“Goodwill only appears with the acquisition of a company. Not if you just grow organically, which makes comparisons difficult. Skype paid 2.6 billion dollars for eBay and goodwill was 2.3 billion. We need to be capable of making a valuation of the intangibles in this type of company,” explains Anne Jeny, member of the Management Committee of the European Accounting Association.
“Competition is especially important for innovation and some of the big (US) companies also have a lot of power in the market…but it’s difficult to keep innovating.”
Emmanuelle Auriol, member of the board of the European Economic Association at the University of Toulouse, is well-known in France for her polemic proposals. She believes, and this is very important for France, for its identity and the social consensus we have established, “that we need to protect the workers, not the jobs. Because if we try to protect the jobs, prohibit lay-offs, what happens is that there is more unemployment in the end.”
Claudio Borio, chief economist at the Bank of International Payments (BIS) in Basel, believes that the question that differentiates what has been happening in continental Europe from what has been happening to some extent in the US, the UK and other economies, including Spain, is the extent to which the banking problems and the asset quality problems have been adressed head-on.
Juan de Antonio, CEO of Cabify, firmly believes that disruption is the main driver for progress in business. “Wealth is generated outside our continent and Cabify is an example of a Spanish company which would have died if we hadn’t left here.”
Fixed income’s scant returns has led Norway’s sovereign fund to focus on equity investment. This now accounts for 65 percent of exposure. At the same time, the Norwegian government estimates that investment in the stock market will reach 70 percent to boost profits in the coming years. Hilde C. Bjørnland, professor of Economics at the Norwegian Business School and Director of the Centre for applied economy and oil explains why.
The real problem with Italy’s banking system is not the new EU legislation but its poor supervision, which means the system does not function. Imposing European regulation on this system means that instead of penalising the investors who took risks or the hedge funds, you destroy the small investors.
After participating in the founding of Astra and SES (which today operates 52 geostationary satellites, capable of reaching 99% of the world population), Candance Johnson leads the European association of ‘business angels’. She is determined to build an online network of investors and provide the European Union with a “nation of investors”…
The European banking system is much larger than the US’, namely three times –$33.2 trillion against $13.4 trillion. Hung Tran, Executive Managing Director at the Institute of International Finance, explained to The Corner how this could result in the Eurozone becoming one of the world’s lenders.
Luis Martín Cabiedes started investing in technology ‘startups’ in 1998,first as a ‘business angel’ and then via his own venture capital firm (Cabiedes & Partners SCR). He has invested in over 80 companies, including Ole, Myalert, Privalia and Trovit. He points that there are venture capital funds in Spain with 90% of public money.”