Italy’s political crisis is roiling financial markets once more

HERE we go again. Financial markets don’t much like uncertainty. Thanks to Italy’s politicians, in recent days they have had plenty. By May 30th some calm had returned: it seemed possible that a pair of populist parties, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, would form a government after all (see article). Markets had been in turmoil for two days, unsettled by a farcical back-and-forth between the populists and the country’s president, who had rejected the parties’ choice of a Eurosceptic economist as finance minister. The politicians may have done the markets a service, by shaking them out of complacency. Investors may have returned the favour, by shaking some sense into the politicians—at least for now.

Italy is perennially slow-growing and groans under public debt of around €2.3trn ($2.7trn), or 132% of GDP. The drama...Continue reading

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A critical task for the Greek economy enters a new phase

OF THE €57.7bn ($68.2bn) of loans that Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s four dominant lenders, had on its books at the end of March, €20.5bn were more than 90 days overdue. A further €11.7bn were also deemed unlikely to be repaid. In all, at the end of 2017 Greek banks carried €95.7bn of such non-performing exposures (NPEs)—at 43.1% of loans, the heaviest burden in Europe. Still, the pile was €13bn smaller than at its peak in March 2016. The banks plan to reduce it by €30bn this year and next.

Dealing with bad loans to business—around 60% of NPEs, mostly to small firms—is the most daunting part of this monumental job. It means resetting the balance-sheet of much of Greece’s economy, from restaurants to manufacturing. But a new phase of this task is under way, with the first sale of secured commercial loans. On May 29th Piraeus said it had agreed to sell Amoeba, a €1.45bn bundle of loans to around 180 borrowers, to Bain Capital Credit, which has previously bought bad debts in Italy...Continue reading

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America’s security profiling at airports should worry frequent flyers

A critical task for the Greek economy enters a new phase

OF THE €57.7bn ($68.2bn) of loans that Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s four dominant lenders, had on its books at the end of March, €20.5bn were more than 90 days overdue. A further €11.7bn were also deemed unlikely to be repaid. In all, at the end of 2017 Greek banks carried €95.7bn of such non-performing exposures (NPEs)—at 43.1% of loans, the heaviest burden in Europe. Still, the pile was €13bn smaller than at its peak in March 2016. The banks plan to reduce it by €30bn this year and next.

Dealing with bad loans to business—around 60% of NPEs, mostly to small firms—is the most daunting part of this monumental job. It means resetting the balance-sheet of much of Greece’s economy, from restaurants to manufacturing. But a new phase of this task is under way, with the first sale of secured commercial loans. On May 29th Piraeus said it had agreed to sell Amoeba, a €1.45bn bundle of loans to around 180 borrowers, to Bain Capital Credit, which has previously bought bad...Continue reading

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Dear oil helps some emerging economies and harms others

When they are not fretting about the American dollar or Chinese debt, policymakers in emerging economies keep a close eye on the oil market. The price of Brent crude has risen by nearly 50% in the past year to around $80 a barrel. It ranks as the 11th-biggest spike in the past 70 years (adjusted for inflation), according to UBS, a bank. So should emerging markets now worry that oil prices will carry on rising above $100, or that they will tumble below $50? The answer is yes.

Many emerging economies import oil; others export it. As a rule, higher prices hurt the first group and lower ones hurt the second. But it can be more complicated than that. Indonesia, for example, is a net importer of oil, but a net exporter of “energy”, more broadly defined, including coal and palm oil. Since coal, palm and oil prices tend to rise roughly in tandem, Indonesia would benefit overall from $100 oil, according to UBS. Mexico, like America, is also a net importer of crude. But in both countries a higher oil price...Continue reading

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What is an audit for?

AUDITS get noticed only when things go wrong. Last week British MPs issued a scathing attack on KPMG, an auditor, for failing to avert the collapse of Carillion, a contracting company. South African authorities are looking into Deloitte’s audit of Steinhoff, a retailer. PwC, another auditor, could face a court-damages verdict for hundreds of millions of dollars for not spotting fraud at Colonial Bank, a failed American lender. It is also fighting a $3bn lawsuit in Ukraine and a two-year ban in India.

Investors are also waking up to audits. They almost never vote against management’s choice of auditor. But last month over a third of shareholders at General Electric, an industrial conglomerate, voted against the reappointment of KPMG. Investors in Steinhoff are suing the company and Deloitte for $5bn for their losses.

These actions challenge an industry dominated by four big firms: Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. Between them they earned $47bn from auditing most of the world’s largest...Continue reading

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Why even bears about the government-bond market can find merit in Treasuries

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, a quotable economist, observed that one of the deeper mysteries is why, in a falling market, there is still a buyer for every seller. It is a conundrum that bond investors must now contemplate. Since January the yield on a ten-year Treasury bond has risen (and thus bond prices have fallen) with scarcely a backward step. It is above 3% for the first time in years.

In part, the fall in bond prices reflects a growing acceptance that the Federal Reserve will raise short-term interest rates to 2.75-3% by the end of 2019, as its median rate-setter expects. In part it reflects worries that tax cuts and rising oil prices will fuel higher inflation. And there is anxiety that the supply of Treasuries is about to increase (in order to pay for tax cuts) just as buyers may become scarcer. The Fed itself is running down its holdings. The higher cost of hedging currency risk in dollars is putting off some foreign buyers.

If sellers outgun buyers, prices will continue to fall. Who...Continue reading

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American firms reveal the gulf between bosses’ and workers’ pay

HOW much should company bosses be paid relative to their employees? It depends who you ask. Plato argued that the richest members of society should earn no more than four times the pay of the poorest. John Pierpont Morgan, a banker from America’s gilded age, reckoned that bosses should earn at most 20 times the pay of their underlings. Investors today hold chief executives in vastly higher esteem. According to new filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), America’s largest publicly listed firms (those worth at least $1bn) on average paid their chief executives 130 times more than their typical workers in 2017. The figures are being disclosed by firms in their financial filings for the first time this year.

The SEC’s new requirement to quantify the gap has its origins in the financial crisis. Facing populist outrage over the pay packages of Wall Street executives held responsible for triggering the crash, Congress added a provision to the Dodd-Frank act, a financial-reform...Continue reading

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As Tesla’s share price falls, it becomes an inviting takeover target

A RECENT tweet from Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car firm, shows footage of a Model X undergoing rollover testing. The SUV is propelled rapidly sideways on a trolley before encountering a sand trap that stops it suddenly, tipping the car. The Tesla teeters between ending up on its roof or settling back on its wheels. It is an apt metaphor for a firm hovering between fulfilling its promise and succumbing to financial woes.

In April Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley, a bank, said the next three months would be the “most critical time in Tesla’s history” since launching its upmarket Model S six years ago. The move from a niche in expensive electric cars to bringing battery power to the masses has been troublesome, to say the least. The firm had once hoped to be making 10,000 of its cheaper Model 3s a week by the end of 2018. But difficulties with a highly automated production line mean that just over 2,000 are rolling out of the factory each week. Even a revised goal of 5,000...Continue reading

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Labour laws in 104 countries reserve some jobs for men only

EVEN as rich countries seek to rid workplaces of subtle gender bias, in many developing ones discrimination remains overt. According to the World Bank, women are barred from certain jobs in 104 countries (see map).

“Gender equality in labour law is associated with more women working and earning more relative to men,” says Sarah Iqbal of the Bank. Yet some countries publish lists of jobs deemed too dangerous for women (Russia’s 456 include driving a train or steering a ship). Others stop women from working in entire sectors, at night or in “morally inappropriate” jobs (in Kazakhstan women cannot bleed or stun cattle, pigs or small ruminants). In four countries women cannot register a business. In 18 a husband can stop his wife working.

The aim is often to protect the “weaker sex”. Some laws put women in the same category as children; they concern jobs seen as physically tough, such as mining, construction and manufacturing. Others relate to broader safety fears. In Mumbai, for...Continue reading

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How kidnapping insurance keeps a lid on ransom inflation

IN THE early 1970s, leftist guerrillas in Argentina discovered a lucrative new way to make money: kidnap millionaires. Panicking firms would agree to huge ransoms, more concerned with freeing their executives than driving down the fee. That was not just bad for businesses. It also became a textbook case of how poor negotiating can send future ransoms rocketing and attract new entrants to the kidnapping trade. In Argentina, this culminated in the payment of an undisclosed ransom in 1975 for the release of Juan Born, followed by a $60m ransom for his brother, Jorge. The latter figure, $275m in today’s money, is the highest ransom known in modern times.

One reason it marked a high point is the spread of kidnapping-and-ransom (K&R) insurance. This is involved in a minority of the $0.5bn-1.5bn thought to be paid out in ransoms each year, but the share is growing. Around three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies pay to cover some employees. Insurers reimburse the ransom and, at least as...Continue reading

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Tailor shops are a thriving pocket of enterprise in Pyongyang

No ordinary fashion statement

WALK down the streets of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and at first sight the passers-by look rather uniform. The women are in tidy skirt suits and medium-high heels. The men sport variations on the theme of the jacket and wide trousers preferred by Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Government-mandated lapel pins with portraits of one or both of Mr Kim’s predecessors continue to be ubiquitous. But look closer and a wealth of individual variations can be seen, particularly among the women: some bright-coloured lace stitched onto a jacket here, a daringly cut skirt in a sparkling satin material there.

Although fashion from China and even from—Kim forbid—South Korea is increasingly making its way to the markets of Pyongyang, many of these flourishes are the work of the city’s own tailors. They may be only a small subset of North Korea’s textile industry—which accounted for around 30% of exports before being hit by sanctions...Continue reading

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Who will be the main loser from Europe’s new data-privacy law?

“PLEASE don’t leave us.” From the dozens of e-mails in people’s inboxes, begging them to give their consent to be sent further messages, you could deduce that the senders of newsletters and the like are hardest hit by the European Union’s tough new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on May 25th. But the main loser may well be an industry that few have ever heard of but most have dealings with every day: advertising technology, or ad tech. In fact, the GDPR would probably not exist at all were it not for this collection of companies, which have an insatiable hunger for personal data.

Ad tech emerged because advertising is the internet’s default business model. Since targeted ads tend to be more efficient and targeting requires personal data (sites previously visited, searches in online stores and the like), these data became the fuel of a new industry to automate online advertising. It is so complex that even experts often resort to what is...Continue reading

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European firms are increasingly tackling the scourge of bribery

ONE of the more extreme recent cases of corporate bribery is that of LafargeHolcim, a giant Swiss-French cement-maker which was accused in 2016 of funnelling money to armed groups controlling roads and checkpoints around a factory in Syria. The firm still cannot be sure who pocketed its payoffs, via middlemen, that were intended to keep its facility running at all costs. The money may well have ended up funding Islamic State terrorists.

The investigation into LafargeHolcim is one sign of a wider change. The era when European firms could talk up lengthy “ethics codes” at home and behave badly abroad is over. Long gone are the days when German law counted bribes paid by the country’s industrial champions as tax-deductible. A spate of scandals in Europe suggest that prosecutors, as well as the politicians who influence how much freedom judicial investigators enjoy, are becoming ever less tolerant of corporate corruption.

Another big firm under pressure is Novartis, a Swiss drugmaker....Continue reading

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Bad loans remain a concern in Italy and across southern Europe

ITALY’S next government, a coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right Northern League, is giving investors plenty to worry about. Leaked plans, hastily abandoned, suggested it might want to leave the euro or ask the European Central Bank to forgive €250bn ($292bn) of Italian debt. But less attention has been paid to what it might mean for Italian banks, and in particular for their biggest burden: non-performing loans (NPLs). Over €185bn of NPLs were outstanding at the end of 2017, the most for any country in the European Union (see chart).

By comparison with Greece, where NPLs are 45% of loans, Italy looks manageable, with just 11.1%. And it has made progress: in late 2015 NPLs were 16.8% of loans. But any wild policy lurches would put that progress in question. The clean-up of banks’ books has relied on openness to foreign investors. Huge volumes of NPLs (€37bn in 2016 and over €47bn in 2017, according to Deloitte, a consultancy) have been sold by banks, often to...Continue reading

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Introducing Bartleby, our new column on management and work

WORK is like a capricious lover whose incessant demands are resented but who is missed terribly when they are not there. The relationship is long-term; an average person spends more than half their life at work. Work defines people’s social status, sets income levels and generates a circle of friends.

Attitudes to management, as to work, are double-edged. The modern economy has become immensely complex. Coordinating the production of goods and services across international supply chains represents a huge achievement. Becoming a manager is usually seen as a promotion, yet the role of a “middle manager” is often despised as a useless layer of bureaucracy. Workers simultaneously blame managers for not providing enough leadership and for interfering too much with their daily tasks.

For their part, managers desperately want to improve their performance. Enter “management books” as a search term on Amazon and you get more than 100,000 results. Budding executives solemnly learn the...Continue reading

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A rare bipartisan moment allows a timid rollback of banking regulation

REPUBLICANS in the House of Representatives had hoped to cut a swathe through the Dodd-Frank act, a titanic set of financial regulations passed in 2010 in the wake of the 2007-09 crisis. The “Financial Choice Act”, drafted last year, would have lessened bureaucratic oversight and relied more on stiff capital requirements. Responsibilities and penalties would have been made clearer and regulators’ discretionary powers would have been reined in. President Donald Trump, who had promised on the campaign trail to “do a number on Dodd-Frank”, was effusive when the House endorsed the Choice Act last year.

But the bill approved by the House on May 22nd, and expected soon to be signed into law by Mr Trump, is a distinctly tamer affair. It moves the line between big, systemically risky banks and the rest, set in Dodd-Frank at $50bn in assets, to $250bn. That cuts the number of institutions subjected to stress tests and stricter supervision from 38 to 12. It also eases some restrictions on proprietary trading. But only the very smallest banks will be allowed to substitute higher capital for strict regulation. Even as bold thinking was thrown out, one truly bad idea made it in, presumably under pressure from representatives from heavily indebted states. Municipal bonds will be granted special treatment in the composition of bank capital, incentivising lenders to load up...Continue reading

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Markets may be underpricing climate-related risk

AS A citizen, Dave Jones worries that climate change may imperil his two children, and theirs in turn. What exercises him, as California’s insurance commissioner, is the way in which a transition to a low-carbon economy might affect the financial health of his other charges—the state’s 1,300-odd insurers. On May 8th Mr Jones unveiled an examination of how well the investment portfolios of the 672 insurers with $100m or more in annual premiums align with the Paris climate agreement of 2015, in which world leaders vowed to keep global warming below 2°C relative to pre-industrial times.

The answer is, not very. In the next five years carbon-intensive firms in the insurers’ portfolios plan to produce more internal combustion engines and coal-fired electricity than the maximum the International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons is compatible with meeting the 2°C goal (see chart). Meanwhile, investment plans in renewable energy and electric vehicles lag behind the IEA’s projections of what is needed.

The results echo those of a study last...Continue reading

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The sexual harassment of flight attendants is a massive problem

OVER the past year, there have been myriad stories in the press about airlines mistreating passengers. Last April David Dao, a passenger on a domestic United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville, was violently dragged off the plane to accommodate crew for another flight. This month United hit the headlines again when a Nigerian passenger accused it of racial discrimination after she was thrown off a flight. But among the sea of shocking headlines about how flight crews abuse passengers, it is easy to forget that the reverse occurs far more frequently.

A new study published earlier this month shows just how common the harassment of flight attendants by flyers is. The Association of Flight Attendants, the union representing American cabin crew, asked more than 3,500 flight attendants from 29 airlines about their experiences. In the past year alone, one-third of flight attendants said that they have experienced verbal sexual harassment by passengers and one-fifth said that they have experienced the physical...Continue reading

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Boeing’s antics at the World Trade Organisation risk a trade war

GULLIVER’S regular readers might be interested in an article in this week’s print edition about Boeing’s partial victory in a case at the World Trade Organisation, brought in retaliation for subsidies that the European Union is alleged to have given Airbus, its European planemaking rival. 

On May 15th the WTO’s final appeals body upheld parts of a previous ruling, finding that the European Union wrongly provided subsidies to Airbus to develop new aircraft. That, it concluded, had hit sales of Boeing’s jets. As soon as the WTO gives the go-ahead America will have the right to impose retaliatory tariffs on EU imports. Trade experts warn they could be the highest in the WTO’s history.

But this could have unintended consequences for Boeing, which now receives 55% of its revenues from outside its home territory of America:

The administrations...Continue reading

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How Turkey fell from investment darling to junk-rated emerging market

MANY of the most famous hedge-fund trades have been bets that things were about to go wrong. Think of Enron’s bankruptcy or the souring of subprime mortgage bonds in America. The best trade made by “the Professor” was very different. It was a bet that something was starting to go right.

A visit almost 20 years ago convinced him that Turkey was serious about fixing its economy. The yield on its one-year Treasury bills was then above 100%. “It was a serious mispricing,” he tells Steven Drobny in “The Invisible Hands”, a book of interviews with pseudonymous hedge-fund managers. The IMF gave its approval to Turkey’s reforms soon afterwards. The price of T-bills surged. The one-year interest rate fell to 40%.

The wheel has since turned almost full circle for Turkey, which now seems to attract more sellers than buyers. The lira is sinking. S&P has cut the country’s credit rating from junk to junkier, partly because of concerns about its reliance on foreign capital. The...Continue reading

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McKinsey gets sued for racketeering

MOBSTERS, gangsters and bent cops have all been tried under America’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act. Might consultants be next? McKinsey, a management consultancy, is being sued under the law by Jay Alix, the founder of AlixPartners, a competitor in the field of bankruptcy advice. Mr Alix alleges that McKinsey knowingly misled courts in order to land clients. The firm denies any wrongdoing.

Bankruptcy is lucrative, for those doling out the advice. According to Debtwire, a data provider, corporate bankruptcies generated $1.3bn in fees in 2016, with lawyers taking home over half, and the rest going to consultants, accountants and financiers. McKinsey is a relative newcomer: it set up its restructuring arm, which turns around companies in financial distress, in 2010. Though its share of the market is smaller than those of the top players, AlixPartners and Alvarez & Marsal, its entry has stiffened competition. Its clients have included American Airlines,...Continue reading

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A Samsung executive is accused of union-busting

ON THE face of it Samsung, South Korea’s biggest chaebol, as the country’s family-controlled groups are known, has had a good couple of months. In April it was name-checked in a report by the country’s antitrust body for good progress on corporate reform. It also posted record profits for the fourth quarter in a row, thanks mainly to its booming memory-chip business as well as its Galaxy range of smartphones. But on May 15th prosecutors spoiled the mood. They raided Samsung’s offices outside Seoul and arrested Choi Pyeong-seok, head of human resources at the after-sales subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, the group’s main earner, on allegations that he had been involved in sabotaging labour-union activities and might destroy evidence unless he was jailed (he has not responded to the allegations).

Mr Choi’s arrest is part of an attempt by prosecutors to prove systematic breaches of labour law at the company’s highest levels. (Samsung says it is unable to...Continue reading

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For European firms, resisting American sanctions may be futile

“DONALD TRUMP is the sort of guy who punches you in the face and if you punch him back, he says ‘Let’s be friends’. China punched back and he retreated. The Europeans told him how beautiful he was, but they got nothing.” This is how an American official-turned-executive describes the latest twists in the Trump administration’s sanctions policy, which this year has roiled business from America to Europe, Russia, China and Iran. What business leaders see, analysts say, is a punitive approach that is capricious, aggressive and at times ill-prepared. But unless companies or their governments take the fight all the way to the White House, they have little choice but to abide by the long—and sometimes wrong—arm of American law.

The capriciousness was evident on May 13th when President Trump executed a handbrake turn on ZTE, the world’s fourth-biggest telecoms-equipment maker, which is strongly supported by the Chinese government. It had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy after the...Continue reading

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The life-insurance industry is in need of new vigour

LIFE insurance is among the oldest financial products. The Amicable Society, founded in London in 1706, charged members a set contribution and paid out annually to widows and children of those who had died in the previous 12 months. Today it is a vast industry: life and health insurers employ over 800,000 people in America alone. It protects hundreds of millions against the risk of dying early, through death benefits, or the risk of living longer than expected, for example through annuities. According to Allianz, a German insurer, total life-insurance premiums are above 5% of GDP in many rich countries, including Britain, France, Italy and Japan. In America, the world’s biggest market, annual premiums total more than $550bn.

But life insurers are struggling as never before. Those parts of the industry that have not evolved fast enough, says Clive Bannister, the head of Phoenix Group, a “closed” life insurer that buys and manages old policies but issues no new ones, have experienced a...Continue reading

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Award

On May 16th Callum Williams, our Britain economics correspondent, was named joint winner of the Young Financial Journalist of the Year at the Wincott Awards, an annual set of prizes for British journalists.

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Toyota keeps its foot off the gas on the road towards autonomous vehicles

Intrepid data gatherers

UBER’s fleet of autonomous vehicles has been parked up since one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona in March. That death highlighted once again the industry’s rush to develop self-driving cars. Waymo, a sister company of Google, plans to launch a robotaxi service in Arizona this year. General Motors says it will launch a fully autonomous taxi service, using cars with no steering wheel or pedals, in an American city in 2019. Volkswagen will make autonomous vehicles available through its new ride-hailing service, Moia, in 2021. Ford says it will be mass-producing fully autonomous cars by then, too.

But not every carmaker is going at the same speed. Toyota, one of only three car companies that sells over 10m vehicles a year, has made no equivalent commitments. The Japanese firm is instead concentrating on using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to make conventional cars safer and more enjoyable to...Continue reading

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How a few companies are bitcoining it

IN A recent video Jeremy Sciarappa, a YouTuber, flips the lid off a red box in his living room to reveal a silver machine the size of a shoebox, whining noisily. The contraption is an Antminer S9, sold by Bitmain, a Chinese firm. Its job is to help validate transactions conducted in bitcoin, the world’s best-known crypto-currency. Because bitcoin has no central authority, it relies on its users to keep things humming along. Those who help out are granted bitcoins, in a process called mining. The Antminer s9 is beloved of hobbyist miners worldwide. Nestled inside are 189 application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) chips, designed by Bitmain to solve bitcoin’s cryptographic puzzles as quickly as possible. They were made by TSMC, a giant Taiwanese semiconductor firm.

Mr Sciarappa and his fellow enthusiasts are a 21st-century version of the “49ers”, the young men who rushed to California in 1849 to try their luck digging and panning for gold. Few hit it rich, but the businesses that helped them...Continue reading

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Lawmakers are trying to curb contracts that make it harder to change jobs

IN 2011 Kathleen started work at an insurance-and-benefits consultancy in Boston. A couple of years later the firm gave her an ultimatum: sign a “non-compete” agreement within 30 days or wave goodbye. She signed, which meant that, if she left, she would be barred for three years from working for a rival or any firm that had been contacted as a potential client, and from starting a competing business. In 2015, when she accepted a new job in a different industry at an unrelated company, her former bosses threatened to sue. The job offer was withdrawn, and reinstated only when she offered to pay any legal costs that resulted. The matter never came to court, but the fear of legal action has kept her out of her old industry ever since.

Non-compete agreements are widely used to stop ex-employees walking out of the door with valuable know-how, or poaching suppliers and customers when they move jobs. Sometimes a great deal of money and intellectual property is at stake. When Paul English, an entrepreneur,...Continue reading

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Portugal prepares to sell its biggest company to a Chinese state-owned utility

SHOULD Europeans worry that China Three Gorges (CTG), a state-owned firm, wants to buy EDP, a utility that is Portugal’s biggest company? It is three years since one local banker, Fernando Ulrich, called Portugal “a Chinese aircraft-carrier in Europe”—back then, Chinese buyers were already snapping up stakes in “strategic” local companies as quickly as the government could privatise them. CTG’s offer of €9.1bn ($10.8bn) for EDP, which was made on May 11th, will further unsettle those suspicious of China’s desire to snap up European assets.

The country is unusually welcoming to investors from the east. Its national airline, TAP Air Portugal, and Redes Energéticas Nacionais, the monopoly power transmitter, both have Chinese investors. CTG is already EDP’s largest owner, with a stake of 23%, after a €2.7bn investment in 2012. Now the Chinese want outright control.

To get that, CTG will probably have to raise its offer; EDP’s board rejected the price...Continue reading

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Pension bonds are an ingenious idea for providing retirement income

WHEN people stop working, they need a retirement income. Some are lucky enough to have an employer-provided pension linked to their salary. Everyone else faces a difficult choice.

Some keep their pension pot in cash and watch as it is eroded by inflation. Others use savings products with high fees and risk being hurt by a stockmarket downturn. A third option is an annuity, which guarantees a lifelong income but vanishes at death, even if that is a week after retirement.

Lionel Martellini of EDHEC, a French business school, and Robert Merton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a Nobel laureate in economics) have come up with an alternative. Workers would buy government-issued bonds while in employment; these would pay no interest until retirement. Over the next 20 years (the typical life expectancy on retirement) bondholders would receive payments comprising interest plus the return of the capital. These would be linked to inflation, or another measure such as average...Continue reading

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Spotify kicks off a cultural shift in the music business

More blues than rhythm for R. Kelly

MAKING it on to an official playlist on Spotify, a streaming service, can help turn a singer into a superstar in the way that major radio stations once could. Until recently the main criterion for inclusion was a curator’s taste. Artists who have been accused of domestic violence and other serious crimes are on playlists with millions of followers, as are songs that critics find violently misogynist.

That is starting to change. On May 10th Spotify announced a new policy on “hate content and hateful conduct”, and removed two artists, XXXTentacion, a rapper, and R. Kelly, an R&B singer, from their official playlists due to allegations of abuse and mistreatment of women. Both artists deny any wrongdoing. Their music will still be available on the service, but it will not be pushed to listeners. It then quickly emerged that Apple Music and Pandora, two other streaming services, had quietly taken similar action....Continue reading

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World economic growth is slowing. Don’t worry—yet

IN 2017 the global economy broke out of a rut. It grew by 3.8%, the fastest pace since 2011. Surging animal spirits accompanied a rebound in business investment across the rich world. Global trade growth rose to 4.9%, also the fastest rate since 2011. Emerging-market currencies appreciated against the dollar, keeping inflation low and debts affordable. Financial markets wobbled in February, but only after reaching all-time highs. In April the IMF said that the global economic upswing had become “broader and stronger”.

Since then that healthy glow has begun to fade. First, economic surveys in Europe took a turn for the worse (presaging...Continue reading

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The long arm of the dollar

FEW banks can match the quaint serenity of Banco Delta Asia’s headquarters in Macau. Housed in a pastel-yellow colonial building opposite a 16th-century church, its entrance is flanked by tall vases, depicting sampan gliding between karst hills. In the tiled square outside, men laze under a banyan tree and an elderly woman peels a boiled egg for lunch.

But in 2005 this backwater bank incurred the wrath and might of the world’s financial hegemon. America’s Treasury accused it of laundering money for North Korea, prompting depositors to panic, other banks to keep their distance and the Macau government to step in. The Treasury subsequently barred American financial institutions from holding a correspondent account for the bank, excluding it from the American financial system.

Macau is over 8,000 miles from Washington, DC. But it is hard to escape the long arm of the dollar. Its dominance reflects what economists call network externalities: the more people use it, the more useful it...Continue reading

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Another allegation of mistreatment of passengers on a United Airlines flight

ON MAY 11TH a Nigerian woman filed a lawsuit against United Airlines for removing her and her two children from a flight after a fellow passenger complained of her smell. Queen Obioma accuses the airline of singling her out “because of her black race and Nigerian citizenship”.

The incident took place two years ago on a flight from Houston to San Francisco. This was the second leg of Ms Obioma’s trip with her children from Nigeria to Canada, where the youngsters were scheduled to begin school. Ms Obioma’s business-class seat was occupied by a white man, according to the suit. She asked him to move but he refused, she claims, and a flight attendant persuaded her to sit elsewhere. Shortly afterwards, she says, the other passenger went to the cockpit—presumably to complain about her—and then blocked her as she tried to get from the toilet to her new seat. When she finally took her seat, she recounts, a crew member asked her to step...Continue reading

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A storm breaks around AirAsia’s boss

“YOU only have one vote so use it wisely,” advised the captain of a lunchtime AirAsia flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur on May 9th. It was the third time he had reminded passengers of Malaysia’s election that day. Travellers delighted by the personal touch shook his hand as they disembarked.

The pilot was not freelancing. AirAsia had planned to provide 120 flights with reduced fares to help Malaysians get home to vote (in the end, half of the extra flights were approved by the airlines regulator). And the low-cost carrier’s political play went much further than encouraging people to vote. Tony Fernandes, the firm’s British-Malaysian boss, arranged for an AirAsia plane to be painted with the slogan of the ruling coalition of Najib Razak, the country’s prime minister at the time. Mr Najib duly posted pictures of it. Mr Fernandes also appeared in a video attributing the success of his business to the Malaysian government.

Then came the most astonishing political result...Continue reading

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Can coach companies lure business people on board?

IN THE past, coach travel was seen as somewhat glamorous. That is perhaps an odd legacy of a Clark Gable film from 1934 called “It Happened One Night”, about a romance between two passengers travelling on a crowded bus travelling from Florida to New York. But now many people look down on it as something used only by time-rich, money-poor people—at best by students going on a Greyhound bus across America for the summer on the slimmest of budgets; at worst by homeless people who “carry all their stuff in plastic bags”, as one of Gulliver’s interviewees unsympathetically put it.

But when Gulliver went on a Flixbus coach in Germany recently, he was very surprised to find business travellers on board:

On the firm’s flagship route from Nuremberg to its hometown of Munich, winding between snow-capped peaks and picture-book villages in Bavaria, its bus passengers look distinctly affluent. Many on board play on tablets to pass the time; shirts and ties are common. One discerning traveller reads The...Continue reading

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Lessons to a columnist’s previous self

IN A British television show, “Doctor Who”, the titular character is able to travel anywhere in time and space in his Tardis police box. Given access to that technology, what useful message would this columnist impart to his previous self, nearly 12 years and 550 columns ago?

The first lesson would be to avoid confusing the economy with the financial markets. If you looked at share prices alone, you might assume the intervening period had been calm; the S&P 500 index is around double its level when this column began in September 2006. But though the markets have long since recovered their sangfroid after the crisis of 2008-09, the trend growth rate of developed economies has never regained its strength. That is a bitter irony given that the crisis originated within the financial sector, bringing to mind a teenager who crashes their parents’ car and leaves them with the bill.

In part, the market’s resilience was owing to the remarkable strength of corporate profits,...Continue reading

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Americans, tired of high-priced drugs, are fighting back

IF ONE concern unites Americans, it is the high prices of prescription drugs. One incident in particular tarnished much of the pharma industry: in 2015 the price of an antiparasitic drug, Daraprim, jumped from $13.50 to $750 per pill. But large price increases remain stubbornly commonplace (see chart). According to IQVIA, a health-data firm, the wholesale prices of leading drugs such as Humira, Enbrel and Lyrica increased by more than 120% between 2012 and 2017. Other data show that cancer-drug prices rose from about $10,000 to over $100,000 per year in just over a decade to 2012. Further ahead, a new generation of cures, such as a gene therapy for haemophilia, may cost more than $1m.

President Donald Trump, never one to avoid stoking a grievance, has waded in, accusing the pharma industry of “getting away with murder”. This week, as The Economist went to press, he was scheduled to deliver a speech outlining a strategy to lower prescription-drug prices. Whatever he says, though,...Continue reading

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Air France-KLM is being brought to its knees by its unions

AIR FRANCE likes to present itself as a cut above other European airlines. Offering fancy French food and free champagne in economy class on long-haul flights, the company’s strategy is to justify its high ticket prices by offering a premium service. But facing intransigent unions at home and competition from abroad, the airline’s financial fizz is rapidly going flat.

A drawn-out fight with its unions has toppled the boss of its parent group, Air France-KLM, yet again. On May 4th Jean-Marc Janaillac, its chief executive, resigned after its workers voted against a pay rise of 7% over four years. His predecessor, Alexandre de Juniac, left two years ago after two executives had their shirts violently ripped off by a mob of angry workers over a restructuring plan. The latest resignation is more serious because investors are also losing their rag. Air France-KLM’s shares have halved in value since January; over the same period those of rival carriers such as IAG and Ryanair have risen.

Air France’s trade unions are demanding an immediate pay rise of 5.1%. That looks bearable set against profits of €1.5bn ($1.8bn) last year. But a decent-looking performance in 2017 owed much to low oil prices. Its finances are weakening fast. Mr Janaillac had warned of a big drop in profits this year. A series of 14 one-day strikes has already cost Air France at least €300m...Continue reading

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The latest video-game fad shows off a DIY ethic

TWENTY years ago schoolyard fads revolved around clothes and music. Now they are as likely to involve video games. The latest must-have is “Fortnite Battle Royale”, a lighthearted multiplayer shooter in which up to 100 players parachute onto a continually shrinking playing field, hunt each other down and compete to be the last one standing.

It is wildly popular. One estimate is that it had 45m players in March. A match broadcast on YouTube, and featuring some of that site’s stars, attracted more than 1.1m concurrent viewers, making it one of the most watched streams ever. Other big publishers, such as Activision-Blizzard, are pondering jumping in with clones of their own. Parents blame it for unfinished homework and for corrupting their children’s oh-so-pure minds. Some schools have tried, mostly in vain, to prevent students from playing.

Moral panics are tedious things. But “Fortnite” is interesting for a good reason. It shows the long-established influence within...Continue reading

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Xiaomi eyes a giant Chinese IPO

IN CHINA no company achieved $1bn in annual revenue as quickly as Xiaomi did, in the year following the launch of its first smartphone in 2011. Chinese media initially nicknamed Xiaomi the “Apple of the East” (its literal translation is “little rice”). That was a stretch, even in good times. But within another two years the affordable-handset-maker became the world’s most valuable startup, worth $46bn.

Analysts reckon that it now wants to raise up to $10bn in an initial public offering (IPO) on Hong Kong’s stock exchange which was announced on May 3rd. (Its filing documents disclose neither the valuation that it is seeking, nor a fundraising target.) That could afford it a very generous valuation of as much as $80bn—not far off the $91bn market capitalisation of Baidu, China’s biggest search engine and one of the country’s three “BAT” tech titans alongside Alibaba and Tencent.

Yet only 18 months ago such talk would have seemed outlandish. In 2016 Xiaomi’s sales...Continue reading

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American shale-oil producers are on a roll

JUST over a year ago Harold Hamm, billionaire boss of Continental Resources, one of the biggest shale-oil producers in America, issued a stern warning to his fellow frackers. Drill with restraint or we will “kill the market”, he said. This month the 72-year-old Mr Hamm, son of an Oklahoma cotton sharecropper who went on to become one of the founding fathers of the shale revolution, had a different message. Restraint is working.

The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the light, “sweet” (or low-sulphur) crude that is a benchmark for American producers, rose to $71 a barrel on May 9th, its highest level since November 2014. OPEC, which Mr Hamm once called a “toothless tiger”, is successfully leading efforts to balance the market. Oil prices are partly rallying because President Donald Trump this week pulled America out of the nuclear deal with Iran and said he would reimpose sanctions on a big oil producer. Meanwhile a free fall in Venezuelan production may be further exacerbated by the...Continue reading

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How Flixbus conquered the European coach market

Digging in its wheels

MANY Europeans see long-distance coach travel across America as glamorous. That may be a legacy of a Clark Gable film from 1934 called “It Happened One Night”, about a romance between two passengers on a bus travelling from Florida to New York. Modern Americans see it as anything but alluring. It is looked down on as something used only by time-rich, money-poor people who cannot afford to travel by car, train or plane.

Flixbus, a German coach startup which is launching in America on May 15th, wants to change that. On the firm’s flagship route from Nuremberg to its hometown of Munich, winding between snow-capped peaks and picture-book villages in Bavaria, its bus passengers look distinctly affluent. Many on board play on tablets to pass the time; shirts and ties are common. One discerning traveller reads The Economist. Since Flixbus was founded in 2013, its efforts to encourage more people to try coach travel...Continue reading

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A Canadian startup applies machine-learning to corporate bond issuance

WITH the exception of a few governments big enough to run their own auctions, anyone wishing to issue bonds must seek bankers’ help. A hefty fee will buy assistance in calibrating the size, structure and timing of a bond issue, as well as connections to lots of buyers. And once a bank has agreed to underwrite an issue, it bears the risk of failing to get a good price for the bonds. But the process is old-fashioned and inefficient (the head of bond origination at one American bank jokes that “not a lot has changed since 1933”), and the accuracy of the advice is hard to gauge. Overbond, a financial-technology startup in Toronto, wants to change all that.

Investment bankers responsible for bond issuance still operate largely by feel, calling up asset managers to get a sense of demand, rather than by crunching numbers. Rules against insider trading mean they cannot talk directly with their trader colleagues. Data on existing bonds are more abundant. In America, for instance, information on the price,...Continue reading

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Internship

The Economist invites applications for the 2018 Marjorie Deane internship. Paid for by the Marjorie Deane Financial Journalism Foundation, the award is designed to provide work experience for a promising journalist or would-be journalist, who will spend three months at The Economist writing about finance and economics. Applicants are asked to write a covering letter and an original article of no more than 500 words suitable for publication in the Finance and economics section. Applications should be sent to deaneintern@economist.com by June 2nd. For more information, see www.marjoriedeane.com

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The world’s biggest Muslim country wants to boost sharia finance

Still pretty interesting

THE Indonesia Stock Exchange greeted its latest listing on May 9th: that of BRIsyariah, the Islamic arm of state-controlled Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the country’s biggest bank by assets. The initial public offering (IPO) of 27% of BRIsyariah’s equity raised around 1.3trn rupiah ($92m). Islam outlaws the payment of interest, the basis of conventional banking. Yet despite being home to an eighth of the world’s Muslims—225m, in a population of 260m—Indonesia’s Islamic banks are tiny. They account for just 5.8% of all banks’ assets. In neighbouring Malaysia, which has been promoting Islamic finance for many years, Islamic banks’ share exceeds 25%.

But Indonesia’s are growing fast. According to the Financial Services Authority (OJK), the industry’s supervisor, last year their assets rose by 19%, against 9.8% for conventional banks. BRIsyariah’s IPO will help tackle what the OJK says is the biggest obstacle to their...Continue reading

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Europe must agree a common position to avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs

DIPLOMATS are racking up the air miles, but the prospect of trade war has not receded. Negotiations between American and Chinese representatives in Beijing ended on May 4th without agreement. Indeed, the two sides’ starting positions are so different that a mutually agreeable deal is hard to imagine. Talks will resume next week when Liu He, China’s vice-premier, travels to Washington. Negotiators will need to work quickly. From May 23rd America can impose its first set of tariffs against China, on around $50bn of goods. The Chinese would soon retaliate.

America is edging towards trade conflict not just with an avowed rival but with its closest friends. In March, when President Donald Trump announced plans for tariffs on steel and aluminium, America’s allies were granted temporary exemptions to allow time to negotiate deals. Those exemptions are due to run out on June 1st.

Many countries are already off the hook, having agreed to restrict shipments to America. South Korea...Continue reading

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Big investors are giving university digs an upgrade

The way we were

THE words “Unite Students” are emblazoned on Aston University’s residence halls and on signs all over campus. They are the name of a firm that builds, buys and manages student accommodation across Britain. Last year Unite Students bought all 3,000 of Aston’s on-campus bedrooms for £227m ($313m) in partnership with the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, a sovereign-wealth fund. It was thought to be the largest ever one-off purchase of student housing.

Many readers will no doubt recall dingy halls of residence owned by universities, or squalid private digs owned by individual landlords. But student accommodation has got an upgrade. Private halls have sprung up as cash-strapped universities have outsourced to companies such as Unite. Some have grown into publicly traded brands offering thousands of beds across the globe. American Campus Communities owns more than 134,000 beds across America. Dubai’s GSA has student housing in...Continue reading

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Air France-KLM is being brought to its knees by its unions

AIR FRANCE likes to present itself as a cut above other European airlines. Offering fancy French food and free champagne in economy class on long-haul flights, the company’s strategy is to justify its high ticket prices by offering a premium service. But facing intransigent unions at home and competition from abroad, the airline’s financial fizz is rapidly going flat. 

A drawn-out fight with its unions has toppled the boss of its parent group, Air France-KLM, yet again. On May 4th Jean-Marc Janaillac, its chief executive, resigned after its workers voted against a pay rise of 7% over four years. His predecessor, Alexandre de Juniac, left two years ago after two executives had their shirts violently ripped off by a mob of angry workers over a restructuring plan. The latest resignation is more serious because investors are also losing their rag. Air France-KLM’s shares have halved in value since January; over the same period those of rival carriers such as IAG and Ryanair have risen.

Air France’s trade unions are demanding an...Continue reading

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Walmart takes a second shot at the Indian market

BUSINESS news does not repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. In 2007 Walmart, America’s biggest grocer, crowed that it would crack the coveted Indian market by being the first global retailer to set up shop there, pipping envious rivals in the process. On May 9th it announced much the same thing: its time in India has come, this time by virtue of paying $16bn for a majority stake in Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce outfit, which had also been coveted by its vast online rival, Amazon.

The sense of déjà vu owes to the fact that its original foray proved a disappointment. Walmart’s hopes of somehow circumventing rules to protect local shop-keepers, which have long prevented most foreign retailers from opening stores, have been repeatedly dashed. A decade on it has a meagre 21 wholesale stores in India, generating just 0.1% of its $500bn in global revenues and a small loss to boot. Somehow that has not dissuaded the beast of Bentonville from undertaking the biggest corporate...Continue reading

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Two hackers have found how to break into hotel-room locks

WHEN a hacker gets hacked, hackers hack back. That is exactly what an attendee at a hacking conference in Berlin in 2003 did when the keycard-operated lock of his hotel room got hacked. On returning to his hotel room, he found that his laptop had been stolen, but there was no evidence of forced entry. So how did the thief get into the room? Two of his colleagues spent more than a decade trying to answer that question. Now they have succeeded—and in the process they have exposed a security vulnerability that leaves millions of hotel rooms susceptible to theft.

Tomi Tuominen and Timo Hirvonen of F-Secure, a cyber-security firm, devised a hack that they say allows them to create a master key that mimics the guest keycards produced by VingSecure, a manufacturer of hotel locks. According to F-Secure, the affected software is used in more than 40,000 hotel...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2018/05/can-hack-it?fsrc=rss
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So long, farewell

IT IS an enormous privilege, and responsibility, to write for The Economist and capture a small sliver of readers' attention. All told, there have been well over a thousand posts on this blog (the site history runs for 98 pages) as well as 546 print columns (the last will appear at the end of the week). The first post, back in February 2009, was written in the depths of the crisis and "was looking for signs of hope, although without any confidence it can call the bottom exactly." In fact, the market bottom occurred only a few weeks later. There have been a few wobbles along the way but that bull run is still going. The irony would be that, just as the start of this blog heralded the upswing, the last post might signal the demise of the great bull market.

This blogger has been a bit gloomy during his tenure, too gloomy as it turns out. So as well as three signs of danger, I wanted to close with three signs of optimism. First, the concerns.

We have...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2018/05/last-post-0?fsrc=rss
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Trade talks expose a chasm between China and America

START with the good news from the trade negotiations between China and America. After weeks of threatening tariffs and counter-tariffs, representatives from the world’s two biggest economies are at last talking. Over two days of meetings in Beijing, which ended on May 4th, Chinese and American officials laid out their grievances and their demands. That, unfortunately, is where the good news ends. The positions that both sides took were so extreme and contradictory that compromise appears a remote prospect. What, until now, has largely been a war of words could easily careen into a full-fledged trade war.

Publicly, the two countries put a positive gloss on the outcome. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, described the talks as candid and constructive. It noted that they had agreed on some issues and recognised their “considerable differences” on others. On the evening the talks closed, President Donald Trump tweeted a sentiment that, by his standards, was sympathetic: “it is...Continue reading

from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21741632-hardline-demands-both-countries-raise-risk-trade-war?fsrc=rss
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