Pablo Pardo | With his trade war, Trump has accelerated the slowdown in China, and now the world´s second economy is buying fewer goods and services from the US. And from the rest of the world in general. Not only Apple has declared that its profits are going to be reduced by China´s slowdown. Also, for example, its main rival outside China, Samsung.
The re-opening of the primary debt market for companies on both sides of the Atlantic, from which companies in the high yield segment also benefit, is good news given that it shows the reduction of investors’s fears and, more important, means a respite for the companies able to access again market financing. The primary high yield market in the US accumulate 41 days without operations, the longest drought in the registers of Dealogic, which began in 1995.
Barry Eichengreen via Caixin | What would have to happen for this to be a tranquil year economically, financially, and politically? Answer: a short list of threats to stability would have to be averted.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) marked its fifth birthday in September 2018, though there was probably less to celebrate than the Chinese authorities might have wished. Five years after President Xi presented the initiative to the world in a speech in Kazakhstan, the BRI is facing pressures on three fronts.
| When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 it sent significant numbers of businesses to the wall. Investment banks had been encouraging enormous investment in dot-com ventures by launching Initial Public Offers (IPOs) allowing investors and entrepreneurs to cash in on vast fortunes by selling off shares in their companies.
A combination of proper pension reforms, better allocation of state and private-sector assets, and greater utilization of new technologies can help China to defuse the demographic bomb and mitigate the ageing shock for its economy and society. Analysts at AXA IM briefly summarises the pillars of China’s pension system.
via The Conversation | Parts of the federal government have been closed since midnight on Dec. 22, making it the second-longest shutdown on record. It’s also the third since President Donald Trump took office. The immediate and most visible impact of a shutdown is in the government’s day-to-day operations.
Sheng Songcheng and Shen Xinfeng via Caixin | Speculation has flared up that the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is considering buying stocks. But there are no valid reasons for the central bank to buy shares directly or through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track indexes or baskets of stocks.
The commercial tensions between the US and China and the signs of a slowdown in China will surely serve in 2019 to justify the return of volatility to markets and conceal an aspect which, for Intermoney, will again be really important at the beginning of 2019: the movements of sovereign funds.
BBVA has announced that it is creating a team of 2,000 data scientists to develop new digital products and services. It is only one of the many companies jumping on the Big Data waggon. But do these companies understand the dangers of Big Data analysis, and in particular the algorithms that underlie them?