What Boeing Has to Lose in a U.S.-China Trade War

Boeing has become an unofficial proxy for fears about an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Investors are right to be worried.

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Nike Rides Out its #MeToo Moment

Nike has bounced back from some sizeable scandals, so it isn’t surprising that the company has gotten ahead of the problem of alleged inappropriate behavior by top executives.

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These Lenders Are Cheering the Spending Bill

Business development companies stand to get a special favor from Congress.

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Two giant engineering projects will alter the European landscape

WHEN the Berlin Wall fell, Europe began repairing its sundered east-west transport networks. A revived Paris-Moscow train heralded the new era. Berlin’s cathedral-like main station, opened in 2006, became the continent’s new hub. But old north-south bottlenecks are back in the spotlight. Of the nine “Core Network Corridors” currently earmarked for EU investment, six are more vertical than horizontal. The centrepiece of this strategy is the “Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor” from Sweden and Finland, through Denmark, Germany, Austria and Italy to Malta in the south. This programme—jointly funded by the EU and member states—includes railway electrification, port modernisation and the two largest engineering projects on the continent.

The greatest progress has been at the route’s northern end. The Oresund link, a 16km road-and-rail, bridge-and-tunnel link from Malmo to Copenhagen that opened in 2000, has knitted the two cities into one region. The next step is to link them to Hamburg...Continue reading

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Catholics are keeping a low profile in Ireland’s abortion referendum campaign

No rosaries please

WHEN Ireland first voted on abortion, back in 1983, there was no doubt as to who was behind the push for a full constitutional ban. The Pro Life Amendment Campaign, which persuaded 67% of voters to approve the 8th Amendment to Ireland’s constitution, was a coalition of Roman Catholic organisations supported by the pope and his bishops. Rosaries and crosses were proudly borne to its marches and rallies.

Now, 35 years later, as Ireland prepares to vote, in May or June, on a proposed repeal of the amendment, overt Catholicism has all but vanished from the scene. Although the religious affiliations of many activists are, of course, known, contemporary pro-life groups like the Iona Institute, the Pro Life Campaign, the Life Institute, and Save the 8th present themselves as non- or multi-denominational, or simply leave such matters vague.

With good reason. Since 1983 a long series of scandals has battered the church’s moral authority. These...Continue reading

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Israel is cultivating new friends in the Balkans, but quietly

Quiet remembrance

ALTHOUGH it was in use from 1497 to 1943, the Jewish cemetery in Bitola, Macedonia’s second city, had long been forgotten. No longer. Not only is the site now being restored and a new memorial built, but on March 11th a couple of thousand people, including Macedonian and Israeli ministers, marched through town to pay homage to the Macedonian Jews who were rounded up exactly 75 years earlier and sent to the death camp at Treblinka. At the same time Israeli developers held a “hackathon”, dreaming up ideas for digital memorials with Macedonian fellow geeks. It is typical of the way Israelis are quietly discovering the western Balkans.

Bitola’s Jewish cemetery is on a steep hill, and over time its flat tombs became covered by soil. In the past few years 4,300 have been excavated; there could be as many as 10,000. Jews remember Bitola by its Ottoman name of Monastir, but most people in Bitola have forgotten that their down-at-heel town was once a...Continue reading

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Greece is set to leave its bail-out programme. Its troubles aren’t over

ALEXIS TSIPRAS, Greece’s left-wing prime minister, is getting along better these days with his country’s big creditors, the EU and the International Monetary Fund. One reason is that Athens is likely to complete its current bail-out programme in August, on time and with funds to spare. Another is that the economy is growing, albeit more slowly than forecast.

But Mr Tsipras is under growing pressure at home. His Syriza party’s unlikely coalition with Independent Greeks (Anel), a small populist party led by Panos Kammenos, a blustering right-winger, is in danger of falling apart. Mr Kammenos, the defence minister, opposes Mr Tsipras’s efforts to resolve a 25-year dispute over what Greece’s poor northern neighbour, officially known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, should henceforth be called. Mr Kammenos has also broken ranks with Syriza over how to handle Greece’s latest flare-up with its historical rival, Turkey, a NATO ally with a policy of contesting Greek sovereignty over a clutch of small Aegean...Continue reading

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Why controlling chemical weapons is so hard

IN THE sort of movie where global agencies are attacked by arch-villains with superpowers, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) would make a perfect target. Its concrete and glass headquarters sits amid a cluster of high-minded international institutions in The Hague, down the street from the tribunal where Yugoslavia’s war criminals were tried and not far from the International Court of Justice. The OPCW has been busy over the past decade, destroying chemical-weapons stockpiles in Libya, Iraq and Syria, for which it won the Nobel peace prize in 2013. But the use of a nerve agent in the attempted assassination of a Russian ex-spy in Britain this month has dragged it into tricky waters.

The mission of the OPCW is to support the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which bars countries from possessing them. (Using them has been illegal since The Hague Conventions of 1899, signed just across town—though that did not stop Germany and Britain from gassing each other’s troops during the first world war.) But the OPCW is...Continue reading

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Why Uber in Istanbul is costlier than a cab

COMPETITION between Uber and the taxi industry tends to be fierce everywhere. In Turkey it has turned violent. Over the past month, some Uber drivers in Istanbul, the only Turkish city where the ride-sharing firm operates regularly, have been beaten, and on at least one occasion shot at, by disgruntled cabbies. A union of taxi drivers has taken Uber to court, asking the authorities to block access to its app. (The country has already banned Wikipedia and Booking.com, an online travel agent, as well as thousands of other web pages.) The union’s boss recently accused Uber of being part of a “thieving Jewish lobby”.

Most of Istanbul’s cabbies are perfectly nice people who resort neither to violence nor to anti-Semitism when faced with new market entrants or afternoon traffic. But too many are swindlers, chain-smokers and speed addicts. On a recent trip across town, your correspondent spent 15 hair-raising minutes trying to calm an elderly driver who regularly succumbed to a series of twitches, popped out of...Continue reading

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Emmanuel Macron, the new Teddy Roosevelt

THE American guest in ill-fitting clothes was a curiously bedraggled sight next to his sharp-suited French hosts. But when Steve Bannon took to the stage as the surprise invité at the National Front congress in the city of Lille earlier this month, he stole the show. “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” declared Donald Trump’s former chief strategist. “Wear it as a badge of honour!” As each of his phrases was translated into French, the star-struck audience applauded. Fresh from meeting populists and nationalists from Germany and Italy, Mr Bannon hailed the rise of a global movement and told them: “History is on our side.”

In one sense, Mr Bannon chose an odd time to drop in on France. Marine Le Pen’s movement, which she now wants to rename Rassemblement National (National Rally), has been in disarray ever since she lost the presidential election last year to Emmanuel Macron and secured only eight parliamentary...Continue reading

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Can Markets Handle So Much Trouble at Once?

Trouble comes in threes. In isolation, the headwinds facing global markets could be manageable. Taken together, they spell continued turbulence.

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Viacom's Hidden Charms May Tempt CBS

As CBS weighs making an offer, it may discover more value than it did last time round.

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Wynn Resorts Enters a New Galaxy

Steve Wynn shed his stake in the casino giant he co-founded. On the same day, Wynn Resorts said it would issue a near-5% stake to rival Galaxy Entertainment. Both moves look sensible.

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Markets think trade war is good for "absolutely nothing"

IN THE original Godzilla movie, made in Japan back in 1954, the testing of American nuclear weapons leads to the creation of a giant dinosaur that threatens to destroy not just Japan, but the rest of the world. Now Asians face another American creation that seems to be laying waste to all around it.

President Donald Trump has already pulled out of the TPP (the Trans-Pacific trade pact) and the Paris climate change agreement. Now he appears determined to roll back the international trade arrangements that have been in place since 1945. Yesterday's announcement of tariffs on $60bn of Chinese trade threatens to launch a trade war between the world's two largest economies (the Chinese have already suggested retaliatory measures). Small wonder that Asian markets have taken a hit today (March 23rd); Japan's Nikkei was down 4.5%, China's Shanghai Shenzhen dropped 2.9%; Hong Kong's Hang Seng 2.5%. European markets...Continue reading

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H.R. McMaster out, John Bolton in

IN PROFESSIONAL wrestling, a fake form of combat mistaken for the real thing by some fans, a “carpenter” is a skilled wrestler of middling fame, whose job is to make rising stars look strong and intimidating.

Remember that jargon—and President Donald Trump’s long-standing love of professional wrestling—when trying to understand the seemingly bizarre appointment of John Bolton as the third national security adviser of the Trump administration, replacing Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster, a hard-charging army officer and intellectual who rubbed his president up the wrong way.

Judged as an act of high statecraft, the appointment is one to furrow brows in capitals worldwide. Mr Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations under George W Bush, is a ferocious war hawk who is one of the few men in public life still willing to defend the Iraq invasion of 2003. He is an implacable critic of President Vladimir Putin and gleeful fan of the NATO military alliance. In an op-ed for The Hill in February Mr Bolton called for a...Continue reading

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Micron's Results Weren't Quite Chipper Enough

The memory chip maker’s stock ran too hot ahead of its earnings report.

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What works to reduce gun deaths

And you fret about screen time

THE young people who will march to protest against gun killings in Washington, DC and other cities on March 24th would appear to be wasting their time. Since December 2012, when Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, America has experienced some 240 shootings that injured or killed people on school or college campuses. From 2012 to 2016 fully 108,100 people used guns to take their own lives and 63,600 were shot dead by others. Yet the House of Representatives has not voted on a single measure to prevent gun violence, let alone passed a law. In some states the law has loosened. Students at public colleges in Texas can now carry concealed handguns.

The marchers should not succumb to gloom. Congress will probably not pass sensible gun laws, it is true. But some state assemblies and city governments have already done so. These laws seem to be saving lives; if adopted in other states, the toll of guns would...Continue reading

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Switzerland does not prove the NRA’s case

“PRO Deo et Patria”, “For God and Country”, is painted over the entrance of the Arquebuse shooting club. Members arrive clutching ear-protectors. A few carry backpacks with rifle barrels poking out. Gunfire echoes from the building, as pistols are fired on 25-metre and 50-metre ranges. Those with rifles pick out targets 300 metres away.

Since 1474 Geneva’s male residents, obliged to defend the city, have met for regular weapons practice here. Jacques Vo-Thanh, smoking outside after training, says guns are “embedded in the social life”. Though membership has declined, he estimates the club has 500 regulars and 2,000 retired members. Children as young as ten may learn to shoot. The government subsidises ammunition.

Pro-gun types in America have long pointed to Switzerland as a country with supposedly lax rules, widespread ownership of arms, proud hunting and shooting cultures and few resulting criminal problems. As of late last century some 40% of Swiss households had a weapon, usually a military-issue rifle or pistol in...Continue reading

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An innocuous-seeming law causes a ruckus

FEW pieces of legislation sound more anodyne than the Taiwan Travel Act. The bill, which both houses of Congress passed unanimously and President Donald Trump signed into law on March 16th, aims only to “encourage visits between officials from the United States and Taiwan at all levels”. Yet it risks triggering a diplomatic brouhaha. China regards the prospect of visits between American and Taiwanese officials as a violation of America’s “one-China policy”, under which America pledged to maintain only unofficial relations with a place that China regards as a renegade province. “We urge the US side to correct its mistake,” says a spokesman from China’s foreign ministry.

Steve Chabot, a Republican congressman from Ohio and author of the bill, says that his legislation has “no provocative intent”. Taiwan, after all, is America’s 11th-biggest trading partner, outstripping Brazil. And the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 commits America to helping Taiwan defend itself. Mr Chabot worries that insufficient communication between the two...Continue reading

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In Illinois politics, money talks

MONEY did not talk during the Democratic and Republican primary elections held in Illinois on March 20th—it screamed. The incumbent Republican governor, Bruce Rauner (pictured), who splashed out some $50m on his campaign, saw off a strong challenge from a right-winger, Jeanne Ives. He will face an even richer opponent in the general election in November, because J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who poured almost $70m into his own campaign, easily won the Democratic primary for governor. Wealthy candidates also prevailed in many of the primary races for Illinois’s 18 congressional seats and other positions, held on the same day.

High-level politics is increasingly a game for wealthy people. Roll Call, a political newspaper owned by The Economist Group, calculates that America’s senators and congressmen were worth $2.43bn when the 115th Congress began—20% more than the previous Congress. Ten house members and three senators are worth more than $43m each (many politicians are...Continue reading

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Memo to White House staff: keep talking

You didn’t hear that from me

IN THE early weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the White House was a leaky ship. So Mr Trump seems to have imported a device often used in the private sector, but never before employed in the executive branch: sweeping gag orders covering everything—from secrets to mere gossip—picked up at work. Naturally, a draft agreement has leaked to the Washington Post. It suggests that staffers who improperly disclose confidential information would be liable for huge fines, and even bars future novels from mentioning White House work. The scheme, conceived in chaos, has plainly been ineffective in its intended purpose. The administration remains shambolic and sieve-like.

These sorts of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are probably both unenforceable and unconstitutional. Because White House staff are employed by the government, their speech is protected by the First Amendment. “Information about public service belongs to...Continue reading

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Why Stormy Daniels is so dangerous

THE humourist P. J. O’Rourke once made these distinctions. “There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.” Stormy Daniels’s “Make America Horny Again” tour, which the porn star recently took to strip clubs in Texas and Florida, arguably constitutes a rare triple-whammy. And if power can be substituted for smarts, which Stephanie Clifford, as Ms Daniels is properly known, appears to have in abundance, the case is indisputable. Not since a Mikhail Gorbachev impersonator enticed a fawning Donald Trump onto 5th Avenue has anyone made such a monkey of the president.

Much has been made of a moment in West Palm Beach last month when Mr Trump’s motorcade, en route between Mar-a-Lago and a golf club, roared past a strip joint advertising Ms Clifford’s tour in neon lights. But irony did not die that night, as some have suggested. It is...Continue reading

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Sorry, But The Fed Will Be Safe Not Sorry

The Federal Reserve isn’t ready to adopt the idea that the economy can run faster without running hotter.

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Why tariffs on steel and aluminium are easier said than done

HISTORY will rhyme on March 23rd, when Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium imports are due to come into force. Several previous presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, also used tariffs in an attempt to protect America’s steel producers from foreign competition. (There are historical echoes, too, in Mr Trump’s plans to slap tariffs on a range of Chinese imports; in the 1980s Japan was the target.) A rhyme is not a repeat. But past experience is not encouraging.

The central problem for America’s policymakers is that trade is like water. Block its flow in one place and pressure builds elsewhere. When many countries are covered by tariffs, trade may simply be diverted through those countries that are let off the hook. Importers will howl for exemptions. As a result, whatever the Trump administration’s broader ambitions with respect to trade, bellicose unilateralism will make them harder to achieve.

In 1982 America browbeat the European Community, the forerunner of the European Union, into limiting its steel exports...Continue reading

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Europeans fret that Chinese investment is a security risk

“WE ARE not naive free traders. Europe must always defend its strategic interests,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, last year as he introduced plans to screen foreign investment into the European Union. America has had such rules since the 1970s; they are set to tighten further. The EU used to be more relaxed about acquisitions by foreigners. Now it too is toughening up.

The target is China, whose firms have been on a shopping spree (see chart). Purchases of fripperies such as football clubs and hotels have been curbed by the Chinese authorities, but investment continues to flow into technology and infrastructure, notes James Zhan of the UN...Continue reading

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The EU wants to make finance more environmentally friendly

TO GAUGE an issue’s importance, a guest list is a good place to start. The one for a conference in Brussels on March 22nd to discuss the European Union’s “action plan” on sustainable finance features heavy-hitters including Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, and Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York who campaigns on climate change. Given that sustainable finance is well-established, what action does the EU think is needed?

Investing with an eye to environmental or social issues, not just financial returns, has become mainstream in the past decade. According to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), $23trn, or 26% of all assets under management in 2016, were in “socially responsible investments” that take account of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. New asset classes have sprung up. According to SEB, a Swedish bank, the issuance of green bonds, the proceeds of which are invested in environmental projects, reached $163bn in 2017, up from less than $500m in 2008.

Yet standards are a...Continue reading

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Wall Street looks overvalued

FEW measures of stockmarket valuation are as controversial as the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, or CAPE. American equities have looked expensive on this measure for most of the past 20 years, which is why many bulls tend to dismiss its usefulness. It is pretty clear that the CAPE does not help investors to time the market.

But a new paper* from Research Affiliates, a fund-management group, explains why many criticisms are overblown. The strongest case for the measure is that a higher ratio tends to be associated with lower long-term returns. A study of 12 national markets shows that a 5% increase in the CAPE, from 20 to 21, say, tends on average to reduce the total ten-year expected return by four percentage points.

The attraction of the CAPE is that it smooths out the vicissitudes of the profit cycle. In a recession, profits can plunge even faster than share prices. So if you look only at the ratio of a share price and the previous year’s profits, the market can look very expensive....Continue reading

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Can’t hardly wait

LIKE teenagers, central bankers long to feel normal. For many of them (the central bankers, that is), the past decade has been an unusually angst-ridden one. They stumbled through it, confused by the way their policymaking bodies were changing, unsure what to do with their interest rates, embarrassed by their burgeoning balance-sheets. Teenagers often seek to quell their anxiety and insecurity by imitating behaviour they regard as normal. So too for central bankers.

But the desire to normalise policy, and leave crisis-era measures behind, could distract central bankers from their main goals, namely to support growth and control inflation. The Bank for International Settlements, a global club for central bankers, recently urged officials not to let market jitters discourage them from raising interest rates. Yet at worst, chasing some elusive notion of normal could put the global recovery at risk.

What central bankers mean by normalising policy is clear enough. As Peter Praet, the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), explained in a recent speech, to normalise is to end their reliance on “unconventional” or “non-standard” tools such as quantitative easing (QE, the printing of new money to buy assets). It means returning to a familiar world in which adjustments to interest rates are their main policy lever.

Central bankers make no...Continue reading

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What if China corners the cobalt market?

COBALT derives its name from Kobold, a mischievous German goblin who, according to legend, lurks underground. For centuries it vexed medieval miners by lookinglike a valuable ore that subsequently turned into worthless—and sometimes noxious—rubble. Once again it is threatening to cause trouble, this time in the growing market for batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), each of which uses about 10kg of cobalt. The source of mischief is no longer in Germany, though, but in China.

It is widely known that more than half of the world’s cobalt reserves and production are in one dangerously unstable country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. What is less well known is that four-fifths of the cobalt sulphates and oxides used to make the all-important cathodes for lithium-ion batteries are refined in China. (Much of the other 20% is processed in Finland, but its raw material, too, comes from a mine in Congo, majority-owned by a Chinese firm, China Molybdenum.)

On March 14th concerns about...Continue reading

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The digitisation of trade’s paper trail may be at hand

Dockumentary evidence

THE enormous ships steaming into and out of the world’s ports do not only carry cargo. They also represent paperwork: bills of lading (BOLs), packing lists, letters of credit, insurance policies, orders, invoices, sanitary certificates, certificates of origin. Maersk, the world’s biggest container-shipping line, found that a shipment of avocados from Mombasa to Rotterdam in 2014 entailed more than 200 communications involving 30 parties. A giant container vessel may be associated with hundreds of thousands of documents. “A Venetian merchant…would recognise some of our documentation,” says John Laurens, head of global transaction services at DBS, a Singaporean bank.

According to the World Economic Forum, the costs of processing trade documents are as much as a fifth of those of shifting goods. Removing administrative blockages in supply chains could do more to boost international trade than eliminating tariffs. Full digitisation of trade...Continue reading

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How Republicans embraced identity politics

SOME Democrats blamed identity politics for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. Mark Lilla, a historian from Columbia University, suggested in the New York Times that Democratic identity politics “encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group.” But new research suggests that identity politics is not a phenomenon primarily connected to the Democratic Party. Social and cultural identity is more closely tied to partisan support among Republicans.

Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly polarised in terms of their racial, religious and ideological makeup. Blacks, Hispanics and the non-religious have sorted into the Democratic Party, while whites, evangelical Christians, and conservatives have tended to join the Republican Party. Between 1992 and 2016 the percentage of white men registered to vote who identified as Republican rose from 48% to 61% and the share of those who were registered Democrat fell from 44% to 31%, according to the Pew Research...Continue reading

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Tencent, and the Tech Sector, Get a Shock From South Africa

Naspers is selling down its 33% holding in Tencent, a day after the Chinese tech giant’s disappointing earnings. It’s another blow for a sector suddenly looking shaky.

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Durex-Maker Reckitt Avoids $20 Billion Headache

Turning down Pfizer’s $20 billion consumer-health business shows discipline, but leaves U.K. giant Reckitt Benckiser with plenty of work.

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'Rolldown' Shows Why the Bond Market Is an Unfriendly Place to Hide

The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise rates on Wednesday signaled that the yield curve could flatten further, which is bad news for a money-making force known as rolldown.

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The Facebook scandal could change politics as well as the internet

“MY GOAL was never really to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the social-media giant, in 2014. That has never been more true. His company has spent the past year stumbling through controversies over the peddling of fake news and enabling Russian manipulation of American voters, with various degrees of ineptitude. Then, on March 17th, articles in the New York Times and Britain’s Observer newspaper suggested that a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, had obtained detailed data about some 50m Facebook users and shared this trove of information and analysis with third parties, including Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The result is a corporate crisis—and a political reckoning.

Republicans and Democrats alike have called on Mr Zuckerberg and the heads of other tech firms to testify before the Senate. America’s consumer watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has also reportedly...Continue reading

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Dropbox May Get a Little Help From Its Friends

Dropbox has a big valuation to live up to. But other richly valued cloud stocks—and the huge premium Salesforce.com just paid for MuleSoft—could help sell the latest big tech IPO.

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U.S. Trade Leverage With China Is Weakening

Chinese workers are less dependent on labor-intensive export industries than they used to be. But U.S. farmers are more dependent on China.

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Norwegian Air: Easy Times, Desperate Measures

The long-haul airline disruptor has raised capital, but still looks financially precarious.

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General Mills Sounds Inflation Alarm for Food Industry

Shares of General Mills and other food makers were slammed after the company warned of higher costs.

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Tencent Is Like Facebook but With a Different Set of Worries

Facebook lost $50 billion in market value in just two days over concerns about data privacy. Across the Pacific, shareholders of Tencent, which owns China’s most popular social network WeChat with nearly a billion monthly active users, remains unfazed.

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Facebook's Currency Devalued Along With User Trust

Among Facebook’s growing list of new problems is a decidedly unfamiliar one—its market value has been stuck in reverse.

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Oracle Gets a Bit Cloudier

New program lures more licensing customers to the cloud but at a cost to some visibility.

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Will the justices strike down California’s abortion notification law?

SINCE 1992, when the Supreme Court barred regulations posing an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, pro-life and pro-choice forces have battled over how far states may go in circumscribing the right first recognised 45 years ago in Roe v Wade. But in a case on March 20th involving a California law that is designed to expand access to abortion, Anthony Kennedy—the Court’s perennial swing justice—appeared to flip the standard on its head. 

In an exchange with Michael Farris, the lawyer representing the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) Justice Kennedy said the law posed an “undue burden” on the mission of so-called “crisis pregnancy centres” (CPCs), pro-life establishments that seek to steer women away from abortions. The FACT Act, which went into effect on January 1st, 2016, and which NILFA is challenging, seeks to protect low-income women from being misled by California’s hundreds of CPCs that “pose as full-service women’s health clinics” while...Continue reading

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Beware of performance figures

GOLFERS are familiiar with the concept of a "mulligan" - the chance to retake a shot. Give an averagely talented player enough mulligans and he or she will get one close to the hole. And a version of the mulligan exists in fund management too.

Readers will be familiar from past blog posts with the idea that actively-managed funds cannot be relied upon to beat the index. Many of these studies are conducted in the US market, which is probably the most efficient (and thus hardest to beat) in the world. But the same is true in Europe.

Figures from S&P Dow Jones Indices show that, over the 10 years to December 2017, less than 15% of euro-denominated European equity funds beat their benchmark; for emerging market funds, it was less than 3%; and global funds, under 2%. For sterling-denominated funds, less than...Continue reading

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Banking on Deregulation Is Still a Good Bet

Despite some last-minute jitters in Washington, regulatory relief looks to be coming for small and medium-size banks.

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Venture Capital vs Private Equity: Who's the King of Cash?

Venture capital is seen as private equity’s more glamorous cousin and that’s no surprise, but there is a wrinkle.

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Is Ping An China's Most Valuable Insurer or a Tech-Investing Fad?

The $100 billion question for the world’s second-largest insurer: is it an insurance firm or is it a technology firm?

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Aramco Could Still Be Hong Kong's Arabian Knight

A 2018 listing for Aramco, potentially the world’s most valuable company, looks increasingly unlikely. Interests might align in the Far East, however, a year or two down the line.

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Why Facebook Could Lose Friends in High Places

Facebook’s huge business rides on user trust, and that could be in danger for the social network.

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Death of the Mall? Greatly Exaggerated, Says Big Money

The world’s top shopping mall companies are betting that e-commerce isn’t such an existential threat. The latest sign is a tentative bid for U.K. real-estate investment trust Hammerson from its French peer Klépierre.

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