In its latest economic bulletin, the ECB admits that fiscal cost of the economic crisis resulting from Covid-19 varies greatly among the countries of the euro area. The institution predicts that the pandemic will cause a fiscal hole of 28% of GDP in Spain between 2020-22, followed by Italy (24%) and France (21%).
Analysts at BofA Global Research still expect the global oil market to move into a 4.9mn b/d deficit in 4Q20 on the back of the OPEC+ cuts, supporting crude prices. Yet diesel and jetfuel/kerosene make up by far the largest petroleum product group in the oil market. So crude oil prices cannot really rally until distillate demand, jet fuel included, recovers to more normal levels in the next few months.
Julia Pastor | Chairman and Owner with 90% of the capital of the Spanish energy firm Audax Renovables José Elías regrets that the whole industry has made a terrible mistake. “We were able to generate all that photovoltaic energy and we were able to develop an industry around that, but we screwed up, ruining a lot of citizens. We could not have acted worse,” he reckons.
Julia Pastor | Board member at the Bermuda Monetary Authority, Professor Karel van Hulle considers that the current accounting standards, which changed last year, “is not good because since it does not recognize the change we are seeing in society whereby people want to have more future-oriented value in the balance sheet.” This is the second part of our conversation.
Julia Pastor | Accounting expert Karel Van Hulle (+30 years of experience at the European Commission) believes that financial states of the companies should focus more on important issues for society. “Firms today are different than the ones we had in the past… they don’t have assets in their balance sheets since all their value is non-tangible.”
Julia Pastor | Born in Paris, Kalypso Nicolaïdis grew up in Greece. She also has Spanish heritage. Because of all of this she says she has a vision of Europe filtered through the southern roots. Nevertheless she lives and works in Oxford, where she is Professor of International Relations at the University . In her last visit to Madrid she gave a conference in the Fundacion Areces about European economic governance.
via The Conversation | It is almost too easy to bash Facebook these days. Nearly a third of Americans feel the country’s most popular social media platform is bad for society. As the company approaches its 15th birthday, Americans rate its social benefit as better than Marlboro cigarettes, but worse than McDonald’s.
Last week John Bogle died, considered one of the major philanthropists in history.He did it through the Vanguard Fund, which he created in 1975, and which became the first indexed fund for retail clients. In September 2007, just a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we had the opportunity to speak with him about the damage that “the capital of the managers” had caused to people’s savings. The following are some of the opinions he left us.
Telefonica reached a non-binding agreement with Vodafone, which expands the current deal on sharing networks in the UK. The objective is to extend the duration and to include 5G. Both operators also want to modernize their fibre optic networks. The agreement depends on concluding the legally binding terms and securing the necessary regulatory approvals, which is expected to happen during 2019.
The Economist Intelligence Unit has published the 11th edition of its ranking on the global state of democracy. Of 165 countries in the world, Spain is ranked 19th for the quality of its democracy. It is not bad given the political instability Spain is experiencing. Nor the open breach in confidence following the crisis between citizens and politicians and citizens and economic powers. Nor taking into account Spaniard’ s tendency to self-flagellation.