March, 2018

• 25 March

  Stocks need ‘GDP growth’ to prosper

  

  Forecasting the long-run return on equities is one of the key challenges in financial planning. Jeremy Siegel, the author of “Stocks for the Long Run,” wrote that he had examined 210 years of stock returns and found that “the real return on a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks has averaged 6.6 percent per year.” Public pension funds make similar assumptions. ...

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• 25 March

  No one wins in this battle for an orphaned asset class

  

  It looks a victory for aggrieved bondholders. Aviva Plc has had enough bad press and has kicked controversial plans to cancel its preference share class into the long grass. The decision isn’t entirely charitable. The British insurer may also have been influenced by the fact that likely cost of issuing new perpetual debt was beginning to tick up. But this ...

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• 25 March

  Washington shouldn’t shut the door on Chinese students

  As part of its continuing campaign to prevent China from stealing American intellectual property, President Donald Trump’s administration is considering restrictions on the number of Chinese citizens enrolled at US colleges and universities. Targeting foreign students will undermine US competitiveness, not enhance it. Of the 1 million foreign nationals enrolled at US schools, nearly one-third are from China — double ...

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• 25 March

  Robots won’t take all jobs as humans demand new things

  

  Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence — or ‘robots’ in common parlance – is whether they will make human workers obsolete. ...

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• 25 March

  Everyone gets how badly BOE wants to hike rates

  

  Communication received loud and clear. The Bank of England (BOE) did just enough to keep interest rate expectations alive for a hike in its key interest rate in May to 0.75 percent — and beyond. The switch to a 7-2 vote at March 22 policy decision, with the most voluble hawks Michael Saunders and Ian McCafferty reverting to wanting an ...

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• 25 March

  Mark Zuckerberg has no way out of Facebook’s quagmire

  

  I think I understand why Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t publicly responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He’s stuck in a catch-22. Any fix for Facebook’s previous big problem — fake news — would make the current big problem with data harvesting worse. As a media company and one of Americans’ top sources of information, Facebook’s de facto ...

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• 25 March

  Banks win break on capital requirement rules

  

  Bloomberg Banks that spent years lobbying against billions of dollars of new capital requirements are being rewarded for their efforts. They won concessions from global regulators that may cut the amount of extra capital the industry’s biggest companies will need in 2022, when the new market-risk rules are due to take effect. The proposed revisions will come as a relief ...

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• 25 March

  ANZ Bank sued over lending standards

  

  Bloomberg For Australian banks the jabs just keep coming — and not always from the most expected sources. Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ Bank) is facing a civil suit in Guam over lending standards at its American Samoa offshoot. Two retired US military veterans claim the Melbourne-based bank is liable for “systematic violations of the Truth in ...

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• 25 March

  BoE launches hub to monitor fintech

  

  Bloomberg Developments in fintech could boost the UK’s sluggish productivity growth and the Bank of England has started a unit to monitor its developments, Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said. “We have set up a new Fintech Hub that will sit at the heart of the bank, to consider both how the bank understands and how it applies fintech, relevant to ...

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• 25 March

  Philippines holds interest rate at record low

  

  Bloomberg The Philippine central bank left its benchmark interest rate at a record low as it forecast inflation will remain inside the target band this year and in 2019. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas held the overnight borrowing rate at 3 percent, it said in a statement in Manila, as predicted by 11 of 17 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The rest ...

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