Markets

royalmail

UK Royal Mail: From Henry VIII to the Stock Exchange

LONDON | By The Corner Team | It will be the U.K.’s  largest public offering in decades. London plans to sell a majority of its stake in the Royal Mail, the biggest icon of British public companies that not even Margaret Thatcher dared to privatize. The sell-off to begin “in the coming weeks”, as the government announced on Thursday. But so will strikes.


Lehman Brother collapse

5 years since Lehman Brothers collapsed

MADRID | By JP Marin Arrese | In the aftermath of the world financial crisis, the G 20 solemnly committed itself to undertake a major overhaul to avoid such a disaster from happening again. The diagnosis rapidly identified a disproportionate risk appetite, coupled with lenders’ reckless confidence, as the main culprit. Deregulation and the benign neglect hailed by supervisory authorities as a hallmark for best practices also stood in the pillory. Yet, five years later, no major breakthrough in dealing with the core problems has been performed.


china

China’s New Experiment: Financial Equality

Iris Mir | China starts a new round of economic experimentation. Shanghai is set to become the new engine of growth with a China’s first Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The goal is to attract foreign investment by testing new deregulation rules that should give foreign companies greater flexibility. But urgent reforms in other areas are a must in order to transform the rise of the income of Chinese households into real purchasing power.


Europe Tobin Tax

Europe’s financial tax plan hits wall

LONDON | Via Presseurop | ‘The EU’s controversial “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions has been dealt a severe blow after the EU Council’s legal service judged the proposal “infringes” EU treaties and is “discriminatory” to states which do not take part, reports the Financial Times.


No Picture

Public cost of the Spanish financial crisis amounts to 5.9% of GDP

MADRID | By Carlos Díaz Güell | According to the Bank of Spain, the public aid for the recapitalisation of the Spanish financial system between 2009 and 2013 amounts to €61.366 billion (£51.739bn), 5.9% of the GDP. This is below the average cost of other banking crisis since 1970. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the public cost of the financial crisis was of 3.9% of the GDP.


dow

Dow Industrials: New Kids on the Stock

NEW YORK |  By The Corner Team |  Alcoa, Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America have been shown the door from Dow Industrials. Goldman Sachs, Nike and Visa are replacing them. It’s the first “three-for-three” change to the blue-chip index in almost a decade.

 

 


No Picture

Investors, welcome back to a sexier Spain

MADRID | By Tania Suárez | The Spanish scenario seems like a more attractive bet for foreign investors now. Even private consumption and the unemployment rate – Spain’s major economic weaknesses-, are showing an improvement, Mirabaud analysts believe.



interest rates

Central banks’ tightening: Learning to live without $33 trillion

WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | The party is about to end. It is a party that has lasted six years. According to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, during that time, the approximately 173 central banks that exist worldwide have lowered interest rates 520 times and pumped in approximately $33 trillion into the world through different mechanisms, some of them extremely unconventional.