftist activists to libertarian Silicon Valley techies. Proponents see a neat solution to poverty and the challenges of automation; detractors argue it would remove the incentive to work. Trials of UBI have been launched, or are about to be, in several countries. Most are publicly funded, although Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, is starting a privately funded experiment in America.

Finland was one of the first movers. In January 2017 it began a trial for 2,000 people, each receiving €560 ($680) a month. That drew legions of foreign journalists and camera crews. This week, however, international media attention abruptly centred on the ending of the experiment in December 2018. Headlines suggested that it had been “scrapped” or had “failed”. The truth is more nuanced.

The trial...Continue reading

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A market-design economist wins the John Bates Clark medal

Parag Pathak penned a pupil-picker paper

BOSTON parents were fed up. To get their children into public schools they had to submit a list of their preferences. Spots were allocated first to those who put a school top. Only then would schools consider pupils who put them second or third. Sounds fair? Hold on. The best schools are popular. Picking them risks rejection. Good schools are sought after, too. If put second they may also fill up, leaving only places at worse schools. Should parents aim for the best and risk mediocrity, or settle for the good?

On April 20th the American Economic Association (AEA) awarded the John Bates Clark medal, given annually to a leading economist under 40, to Parag Pathak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches market design—eg, creating mechanisms to allocate resources without money, such as school places in Boston. Solutions he devised there have been applied widely, from New York to New Orleans. The AEA says...Continue reading

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Donald Trump is sending shockwaves through global commodities markets

Technology can tackle investors’ flaws

TECHNOLOGY has transformed finance. Consumers bank and buy their insurance policies online. They use technology to manage their pensions and other investment portfolios. But can tech improve returns? Only if it is used wisely.

If it is cheaper to trade, then costs will take a smaller chunk out of long-term returns. Technology also allows fund managers to replicate stockmarket indices, giving investors access to broadly diversified equity portfolios for a fraction of a percentage point in annual fees.

But the ease and cheapness of trading, along with the vast range of options available, create a terrible temptation. Worldwide there are nearly 7,400 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and related products. These funds are not used only by “buy and hold” investors. Nearly half of the top 20 traded securities on American markets, by value, are ETFs.

Just because you can trade does not mean you should. And just because there is a fund specialising in smaller Vietnamese companies, or one...Continue reading

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Many results in microeconomics are shaky

MICROECONOMISTS are wrong about specific things, Yoram Bauman, an economist and comedian, likes to say, whereas macroeconomists are wrong in general. Macroeconomists have borne the brunt of public criticism over the past decade, a period marked by financial crisis, soaring unemployment and bitter arguments between the profession’s brightest stars. Yet the vast majority of practising dismal scientists are microeconomists, studying the behaviour of people and firms in individual markets. Their work is influential and touches on all aspects of social policy. But it is no less fraught than the study of the world economy, and should be treated with corresponding caution.

For decades non-economists have attacked the assumptions underlying economic theory: that people are perfectly informed maximisers of their own self-interest, for instance. Although economists are aware that markets fail and humans are not always rational, many of their investigations still rely on neoclassical assumptions as “good...Continue reading

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A new NAFTA may be agreed on soon

The new NAFTA model has many moving parts

ONE year ago, a member of President Donald Trump’s administration drafted a short executive order to withdraw America from the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade deal with Canada and Mexico. The obvious interpretation was that Mr Trump was irresponsibly bullying the Mexicans and Canadians into giving America better terms. A kinder view held that he was aiming at a domestic audience. Congress was dragging its feet at the time over the confirmation of Robert Lighthizer, the president’s chosen trade negotiator. Mr Trump’s threats were a way to kick it into action.

One year on, with Mr Lighthizer long since in place, America’s attitude to NAFTA seems no less hostile. Its threat of withdrawal still hangs over the talks, and in March Mr Trump waved the stick of tariffs on steel and aluminium in case a deal to revise NAFTA could not be reached by May 1st. This tough talk may yield an agreement within the next few...Continue reading

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Big tech is growing, but so is investors’ caution

FOR a few years now Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google have behaved like sled dogs pulling the stockmarket forward with boundless energy. The ride has been mostly smooth and enriching. To many in Silicon Valley the fortunes of the FANGs—as the pack is known—seemed so entwined that they were treated like a distinct asset class. It was one in which everyone should have coveted a stake (see chart 1). The four firms have accounted for 20% of the rise in S&P 500 stocks since 2016. Yet the FANGs’ fates may no longer be indivisible.

On April 23rd Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported its strongest sales growth in nearly...Continue reading

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Politicians’ battle against Korean conglomerates hits a snag

A mountainous task

WHEN Kim Ki-sik took the helm of South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) on April 2nd, he was supposed to restore credibility to the embattled agency. The co-founder of an influential left-leaning NGO and fierce critic of South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, or chaebol, Mr Kim seemed the ideal candidate to clean up after his predecessor, Choi Heung-sik, who had to quit after just six months when he became embroiled in a nepotism scandal. In the event Mr Kim’s tenure proved even shorter than Mr Choi’s. He resigned on April 16th after it emerged that as an MP he had mishandled political donations and gone on three foreign trips—including cable-car rides in the French ski resort of Chamonix—sponsored by organisations his committee was supervising at the time.

Mr Kim’s downfall is the latest setback for President Moon Jae-in’s ambitious chaebol reforms. Along with Kim Sang-jo, who...Continue reading

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Regulating virtual currencies and ICOs

THE pattern is familiar. Computer geeks develop technology that threatens to overturn established markets and habits. Regulators then scramble to understand and tame the beast. This is what is happening in the financial world in the wake of an explosion of crypto-currencies. Over the past year the pool of virtual currencies has both deepened, from $30bn to $400bn, and widened, with the spread of “initial coin offerings” (ICOs, a form of fundraising in which investors in young companies are issued with virtual tokens). Hedge funds, students and pensioners have all been caught up in the crypto craze.

This worries authorities, because the crypto-sphere is far from risk-free. Valuations can leap and plunge: after a giddy rise, between December and February the price of bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to less than $7,000. (It is now around $9,000.) Several ICOs have turned out to be scams. Legitimate tokens are in danger of being stolen. Some crypto-currency exchanges have been...Continue reading

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Crypto money-laundering

AS LONG as dirty money has been around, so has money-laundering. Between $800bn and $2trn, or 2-5% of global GDP, is washed annually, estimates the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Criminals have swapped money for precious metals, mis-stated invoices, rinsed cash through casinos or simply strapped it to their bodies and flown to places where banks don’t ask questions. Now they have a new detergent: crypto-currencies.

Such data as there are suggest that crypto-laundering is still a small share of the whole. But crypto-currencies’ attractions—global availability, the speed and irreversibility of transactions and the ability to hide identities—are plain. Rob Wainwright, head of Europol, Europe’s police agency, has estimated that 3-4% of the continent’s annual criminal takings, or £3bn-4bn ($4.2bn-5.6bn), are crypto-laundered. He thinks the problem will get worse. America’s Drug Enforcement Administration believes international gangs are using crypto-currencies...Continue reading

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The best books on finance and economics

THE late Hans Rosling is best known for his Ted talks (here is one on the wonders of the washing machine). Sadly he died last year but before he did so, he worked with his son and daughter-in-law to write "Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We're Wrong About the World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think." It is a wonderful book, full of humour and humility, and it paints an optimistic picture of progress.

Take his 13 question test and you will probably be surprised. For example, has the proportion of people in the world living in extreme poverty over the last 20 years almost doubled, stayed the same, or almost halved? Over the last 100 years, has the number of deaths per year from natural disasters more than doubled, stayed the same or more than halved? In both cases, the answer is the most optimistic one; the latter statistic is particularly remarkable given the increase in the size of the population over the last century. 

Perhaps because the...Continue reading

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Korean Air’s “nut rage” sisters step down

Hong Kong defends its dollar peg in both directions

THE Hong Kong dollar is one of the most and least manipulated monies in the world. For over 34 years the territory’s monetary authority, the HKMA, has kept it pegged to America’s currency at around HK$7.80 to the dollar, resisting all temptations to let it fall or rise. In 2005 it refined the peg with two promises: to buy dollars at the price of HK$7.75 and to sell them for HK$7.85.

The strength of the Hong Kong dollar has obliged the HKMA to keep the first promise many times since. Its purchases of American dollars have even drawn the accusation that it manipulates its currency for competitive advantage.

In fact, the HKMA has always been ready to manipulate its currency upwards, too. But since 2005 it has had no occasion to, until last week. On April 12th the Hong Kong dollar weakened to HK$7.85, forcing the authority to buy HK$51bn over the next few days in exchange for American dollars.

The Hong Kong dollar’s weakness reflects the gap between rising American interest rates and...Continue reading

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Coco bonds have not lived up to their promise

DURING the financial crisis, Western governments poured hundreds of billions of dollars into their banks to avert collapse. The search for ways to avoid future bail-outs started before the turmoil ended. One of the niftiest proposals was the “contingent convertible” (coco) bond, which turns into equity when the ratio of a bank’s equity to risk-weighted assets falls below a predetermined danger point (since set at a minimum of 5.125% for cocos, although it can be up to around 7%). The ambition was grand. As the Squam Lake Group, composed of mostly American academics, put it in 2009, the automatic conversion of cocos would “transform an undercapitalised or insolvent bank into a well-capitalised bank at no cost to taxpayers”.

At first, regulators were keen. In 2010 Mervyn King, then the governor of the Bank of England, said he wanted contingent capital to be a “major part of the liability structure of the banking system”. Swiss regulators, too, pushed for coco issuance. The hybrid nature of cocos seemed a way to satisfy both regulators, who wanted banks to have bigger safety buffers, and bankers, who were reluctant to issue new shares because of the high cost of capital. The hope was that investors, too, might see the appeal of an asset that offered a higher yield than bank bonds but lower risk than bank shares.

Nine years after the first cocos...Continue reading

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Indicators that signal financial-market trouble are flashing

WATCHING financial markets can be like watching a horror film. A character walks into the darkness alone. A floorboard creaks. The latest spooky sign is the spread between the three-month dollar London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) and the overnight index swap (OIS) rate. It usually hovers at around 0.1%, but has recently climbed to 0.6% (see chart). As it widens, bankers are bracing for a jump scare.

To see why, consider what each rate represents. LIBOR is the rate that banks charge other banks for unsecured loans. The OIS rate measures expectations for the federal funds rate, which is set by the central bank. As LIBOR rises above the OIS rate, that suggests banks fear it is getting riskier to lend to each other. (The gap was 3.65 percentage points in the depths of the crisis, after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.)

Market-watchers were already twitchy. Last November they shuddered as the yield curve, which plots the yields of Treasury bonds of different maturities, abruptly flattened....Continue reading

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Americans will no longer have to sign for credit-card purchases

Sir Martin Sorrell leaves the world’s biggest ad company in a sorry state

Amazon is not the only threat to legacy post offices

The Pony Express, British style

IT MAY be hard to imagine a world without cheap postal services, but 200 years ago sending mail was a luxury. Posting a letter from London to Edinburgh cost an average daily wage. In 1840, after a proposal by Rowland Hill, an inventor, Britain launched the Penny Post, the world’s first universal mail service. The state-run post office was given a mail monopoly in return for delivering letters to any address in the country at the same rate. Cheaper postage proved wildly popular and the flows of information it enabled boosted economic growth. But the scheme’s finances proved controversial. The low cost of the service hit profits and the government introduced income tax to fill the fiscal hole.

That did not stop the idea of a “universal service obligation” for post spreading across the entire rich world over the next century. At the industry’s peak, post offices worldwide delivered nearly 350bn items of mail in 2007. But over the past...Continue reading

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A potential merger between IAG and Norwegian should worry flyers

WHEN flag carriers such as British Airways (BA) ruled the skies, only the rich could afford to fly across the Atlantic. That was until Freddie Laker, a British entrepreneur, came along. His dream was to open long-haul travel to the masses. In 1977 he launched Skytrain, the first low-cost long-haul flights between London and New York. “Thanks to Freddie Laker you can cross the Atlantic for so much less,” declared Margaret Thatcher in 1981. “Competition works.” But within a year of her speech Laker Airways had gone bust, amid accusations of predatory pricing.

Since 2013 Norwegian, another low-cost carrier, has been trying to make Laker’s dream a reality. Last year it painted his face onto one of its jets to show it is serious about disrupting transatlantic air travel. But just like Laker Airways, it has run into financial headwinds. And BA is once again a potential beneficiary. On April 12th IAG, a group of flag carriers including BA, said that it had bought 4.6% of its budget rival as a precursor...Continue reading

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ESPN starts a streaming service

THE first week for ESPN+, a sports streaming service that Disney, owner of ESPN, launched in America on April 12th, had none of the razzmatazz associated with a firm known for blockbuster openings. Forget marquee matchups from the National Basketball Association. The games come from lesser-known football (ie, soccer) leagues, minor college sports and international fixtures with limited American audiences, like rugby and cricket.

This was tactical, says Kevin Mayer, the boss of Disney’s first shot at streaming in America. At $5 a month, the aim is to create a sort of mini-Netflix for sports. But Disney is loth to take customers away from the company’s lucrative ESPN networks on pay-TV. It wants to avoid the own goal of disrupting itself.

The delicate positioning of ESPN+ reflects an industry in flux. Cable networks are losing millions of subscribers to “cord-cutting”, whereby customers drop expensive pay-TV packages in favour of much cheaper internet services like Netflix. In response to this threat Disney decided to pull its films from Netflix and to develop its own internet-only entertainment service, which is scheduled to debut next year. In December the company agreed a $66bn deal to buy much of the entertainment business of 21st Century Fox, in order to gain the heft to compete with Netflix. Disney is betting that streaming is the...Continue reading

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How Heineken beer survives in Congo

THE Bralima brewery in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is an island of modernity in a city where chaos is the norm. Inside a building near the docks where barges begin the journey up the Congo river, conveyor belts rattle as thousands of glass bottles are washed and filled with amber liquid. A generator hums to power the new brewing machinery, creating enough booze to fill 28,000 crates every two days.

Yet the real achievement of Bralima, which is owned by Heineken, a Dutch brewer, is not making the beer. It is what happens when it leaves the factory. Congo is one of the worst-connected, most dysfunctional countries on Earth. Four times the size of France, it has almost no all-weather roads. In large parts of eastern DRC, the state is a fiction and rebels control the roads. Yet there is scarcely a village where it is impossible to get a beer.

Bralima was founded in 1923. Its main competitors, Bracongo and Brasimba, both owned by Castel, a secretive French...Continue reading

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Some American startups are borrowing ideas from China

Hipster Hells Angel

“WHEN you enter [the marketplace] with that level of hubris and arrogance, you don’t create trust.” So declared a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors this week. He was upset about the sudden appearance of dockless electric scooters, rented via smartphone, all over the city. Several American startups are battling each other and the authorities to promote them. They are clean, cheap and convenient. The snag is that some users ride them wildly or dump them willy-nilly after use. On April 17th the city passed an ordinance requiring a permit to park scooters on its pavements.

Similar clashes have taken place elsewhere. Bird, a Californian startup that raised $100m in venture-capital funding last month, launched its rental service for electrified scooters in September at its home base of Santa Monica. Since then, the beach town’s hipsters have completed over half a million rides on its scooters. Rather less keen were city officials, who...Continue reading

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An American ban puts China’s ZTE in peril

TALK of restricting the use of Chinese telecoms equipment in the West is growing. This week the curbs went the other way, when America banned its companies from selling hardware and software for seven years to one of China’s state-owned tech champions, ZTE. On April 16th America’s Department of Commerce said that China’s second-largest telecoms firm had trampled on a settlement reached in March 2017 over ZTE’s illegal shipments since 2010 of American-made technology—telecommunications equipment to Iran, and routers, servers and microprocessors to North Korea—in known violation of trade sanctions.

The one at risk of being crippled by an embargo is now ZTE. In 2016 UBS, a bank, estimated that 80-90% of its products relied on American parts. Jean Baptiste Su of Atherton Research, an American technology-research outfit, described the ban as “devastating” for ZTE, especially the loss of chips made by America’s Qualcomm used in about 70% of ZTE’s smartphones. Although ZTE...Continue reading

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A new bankruptcy code is reshaping Indian business

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, a Spanish pop singer, plays an unlikely part in the story of Indian capitalism. His presence at a party to mark Vijay Mallya’s 60th birthday, in December 2015, was, literally, a showstopper. A flamboyant booze heir, Mr Mallya was then best known for founding Kingfisher Airlines, which had earlier imploded because of its debts. Given that he had personally guaranteed some of these loans, the self-proclaimed “king of good times” was assumed to have been chastened. Upon hearing of Mr Iglesias’s performance, bankers—and politicians—started asking how Mr Mallya had continued to live so large. The party had lasted for three days.

Mr Mallya is hardly the only embattled Indian tycoon to have cocked a snook at his bankers. Some “promoters” of companies, as founding shareholders of Indian companies are known, have long made full use of a loophole of local corporate law that thwarted banks’ attempts to seize companies in default on their loans. A bunged-up court system made...Continue reading

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Business writer

The Economist is looking for a business correspondent to work at its headquarters in London. An ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, combined with numeracy and curiosity, matter more than prior experience. Applicants should send a CV and an article which they think would be suitable for publication in the Business section to businessjob@economist.com. The closing date for applications is May 18th 2018.

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Should one of the world’s largest banks be wound down?

DEUTSCHE BANK is one of the financial industry’s hardest problems. It is not a viable business when judged by any sensible yardstick, because it is unable to make enough profits to generate a remotely adequate return. Its existence does not seem to be in the public interest, since it is dominated by an investment bank that has paid its lucky staff a colossal €40bn ($49bn) over the past decade. The bank’s governance has misfired for ages. On April 8th Deutsche fired John Cryan, its chief executive, in the third regime change in seven years. If the rules of capitalism apply to banks, Deutsche should be wound down. Is that possible?

Deutsche was founded in 1870 to help German companies go abroad. In 1999 it bought Bankers Trust, a Wall Street firm, and went on a long expansion in the investment-banking business. Today it has four elements. A decent asset-management operation called DWS; a profitable payments business that ships money around the world for companies; a mediocre German retail bank...Continue reading

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Tax cuts and higher interest rates help boost banks’ earnings

SO THIS is how normality feels. Between April 13th and April 18th America’s biggest banks reported a strong set of first-quarter earnings, with a helping hand from the taxman. Some are more profitable than they have been for years. They are paying billions to shareholders; regulatory reins are being loosened. Yet the stockmarket shrugged. On April 18th the S&P 500 index of banks’ share prices was 4.1% lower than at the start of reporting season.

Banks expected three main effects from the corporate-tax cut signed into law by President Donald Trump in December. The first was a write-down of deferred tax assets—past losses that could be set against future bills—which clobbered most lenders’ bottom lines in the fourth quarter but did no real damage. (Some, including Wells Fargo, carried deferred liabilities and hence recorded a gain.) The second was a permanent reduction in their tax bills. The third was a boost to business from a more lightly taxed America Inc.

The direct benefits of lower taxes are plain. Although pre-tax profits at the six biggest banks rose by $4.3bn, compared with the first quarter of 2017, taxes fell at five of them. (At the sixth, Goldman Sachs, the bill was unusually low a year ago because of a change in the treatment of employees’ shares and options.) Of a total increase in net profit of $5.4bn at those five, lower...Continue reading

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America’s Treasury refrains from naming any currency manipulators

MOST governments are happy when foreigners want their bonds, especially when those foreigners are long-term holders, like central banks. But America is different. It worries that some foreign governments buy its debt to keep the dollar pricey and their own currencies cheap. This “currency manipulation” gives other countries a competitive edge, raising their own trade surpluses and America’s deficit.

Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, sees an “arc of intervention” across Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea that has slowed the dollar’s decline over the past nine months. America has reportedly persuaded South Korea to forswear currency manipulation in a “side-agreement” to their revised trade deal. And on April 16th President Donald Trump tweeted that “Russia and China are playing the Currency Devaluation game...Not acceptable!”

Mr Trump’s tweet was at odds with his Treasury Department’s assessment. Every six months it must tell...Continue reading

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A Victorian survivor

WHEN the Foreign & Colonial Government Trust was launched in 1868, The Economist had its doubts. “The shape is very peculiar,” we worried, adding that “the exact idea upon which it starts has never been used before.” Some of the trust’s promises were “far too sanguine to ever be performed”. Nevertheless, we concluded that: “In our judgment, the idea is very good.”

That turned out to be one of this newspaper’s more successful forecasts. One hundred and fifty years later, the trust is still going strong, having delivered a compound annual return of 8.1%. It now looks after a portfolio of £3.5bn ($5bn), rather than the £588,000 it raised at launch.

In its own way, the trust is an example of how much the financial sector has changed—and how much it has stayed the same. The idea of a pooled portfolio seems commonplace now, but at the time it was revolutionary.

This was the 19th century, when Britain was confident of its worldwide role. The first...Continue reading

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Six precepts every investor should remember

SIR ELTON JOHN has a three-year farewell tour planned. This columnist has only a few weeks to go, before heading off to a new Economist beat. So it seems like a good idea to summarise some of the themes which have dominated this blog. 

To start, long-term investing. Here are a set of precepts every investor should remember.

1. You can't start too early. Albert Einstein may not have said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world but it is a good motto to remember. Buttonwood started a pension plan for his daughters when they were three years old. Let us assume a return of 4% a year. That means a sum doubles in 18 years, quadruples in 36 and rises eightfold in 54. Looked at another way, say you have a set sum in mind for retirement. If you start saving at 20, you need to contribute only half as much money a month, as if you start...Continue reading
   
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One person dies after an engine explodes on a Southwest flight in America

A SOUTHWEST AIRLINES flight became the stuff of nightmares on April 17th when a jet engine apparently exploded in mid-air and a passenger was partially sucked out of a window before being rescued by fellow flyers. The flight from New York’s LaGuardia airport was bound for Dallas, but at 11:30 am, when it was near Philadelphia, the left engine blew up, according to multiple reports. Details are still unconfirmed, but according to reports by passengers and media, a piece of shrapnel from the engine shattered a window in the cabin, and a woman was partially sucked out of the hole. Other passengers scrambled to assist and pulled her back in. Oxygen masks were released in the cabin, and the plane dropped from 32,500 feet at a rate of more than 3,000 feet per minute before levelling out at about 10,000 feet, according to NBC, a broadcaster. The pilots were able to...Continue reading

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After a good run of growth, China’s economy braces for bumps

JUST a few years ago Wuhan, a sprawling metropolis in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, exemplified China’s economic woes. Municipal debt had soared. The most senior local official was known as “Mr Dig Up The City”, a reference to his zeal for grandiose construction projects. A movie theme park, intended as a landmark, closed after failing to draw crowds. It would take nearly a decade, it was estimated, to sell all of Wuhan’s vacant homes.

These days, the city of 11m stands as a monument to China’s resilience. Its economy has accelerated even as the government has controlled debt more strictly. Five subway lines were opened or extended in the past two years alone; they are jammed in rush hour. Investment is pouring into semiconductor production, biotech research and internet-security companies. The glut of unsold homes is almost cleared.

But today China’s economy, like Wuhan’s, looks in much better shape. Then, the country was reeling from a stockmarket crash,...Continue reading

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A plan to put beds on planes

Airbus recently announced that it has entered into a partnership with Zodiac Aeropsace, a French aviation-equipment company, to develop “lower-deck modules with passenger sleeping berths.” In other words, passengers in need of 40 winks might eventually be able to go below decks to the cargo hold and sleep in bunk beds. The video released by the companies shows a clean, white, modern, and comfortable-looking space, although one conspicuously devoid of windows.

Starting in 2020, Airbus says, the beds will be available on its widebody A330 planes, and could possibly appear on A350s as well. The sleeper modules will be easily swapped in and out, the company...Continue reading

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Catching the bitcoin bug

SINCE the heady days of late 2017 and January of this year, crypto-currencies have gone into retreat. Bitcoin, the best-known example, is now worth just a third of its value at its peak (see chart).

But there remain plenty of true believers in digital currencies. They point out that prices are still well above where they were in 2016. And interest from institutional investors is still strong enough for analysts to want to make sense of the crypto-phenomenon.

The latest bank to take a shot is Barclays, which devotes a lot more of its “Equity Gilt Study 2018” to the impact of technological change on finance and the economy than it does to either equities or gilts. Its report describes crypto-technology as “a solution still seeking a problem”.

It identifies four challenges in particular. The first is trust. In most countries, consumers and businesses have faith in the currencies issued by the government. The second is sovereignty: the potential for tax avoidance and loss of...Continue reading

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The outlook for US government debt

THE bond market used to be the prime exhibit for those predicting low long-term economic growth. In the summer of 2016 the ten-year Treasury yield briefly dipped below 1.5%, as expectations for growth and inflation sagged. Things have changed. Earlier this year the ten-year yield briefly went higher than 2.9%. Even after recent share-price gyrations, it remains around 2.8%, well up since the start of 2018. The rebounding interest rate partly reflects higher confidence in global growth. Inevitably, a new set of pessimists now voice a fresh worry: that bond yields might go on rising for less welcome reasons.

They point to three threats. The first is monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has raised short-term interest rates by 1.5 percentage points since December 2015. At their March meeting, rate-setters slightly upgraded forecasts of how far rates should eventually rise. Last October the Fed began shrinking its $4.5trn portfolio of assets, mostly government debt, amassed since the start of...Continue reading

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The proxy-voting season kicks off on Wall Street

JING ZHAO’S main occupation is translating Latin classics into Chinese. He runs a small think-tank, the US-Japan-China Comparative Policy Research Institute. He lives off rents from property bought cheaply after the financial crisis. But this quiet, intellectual California resident has a surprising sideline: submitting proposals to be voted on by the shareholders of companies in which he owns small stakes. That makes him part of a movement that is forcing management at some of the world’s biggest firms to consider not just profitability but broad shifts in social attitudes.

The annual meetings of America’s listed companies, usually held between February and June, have come to constitute “proxy season”—so-called because shareholders need not cast their votes in person. This year proposals from Mr Zhao will be on the ballot at four giant firms. He wants Apple to create a human-rights committee, citing its decision last year to bow to Chinese censorship by removing hundreds of...Continue reading

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Kinder Morgan’s frustrated attempt to build an oil pipeline reflects badly on Canada

ALMOST all Canada’s oil and gas is landlocked, so getting it to market requires pipelines—lots of them. But building them requires skills more suited to circus artists than engineers. They must walk the financial high wire, jump through ever-changing regulatory hoops and juggle conflicting demands from environmental groups and numerous governments. The list of failures is long. It includes Northern Gateway, meant to bring Alberta crude to a port in northwestern British Columbia; Energy East, which would have linked Alberta to the Atlantic coast; Pacific Northwest, to bring gas to the west coast; and the legendary Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, first proposed in 1974 and dropped in 2017 by its last, exhausted promoter.

Another flop is likely following the announcement this week by Kinder Morgan, one of North America’s biggest pipeline firms, that it would freeze spending on the Trans Mountain Expansion, a C$7.4bn ($5.9bn) plan to triple the capacity of an existing pipeline carrying fuel from Alberta to...Continue reading

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The shipping industry attempts to cap carbon emissions

ACROSS the river from the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) headquarters in London protesters have pressure-hosed “IMO DON’T SINK PARIS” into the muck lining the walls of the Thames. The river bank is not the only thing that is dirty.

Shipping and airlines were the only greenhouse-gas-emitting industries not mentioned in the 2016 Paris climate agreement. This was, in part, because assigning emissions is hard. To whom should you designate emissions for shipping Chinese goods, made with South Korean components, across the Pacific to American consumers? But similar problems did not stop airlines quickly agreeing on an industry-wide limit. This week delegates to the IMO, a United Nations agency responsible for shipping safety and pollution, met in a belated attempt to catch up. A deal was due as The Economist went to press.

It may not be an impressive one. A preliminary agreement set out to achieve cuts of 50% on 2008 emission levels by 2050....Continue reading

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Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten struggles to retake the lead from Amazon

RAKUTEN is a jack-of-all-trades. Since pioneering e-commerce in Japan in 1997, it has been a rare example of a highly entrepreneurial Japanese firm. Today it spans more than 70 businesses providing credit cards, a travel agency, a golf-reservation system, matchmaking, wedding planning and insurance. It owns Viber, a calling and messaging app and has invested heavily in Lyft, a car-hailing service. Now it is adding another: on April 9th the government gave Rakuten a concession to operate Japan’s fourth mobile network (Rakuten currently runs mobile services using another operator’s infrastructure).

Rakuten sees this as the next step in building its “ecosystem”. It reckons it retains its approximately 95m registered users in Japan by being a trusted brand that can provide customers with everything they need at every stage of their life, and by rewarding their loyalty. Customers get points if they use their popular Rakuten credit cards, for example. These they can then spend on other...Continue reading

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Upstart meal-kit companies may need a new recipe for growth

FOR all the allure of televised fare like “MasterChef” and “Chef’s Table”, the reality is that many people are loth to rustle up anything more taxing than a bacon sandwich. Cue the recent emergence of more than 150 companies to make cooking easier. Two of the largest, Blue Apron in America and Germany’s HelloFresh, deliver boxes of pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes to doorsteps worldwide for a fee of around $60 a week.

Blue Apron is also serving up a belly full of woe to investors. Less than a year after it went public in June with a $1.9bn valuation, its share price has fallen by 80%. Although the shares of HelloFresh, which debuted on Frankfurt’s stock exchange in November, have risen by 24%, analysts are concerned that both services may fall prey to competition not from rival startups, but from big grocers.

Supermarkets have gobbled up the meal-kit idea and made it their own. Instead of enrolling customers in a weekly menu of meals, these companies offer...Continue reading

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The departure of the VW boss heralds a big shake-up

From dieselgate to Diess?

MOST chief executives relish a jump in their company’s share price. But spare a thought for Volkswagen’s Matthias Müller as he watched the gauge of value leap by 4.5% on April 10th. That was galling because investors were responding to rumours, in effect promptly confirmed by VW’s board, that he was to depart this week after less than three years as head of one of the world’s top three carmakers.

The pensive Mr Müller, 64, rarely had the air of a man enjoying the limelight. His contract ran until 2020, but he had become increasingly frustrated at internal opposition to his efforts to change the way the company was run in the aftermath of “dieselgate”, a crisis sparked by VW’s rigging of car-emissions tests. To an outsider, changes such as more decentralisation and the sale of peripheral businesses hardly seemed controversial. But they were too much for some. He may be happy to go; the board referred to his “general willingness”...Continue reading

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American sanctions, and fears over Syria, roil Russian markets

ON APRIL 6th America imposed harsh new sanctions on Russia in response to its “malign activity” abroad. Rattled investors sent stocks tumbling when the Moscow exchange reopened on April 9th. The principal stockmarket index fell by 8.3% that day. The rouble sank sharply. Oleg Tinkov, a banker, lost $250m, but brushed it off with reference to a previous daily loss of $1bn. “Being on the Russian stockmarket is like living on a volcano,” he said.

Geopolitics drove markets through the week. Tensions over Syria (see article) and talk of potential sanctions on Russian government bonds weakened the rouble further. A fiery morning tweet from Donald Trump threatening Russia sent stocks tumbling again on April 11th. But when the treasury secretary came out against sanctions on bonds later that day, the rouble and the stockmarket perked...Continue reading

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America’s once-moribund chemicals industry is booming. But politics threatens to get in its way

“THIS is what $3bn looks like.” So beams a manager at Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPC), a petrochemical company jointly owned by Chevron and Phillips 66, both American oil firms. She throws open her arms in a figurative embrace of a giant cracker (pictured) built by the firm in Baytown, a gritty part of Houston. The new plant turns vast quantities of ethane, which is derived from natural gas, into ethylene, an important building block in plastic. Another nearby facility, which the firm has recently expanded, converts the ethylene into plastic resin that is sold worldwide. All told, CPC has spent some $6bn expanding its chemicals-production infrastructure around Houston.

A decade ago, this would have been unimaginable. Chemicals firms in America, beaten down by rivals from the Middle East that enjoyed cheap feedstocks and others from China feasting on subsidised capital, had not invested in new local plants in years. Growth in global demand for chemicals, once roaring, had slowed thanks to the...Continue reading

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Deutsche Bank gets a new chief executive

THE supervisory board at Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest lender, has been sounding out replacements for its chief executive for weeks. On April 8th it made its choice: Christian Sewing, an experienced insider. He starts with immediate effect, replacing John Cryan, who became joint chief executive in 2015 and sole boss a year later. It is the latest in a series of quick changes for the bank.

Mr Sewing is the first German in 16 years to serve as Deutsche’s sole boss. He is also the first in many years without a career in investment banking. In his 25 years at the bank he has worked in commercial banking, auditing and risk management, most recently as joint head of the retail division, which he successfully slimmed down. The appointment is seen by many as heralding a shift in favour of retail banking, especially since Marcus Schenck, joint head of investment banking, is also leaving after being rebuffed in his efforts to expand his division.

Yet the circumstances surrounding...Continue reading

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British law firms seek similar across the pond

MOST of London’s “magic-circle” law firms are intrepid creatures. Over the past 20 years they have busily expanded abroad, opening offices everywhere from Antwerp to Yangon. But despite having hundreds of lawyers on the ground in America, one prize has proved elusive: laying down deep roots in the world’s most litigious market.

Allen & Overy, a top-tier London firm, would like that to change. It has reportedly been in merger talks with an American firm, O’Melveny & Myers. With O’Melveny denying any plans to merge, a union, which would create one of the world’s largest law firms by revenue, may not get off the ground. But that is unlikely to stop Allen & Overy from approaching others in its pursuit of an American alliance.

For the big British firms, America holds the key to greater profitability. Its allure in part reflects its importance on the world stage. Judgments made in America’s courts, such as those in anti-bribery cases, have ramifications beyond its...Continue reading

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How developing countries weave social safety nets

SOUP kitchens serve the needy for free; restaurants serve the hungry for money. In parts of South Asia, eateries near mosques sometimes fall into a third category. They feed the poor sitting patiently outside, whenever a pious or charitable passer-by pays them to do so. Alms-giving of this kind provides one traditional safety net for the destitute in developing countries. But it is, thankfully, not the only one.

According to a new report by the World Bank, developing countries spend an average of 1.5% of GDP on social safety nets designed to stop people hitting rock-bottom. (The rich countries in the OECD spend on average 2.7%.) Among these are workfare schemes, pensions, free school meals and cash handouts, sometimes conditional on recipients sending their children to school, getting them vaccinated and the like. This spending has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day) by 36% on average in the countries examined by the World Bank.

South Asia’s...Continue reading

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Indian states squabble over how to share out federal cash

THE population of Uttar Pradesh is over 220m, enough to make the northern Indian state the world’s fifth-most populous country. But statistics still used by bureaucrats in New Delhi put it at less than 85m. Antiquated census data are used to split everything from federal funding to seats in the national parliament. A proposal to use up-to-date figures has created a political storm.

In the mid-1970s India’s southern states were doing better than northern ones at controlling population growth. That meant losing federal power and money, both doled out in proportion to population. The inelegant solution was to keep using census figures from 1971, an arrangement that became indefinite.

But buried in a recent government memo is a proposal to use figures from the most recent count, in 2011, for federal funding. Southern states are fuming. Their populations have risen since 1971, but nothing like as much as those of Uttar Pradesh and its neighbours (see map). They have also become much richer than...Continue reading

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America’s gripes with China make a deal hard to imagine

Trade warriors at work

AFTER weeks spent threatening tariffs on an ever-greater share of Chinese imports, President Donald Trump seems to be in a more conciliatory mood. On April 10th a speech by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, prompted him to tweet a prediction: “We will make great progress together!”

Many besides Mr Trump share that hope. If China offers him a deal that he is willing to sign, a trade war may still be averted. Or sense may prevail, as it did last month, when American allies such as Canada and Mexico were exempted from tariffs on steel and aluminium. But such optimism shades into naivety. China hawks in the American administration have long seethed over aspects of the relationship with China that rarely feature on Mr Trump’s Twitter feed. Those problems predate his presidency. And they do not look easy to resolve.

The rules-based system of international trade works best for problems that are clearly defined, and when it is easy to...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740410-heart-disagreement-chinas-industrial-policy-americas-gripes?fsrc=rss
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A year after United's public-relations disaster

The smartphone and the toilet

THE impact of technology on the economy is one of the most-debated issues of the moment, whether it is the potential for automation to cause unemployment, boost long-term productivity, or widen inequality. A good deal of the annual Barclays Equity-Gilt Study, published yesterday, was devoted to the subject. But one section caught my eye; the idea that technological change was making GDP a less useful measure.

The report says that

When GDP was first introduced, manufacturing accounted for a large share of the core advanced economies, and the (system of national accounts) was designed primarily to measure physical production.

But the modern economy is dominated by services and

Services cover a wide range of activities and are often customised, making their basic unit of production, as well as differences in quality and changes over time, hard to define

Furthermore, the report points out that

Digitised goods or services are often free: and without an...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2018/04/technology-and-economy?fsrc=rss
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An update from Jeremy Grantham

JEREMY Grantham is an investor with 50 years of experience in the markets who is known for his caution about the outlook for long-term returns (he works for the GMO fund management group). But he caused a stir earlier this year when he said the chances were high of a melt-up in the markets this year. 

Buttonwood caught up with him when he visited London this week and asked whether the recent volatility had changed his view. He does think that the odds of a melt-up have fallen. The acceleration stage of a bull market, as in 1928 and 1999, tends to be smooth and quick. The trade tensions evoked by President Trump could be very damaging. He thinks that it is likely that, in five years, the American market may be 20% lower but this will not necessarily be via a sharp crash but through a series of advances and retreats. 

The reason that the market has been doing well until now is the combination of low inflation and high profits; that explains...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2018/04/market-outlook-0?fsrc=rss
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