Wednesday, 4 July 2018
The American president is stirring up trouble in a volatile oil market
IT USED to be said that America’s shale producers were the new “swing factor” in global oil markets. It turns out that role is being taken by America’s president.
At a time when oil prices are at three-and-a-half-year highs, markets are being buffeted by three countervailing forces unleashed by President Donald Trump: his geopolitical agenda, particularly sanctions on Iran; his domestic political agenda, to lower American petrol prices before the mid-term elections; and his looming trade war with China. If he does not get his way, he may have a dangerous weapon up his sleeve—America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). His meddling risks making OPEC, the oil cartel that is a focus of his wrath, look like a paragon of predictability.
First, geopolitics. Despite an agreement late last month by Saudi-led OPEC and Russia to increase output by up to 1m barrels a day (b/d), the price of Brent crude, a benchmark, has risen to above $77 a barrel. The proximate...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21745521-if-he-cannot-arm-twist-opec-he-may-unleash-americas-special-petroleum-reserve?fsrc=rss
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Monday, 2 July 2018
User-rating systems are cut-rate substitutes for a skilful boss
IT OFTEN arrives as you stroll from the kerb to your front door. An e-mail with a question: how many stars do you want to give your Uber driver? Rating systems like the ride-hailing firm’s are essential infrastructure in the world of digital commerce. Just about anything you might seek to buy online comes with a crowdsourced rating, from a subscription to this newspaper to a broken iPhone on eBay to, increasingly, people providing services. But people are not objects. As ratings are applied to workers it is worth considering the consequences—for rater and rated.
User-rating systems were developed in the 1990s. The web held promise as a grand bazaar, where anyone could buy from or sell to anyone else. But e-commerce platforms had to create trust. Buyers and sellers needed to believe that payment would be forthcoming, and that the product would be as described. E-tailers like Amazon and eBay adopted reputation systems, in which sellers and buyers gave feedback about transactions. Reputation scores...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21745182-management-growing-share-workers-outsourced-strangers-user-rating?fsrc=rss
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Friday, 29 June 2018
Thursday, 28 June 2018
China starts easing monetary policy. Or does it?
CHINESE investors often refer in jest to the central bank as “central mama”. The idea is that it can be counted on to provide tender love—that is, policy easing—when market conditions are rough. But during the past couple of years it has been more of a disciplinarian, taking cash away from reckless investors. Its latest move, a cut of banks’ required reserves, has triggered a debate about which school of parenting it subscribes to these days. Is central mama turning soft again, or is she still cracking the whip?
On June 24th the People’s Bank of China said it would reduce the portion of cash that most banks must hold in reserve by 50 basis points. This was equivalent to deploying 700bn yuan ($106bn) in the financial system, or nearly 1% of GDP, which might sound like a healthy dose of liquidity to shore up growth. But the central bank insisted that it was not easing policy.
Many analysts take the central bank at its word. In the past, when it focused on the quantity of money in the economy, reducing required reserves could be seen as a form of loosening. But in recent years it has placed more emphasis on interest rates. Its most important target is banks’ short-term cost of borrowing from each other. That remained stable over the past week at about 2.8% in annual terms, proof that the announcement had little discernible...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21745236-challenges-interpreting-central-banks-latest-move-china-starts-easing?fsrc=rss
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Tortured by meetings
MOST workers view the prospect of a two-hour meeting with the same enthusiasm as Prometheus awaited the daily arrival of the eagle, sent by the gods to peck at his liver. Meetings have been a form of torture for office staff for as long as they have pushed pencils and bashed keyboards.
One eternal problem has been their inefficiency. In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson, an academic and legendary writer on management, came up with the law of triviality, that “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.” In that same spirit, this columnist would like to propose an even broader principle, applying to gatherings of ten people or more, and immodestly called Bartleby’s Law: “80% of the time of 80% of the people in meetings is wasted.”
Various corollaries to this law follow. After at least 80% of meetings, any decisions taken will be in line with the HIPPO, or “highest-paid person’s opinion”. In short, those who backed a...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/business/21745278-you-take-minutes-and-waste-hours-tortured-meetings?fsrc=rss
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America Inc and the rage against Beijing
ONE of the naughty secrets about America’s trade war with China is that it has the tacit support of much of America’s business establishment. For the past 20 years big firms’ default mode has been Sino-infatuation. Schumpeter attended a dinner in 2016 between the captains of USA Inc and Li Keqiang, China’s premier, and you could taste the deference in the air more keenly than the beef on the plates. But lately bosses’ mood has flipped into a hostility that risks becoming jingoistic and unhelpful.
While a few Sino-dependent companies such as Apple and Boeing want to lower the temperature, many others consider themselves mistreated by China; for them, it is payback time. This stance has two flaws. The sense of victimhood is over the top; American firms have done reasonably well in China. And it is stoking the White House to escalate a conflict that may spill over from trade tariffs into a war over investment by multinationals.
China may have been bad for steel workers in Cleveland...Continue reading
from Business and finance https://www.economist.com/news/business/21745276-boohoo-just-how-badly-has-us-business-been-treated-china-america-inc-and-rage-against?fsrc=rss
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