Archive for the ‘Top Stories’ Category
Posted on Feb 22, 2012 05:02:33 AM
China has agreed to ease restrictions on the number of foreign films shown there, and to increase the amount film studios can make from ticket sales.
According to tracking firm Artisan Gateway, China had 10,500 cinema screens by the end of 2011. It said the figure could top 13,000 by the end of this year.
By comparison, the US has 40,000 cinema screens.
During Mr Xi's visit to California, US film giant DreamWorks Animation announced a $330m (£210m) joint venture with China.
Oriental DreamWorks will give the company further access to Chinese cinema-goers who have fallen in love with films including the studio's Kung Fu Panda 2.
Posted on Feb 21, 2012 11:02:33 AM
All over the world the central banks are printing money like it just came into fashion. The printing is disguised. China raises its reserve requirements for banks. The Bank of England does another $80 billion in QE. Euro leaders meet to discuss a $170 billion second Greek bailout.
This is all money printing by central banks. Money or additional liquidity is being injected into the global economy. When will it stop? Can it be stopped?
China slowdown
Reading the economic commentators on China, for example, and it is clear that the Middle Kingdom can do a lot more. Why will it do so? Well to ease the pain of an economic slowdown this year â auto and housing sales are tumbling and exports in decline. Then again China is also feeling the impact of monetary inflation in the global economy with sharp rises in food and energy prices. This is where the real economy gets impacted by central banks printing more and more money. They can prevent debts from overwhelming an economy and forcing deflation of asset prices. But they cannot eliminate the nasty side effect of inflation which can cause the patient almost as much distress, particularly at the lower end of the scale.
The riots in Athens or Cairo show what this looks like in the real economy. You can squeeze the standard-of-living of the poor but they will fight back. This is also bad news for the real economy because those impacted by food and energy inflation have less to spend on other things, like foreign cars in China.
Winning assets
From an investment perspective gold, silver and oil will do well in an era of money printing and not much else. Stock market speculators can use cheap money to drive up equity prices for a while. But inflation gnaws away on the profitability of companies by pushing up input costs and depressing sales and that means lower share prices in time.
Gold, silver and oil go up because of fixed supply and the desire by investors to get out of devaluing currencies. Rising oil prices are particularly bad for the real economy and will always eventually cause a recession. This is probably not a good year to choose to provoke a showdown with Iran from the point of view of the real economy.
The ArabianMoney investment newsletter is recommending instruments to allow readers to prosper in this environment and these are often options not favored by advisers more interested in their own commissions than their clientsâ interests. Rising oil prices can only be good for the UAE where we are based and investment here must therefore also make sense.
Posted on Feb 20, 2012 08:01:42 AM
Guinea's entrepreneur Moustapha Naite opened a small cyber cafe in Conakry, the capital, 10 years ago. Now his company, Mouna Internet Technologies, has grown into the country's largest web provider.
He asked some friends in the US to send him 10 computers in order to start an internet cafe.
"This is because we thought that business should adapt to the environment. We went from a small cyber cafe to become an internet service provider and a major player in the technology field in Guinea.
African Dream is broadcast on the BBC Network Africa programme every Monday morning.
Every week, one successful business man or woman will explain how they started off and what others could learn from them.
Posted on Feb 19, 2012 08:01:42 PM
If money and credit are the lifeblood of the economy, then finance is its cardiovascular system. When that system fails, as it did following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, the results can be catastrophic.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal assembled roughly 100 of the brightest minds in finance to discuss not just how to restart the global financial system, but how to reconstruct it, so both the spectacular excesses and catastrophic failures of the past decade can be avoided.
The group included financiers such as George Soros and Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, prominent academics such as Nobel Prize winners Myron Scholes and Robert Engle, and former government leaders including ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker. Using a deliberative process devised by The Journal, the group debated dozens of principles on which a new financial system might be constructed, and in the end adopted 20 of them, which are published in this report.
Participants were encouraged to keep their focus on the Future of Finance, but the current crisis was impossible to avoid. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke to the group on the same day that he unveiled his plan for a new Public-Private Investment Program to buy toxic assets from the banks. There was considerable skepticism among members of the group about whether that plan would work, but also an eagerness to suggest ways of improving its odds of success.
The group also was urged to consider the problem in all its global ramifications. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who addressed the group on its opening night, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who addressed many of the participants in New York after the close, both emphasized the importance of coming up with new institutions that can manage a world with multiple, interrelated financial centers.
2:04
WSJ’s Heidi Moore and Annelena Lobb report from The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Finance Initiative, where U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the keynote speaker. More than a hundred CEOs, investors and academics will meet to discuss the credit crisis.
The participants were challenged to set aside, as much as possible, their self-interest, and consider changes that were good for the financial system and society overall. But inevitably, self-interest reared its head. When the results of the deliberations were presented to Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, and to Prime Minister Brown, they were offered in that spirit: While they reflect the enormous knowledge and expertise of the participants, they also, to some degree, reflect their financial stakes as well.
One underlying theme of the discussions was that, in the end, Wall Street and Main Street are in this together. The people on Main Street can’t survive without a functioning finance system. And those on Wall Street can’t hope to prosper until they’ve repaired the social rift that has been graphically demonstrated by, among other things, the outburst of public anger over the bonuses paid to executives of AIG.
As several speakers pointed out, the world today faces not only a financial and economic crisis, but also a political and social crisis. To be successful, solutions must address all aspects.
— Alan Murray
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R1
Posted on Feb 19, 2012 05:01:42 PM
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Posted on Feb 19, 2012 05:02:07 AM
España continuó el jueves con su reciente serie de fuertes subastas de deuda pública al colocar 4.074 millones de euros en bonos, ligeramente por encima del máximo del rango objetivo, con lo que cubre el 34% de su objetivo anual de la captación de financiación.
Hasta la fecha, España ha recaudado 29.229 millones de euros mediante subastas y emisiones sindicadas de deuda pública, frente a su objetivo anual de emisiones brutas de 86.000 millones de euros.
El Tesoro subastaba el jueves entre 3.000 millones de euros y 4.000 millones de euros en bonos al 4% con vencimiento en julio de 2015, su actual línea de referencia a tres años, así como bonos al 4,40% a enero de 2015 y bonos al 4,30% a octubre de 2019. En total, recibió ofertas por 11.692 millones de euros.
“España ha tenido una buena demanda en la subasta de bonos de hoy, incluso pese a que la demanda se ha reducido desde los niveles excepcionalmente altos vistos con anterioridad este año”, señaló Jan von Gerich, analista jefe de Nordea.
El reciente abaratamiento de los bonos españoles ha llevado la rentabilidad de los bonos a julio de 2015 por encima del nivel de la subasta anterior, mientras que en las otras dos, que forman parte de subasta de 2011, bajó la rentabilidad.
La rentabilidad media de los bonos a julio de 2015 fue del 3,332%, por encima del 2,861% de la subasta del 2 de febrero.
“Parece una subasta bastante buena”, dijo Intermoney en Madrid.
La operación de liquidez a tres años del Banco Central Europeo aportó a los bancos casi medio billón de euros en diciembre, parte de los cuales se han invertido en bonos públicos, lo que ha contribuido a que baje de forma significativa la rentabilidad de los países periféricos en las últimas semanas. Las menores expectativas de que la situación de Grecia se solucione pronto, sin embargo, han aumentado la aversión al riesgo de los mercados.
Posted on Feb 18, 2012 02:02:07 PM
Australia ranks as one of the best places to live in the world by all indices of income, human development, healthcare and civil rights. The sixth-largest country in the world by land mass, its comparatively small population is concentrated in the highly-urbanised east of the Australian continent.
The government formally apologised in 2008 for the past wrongs committed against the indigenous Australians, who still suffer from high rates of unemployment, imprisonment and drug abuse.
The gradual dismantling of the "White Australia" immigration policy in the decades after World War II heralded an increase in the number of non-European arrivals, and migration remains a politically-sensitive issue.
Originally composed of six separate colonies of the British Empire, Australia's path to independent statehood began with the formation of a federal state in 1901 and was largely complete by World War II.
The last few remaining constitutional links with the United Kingdom were severed in 1986, although Australia remains part of the Commonwealth, and The Queen is the head of state, represented by a governor-general.
The future of the monarchy is a recurring issue in politics. In a 1999 referendum nearly 55% of Australians voted against becoming a republic.
The six states of the federation retain extensive powers, particularly over education, police, the judiciary and transport.
Australia's growing orientation towards its Asian neighbours is reflected in its economic policy. It is a key member of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, and aims to forge free trade deals with China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).
It has also played a bigger regional role, mediating between warring groups in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, as well as deploying thousands of peacekeepers in newly-independent East Timor.
The island continent combines a wide variety of landscapes. These include deserts in the interior, hills and mountains, tropical rainforests, and densely-populated coastal strips with long beaches and coral reefs off the shoreline.
Through its isolation from other continents, Australia has developed an abundance of unique plant and animal life, most famously marsupials such as the kangaroo.
Posted on Feb 18, 2012 05:01:31 AM
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, you likely will soon.
Traffic to the website—which lets users create online scrapbooks to share images of projects or coveted products—has grown tenfold over the past six months. In January, the number of visitors on Pinterest.com was almost a third of that on Twitter.com.
Pinterest has found favor with e-commerce retailers, many of which have added its “Pin it” button to their websites, but also become the subject of blogosphere chatter over use of affiliate marketing. Sarah Needleman has details on The News Hub.
There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn’t sure how it is going to make money.
“Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table,” said Jeremy Levine, a board member of Pinterest and a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet.”
Pinterest’s situation isn’t unusual for an Internet start-up; some may even call it cliché. After watching the growth of Facebook Inc. and Twitter—both of which grew quickly at first without having a business model—Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann said he is following the same path and will worry about details later.
“My hope is that if we build a service that a lot of people use to plan and discover things, that will be really valuable,” said the 29-year-old entrepreneur, a former Google Inc. employee.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann in San Francisco last month.
Mr. Silbermann co-founded Cold Brew Labs Inc. in 2008 and launched Pinterest, the company’s only product, the following year. It has raised $37.5 million from Silicon Valley angel investors including Yelp Inc. Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman and top venture firms such as Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz.
The closely held company wouldn’t disclose financial figures, but isn’t yet making much revenue and is unprofitable. Pinterest is currently valued at around $200 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The prospect of making money off of social-networking sites, which are usually free to users, has been a challenge. The options for Pinterest suggested by analysts so far, which center around selling targeted advertising and data on users’ interests, aren’t terribly original and run the risk of alienating users—problems faced by bigger social-networking sites such as Facebook.
But people are flocking to the site. Pinterest last month attracted more than 11 million unique visitors, more than double the 4.9 million who visited the site in November, according to comScore. Those who visited spent nearly 100 minutes on the site in January, compared with 19 minutes on professional social-networking site LinkedIn, it said.
“I haven’t seen another stand-alone site that has reached 10 million visitors faster,” said comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman.
The research firm said roughly 68% of Pinterest’s users are women and many are in the Midwest. Users must be invited to join.
What’s Pinterest?
- It’s a free online scrapbook that people use to find and share images on the Web.
- You organize your Pinterest page by creating “pin boards” and giving these labels like “my style” or “favorite places.”
- In January, it had more than 11 million unique visitors.
Retailers are looking to piggyback off its popularity. Bergdorf Goodman, a unit of Neiman Marcus Group Inc., has begun actively trying to develop a following for its high-end clothing and accessories on Pinterest, and Lands’ End Canvas, an extension of Lands’ End, part of Sears Holdings Corp., last month added a widget to its product pages, making it easier for browsers to immediately pin, or repost, images of the looks they like to their Pinterest profiles.
Etsy.com, an online crafts marketplace with 50,600 Pinterest followers, is using Pinterest’s price display feature. That means that when Pinterest users “pin” say, an Etsy chair on a board for their followers to see, the image of the chair will automatically include the chair’s title, and a banner showing the price.
It has also been a boon for some small businesses. “Our traffic converts to sales,” said Amy Squires, co-founder of The Wedding Chicks LLC, which posted about $540,000 in revenue last year, up from $340,000 in 2010. The four-year-old online retailer of wedding-party gifts, which joined Pinterest last summer, said Pinterest now brings in more than double as many monthly visitors to its website than Facebook and Twitter.
Warby Parker Inc., an eyewear brand sold online, has seen the number of visitors to its website coming directly from Pinterest quadruple over the past four months, according to Warby’s co-CEO, Neil Blumenthal. Pinterest allows us to market the company’s products “in an organic and authentic way,” he said.
Like other websites with user-generated content such as Google’s YouTube, Pinterest has procedures in place to deal with the posting of copyrighted images and other material, where content owners can report a violation and have the content taken down. Pinterest said copyright problems “haven’t been a significant issue so far.”
In recent days, Pinterest has attracted some online ire for not disclosing the use of what is known as affiliate marketing, a prevalent form of online advertising that companies such as Amazon.com Inc. also use. Affiliate marketing lets merchants place links to their Web stores on related sites in return for giving up a percentage of every sale that results from those links.
However, affiliate marketing isn’t a major part of Pinterest’s business model right now, according to the company and its venture capitalists.
Another concern raised by some: Pinterest’s terms of use include broad language giving it the right to “sell” and “modify” its member content, creating the potential for future privacy issues.
So far that hasn’t stopped UncommonGoods LLC, an online gift retailer in Brooklyn, N.Y. UncommonGoods began using Pinterest in October after noticing traffic coming to its website from the social network, according to David Bolotsky, its founder.
In recent weeks, traffic from Pinterest to the UncommonGoods website has begun approaching and even rivaling traffic that comes from Facebook, Mr. Bolotsky said. “The overlap between Pinterest users and our customers is just perfect,” he said. Near logos on its website linking to the retailer’s Twitter and Facebook pages, the company recently added a new icon.
“Follow me on Pinterest,” it reads.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com and Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com
Posted on Feb 17, 2012 02:02:08 AM
Burma, also known as Myanmar, was long considered a pariah state, isolated from the rest of the world and with an appalling human rights record.
The generals who ran Burma stood accused of gross human rights abuses, including the forcible relocation of civilians and the widespread use of forced labour, including children.
The largest ethnic group is the Burman people, who are related to the Tibetans and the Chinese. Burman dominance over Karen, Shan, Rakhine, Mon, Chin, Kachin and other minorities has been the source of considerable ethnic tension and has fuelled intermittent separatist rebellions.
Military offensives against insurgents have uprooted many thousands of civilians. Ceasefire deals signed in late 2011 and early 2012 with rebels of the Karen and Shan ethnic groups suggested a new determination to end the long-running conflicts.
A largely rural, densely forested country, Burma is the world's largest exporter of teak and a principal source of jade, pearls, rubies and sapphires. It is endowed with extremely fertile soil and has important offshore oil and gas deposits. However, its people remain very poor.
The economy is one of the least developed in the world, and is suffering the effects of decades of stagnation, mismanagement, and isolation. Key industries have long been controlled by the military, and corruption is rife. The military has also been accused of large-scale trafficking in heroin, of which Burma is a major exporter.
Among others, the EU, United States and Canada have imposed economic sanctions on Burma. Of the major economies, only China, India and South Korea have invested in the country.
Burma is festooned with the symbols of Buddhism. Thousands of pagodas throng its ancient towns; these have been a focus for an increasingly important tourism industry.
But while tourism has been a magnet for foreign investment, its benefits have so far hardly touched the people.
Posted on Feb 16, 2012 05:02:08 PM
It’s no secret that America’s labor unions have become foreign policy interventionists in recent years, seizing on any alibi to try to scuttle every conceivable trade opening. Now it’s Georgia’s turn to feel the wrath of organized U.S. labor—and worry about its effects on the political calculations of a U.S. President known to bend to union wishes.
In a hearing scheduled for today before the U.S. Trade Representative, the Washington-based union giant AFL-CIO will seek to strip the little country in the Caucasus (population: five million) of its preferred-trading-partner status. The petition jeopardizes some of the $750 million or so in annual trade between the two countries—a fivefold increase over the past decade, most of it accounted by U.S. exports. This kind of money may be a blip to the American economy. For Georgia, hobbled by its breakaway regions and still recovering from Russia’s invasion in 2008, it’s nearly seven percent of gross domestic product.
So what’s the AFL-CIO’s beef? They claim the pro-Western government of President Mikheil Saakashvili has been the scourge of the working man ever since it came to power in 2003. The accusations include “draconian anti-union, anti-worker” measures, “severe limitations on freedom of association and collective bargaining,” and promotion of “the use in certain circumstances of forced labor.”
What the AFL-CIO really objects to is Georgia’s 2006 labor code, which forbids employers from discriminating on the basis of union activity but allows them to refuse collective bargaining and fire workers without “cause,” providing one month’s severance. The Saakashvili government has also sinned by reminding employers they aren’t required to transfer 1% of worker salaries to union coffers, an old Soviet throwback.
Well, comrades, welcome to life in the private sector. The 2006 reforms have helped fuel a 57% rise in private-sector employment. That’s all the more important as Mr. Saakashvili has sought to shrink the rolls of state employees (another Soviet hangover), fueling double-digit unemployment. As for charges of “forced labor,” the AFL-CIO is referring to a set of overtime provisions in the reforms, such as those in the event of a natural or industrial disaster. For all that, the labor code still demands a maximum 41-hour regular work-week and a minimum of 24 days of paid vacation.
Mr. Saakashvili is scheduled to meet President Obama in Washington next week, and with luck they’ll have better things to discuss than AFL-CIO attempts to micromanage Georgia’s labor market. Georgia’s a small country, but it has also become an important symbol of a few things the West has traditionally stood up for, like democracy, free markets, and the sovereignty of small states threatened by large and aggressive neighbors. That common agenda is worth defending against busybodies and interventionists everywhere, whether they’re in Moscow or Washington.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 14
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