Ten years after the financial crisis, offshore centres totalled $4.6 trillion at end-2017, compared with $4.3 trillion at end-March 2008. But we can keep talking about financial integration, cooperating on tax matters and so on.
What does Latin America’s bumper election year hold in store for the continent? It is unclear, but as the 2018 regional report on Latin America from Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) stresses, “structural transformation takes time and patience, which many citizens no longer have to spare.”
By Alicia Garcia Herrero and Jianwei Xu via Caixin | It is not the first time that the world has been caught in the China-U.S. crossfire, but the US protectionist move looks different this time. In fact, they are broader-based both as they involve a much larger number of products and in that they also target the global competition for US companies and not only the US market.
The mythical chain of toy stores Toys “R” Us is closing, reflecting not only the power of Amazon in the US retail sector, but also the end of the historic “mall” and the impact of monetary normalisation.
The market behaviour in Q2 continues to be one of de-risking, says Mark Tinker Head of Framlington Equities Asia. “It is clear that the noise traders who came so enthusiastically into equity markets around the turn of the calendar year have gone again before the start of the new financial year, taking their leverage with them”, he explains.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised its growth estimates upwards for the Spanish economy for the next two years, so Spain is now the European country which is growing the most, and number two amongst the developed markets, after the US.
The reasons behind the cooling off in activity on both sides of the Atlantic during Q1’18 are more important than the cooling off itself. In fact, the characteristics of these reasons are those which allow us to have confidence about the improvement in activity in the spring in both the US and Europe.
Saudi Arabian Oil Co. is ready for its initial public offering in the second half of 2018. Bloomberg published on Friday selected data from what it reported to be the company’s 1H17 IFRS financial statement. However, Saudi Aramco said in a statement these were “inaccurate”. If the reported data is accurate, BoAML’s experts make the following observations based on already published fiscal data.
The tech stocks that fuelled the last bull market have seen their share prices plummet as an onslaught of bad headlines takes its toll. According to Neil Dwane, Global Strategist at Allianz Global Investors, “more regulation and taxation are almost certainly on the horizon amid growing concerns about privacy, governance and profitability.”
While the US bank’s chief economist in pointing to systemic risks, financial bubbles and market complacency, his colleagues in Spain believe “this tale about market manipulation is not real.”