Cleaning Up on Fracking’s Dirty Water; 100 years ago, it took about a barrel of water to get 10 barrels of oil out of the ground. Today, generating the equivalent amount of shale-gas energy requires five times as much water

SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 2013

Cleaning Up on Fracking’s Dirty Water

By LESLIE P. NORTON | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

With two recent acquisitions, Ecolab has become a top provider of water-treatment services used in energy extraction. Why the stock could still gush 20% or more higher.

It’s often said that 100 years ago, it took about a barrel of water to get 10 barrels of oil out of the ground. Today, generating the equivalent amount of shale-gas energy requires five times as much water, which is why hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, “is more of a water issue than it is about gas,” says Deane Dray, the water analyst for Citigroup. That has enhanced the long-term prospects of water-related stocks, including Ecolab (ticker: ECL). “The opportunities we’re seeing in water supply and water treatment are exciting,” says Ian Simm, CEO of Impax Asset Management in London and a fan of St. Paul, Minn.–based Ecolab. Despite a run-up in Ecolab’s stock this past year, Impax believes it can still rise further, citing the company’s strong management, the stock’s steady uptrend in a volatile environment, and its “mission-critical products,” says Simm. As much as 140 billion gallons of water are used in the 35,000 wells fracked annually in the U.S. Most of it simply disappears underground; the rest is rendered so toxic by the process that communities are wary of fracking. Plenty of companies will treat the water, but two specialists are Nalco and Champion, both owned by Ecolab.

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Dog days for hedge funds forced to cut fees

April 28, 2013 5:50 pm

Dog days for hedge funds forced to cut fees

By Sam Jones

The definition of a hedge fund, people used to joke, was a fee structure in search of an investor to fleece. However, four years on from the financial crisis, and with so far little to show for it, hedge funds’ notoriously high fees are looking less and less definable, let alone defensible. Some investors now hope that the industry’s totemic “two and 20” fee structure – 2 per cent of assets and 20 per cent of returns annually; a formula that has made many managers fantastically wealthy – may finally be beginning to crack. Challenging fees is no easy task for investors, however. Thanks to the crisis, they may well have more clout than ever before when it comes to negotiating with managers, but they are also themselves more desperate. In a time of ultra-low bond yields and high equity volatility, hedge funds are proving an irresistible draw. And as such, investing in hedge funds still seems to be a game rigged in the managers’ – and not the investors’ – favour. Read more of this post

Malaysia Arson, Intimidation Cases Mount as Election Draws Near; “The violence is much more than previous elections”

Malaysia Arson, Intimidation Cases Mount as Election Draws Near

More than 1,400 cases of arson, fighting and other election-related crimes have been recorded by police since Malaysia’s parliament was dissolved for polls which will determine whether Najib Razak’s government can extend its five-decade grip on power.

“The violence is much more than previous elections,” Irene Fernandez, co-chairwoman of the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections’ code of conduct committee, said by phone. “The increased tension is being driven by the fear of racial riots” and broader implementation of Islamic law among non-Muslims that’s being created in the media, she said.

At least two more campaign offices were torched by suspected arsonists this weekend as politicians held rallies nationwide, the Star newspaper reported today, citing police. The authorities earlier confirmed they were investigating three similar incidents last week, including a small explosion at an event attended by 3,000 supporters of Prime Minister Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition ahead of the May 5 vote.

Najib’s government is facing its fiercest challenge to date, after retaining power five years ago by its narrowest margin since Malaysia’s independence from Britain in 1957. The markets have priced in Barisan Nasional retaining power in next month’s vote with a simple majority, though there is a growing risk of a hung parliament or the opposition gaining control, RHB Capital Bhd. (RHBC) said in an April 1 report. Read more of this post

Loans Borrowed Against Pensions Squeeze Retirees with their high interest rates; “It’s simply a terrible deal”

April 27, 2013

Loans Borrowed Against Pensions Squeeze Retirees

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

To retirees, the offers can sound like the answer to every money worry: convert tomorrow’s pension checks into today’s hard cash. But these offers, known as pension advances, are having devastating financial consequences for a growing number of older Americans, threatening their retirement savings and plunging them further into debt. The advances, federal and state authorities say, are not advances at all, but carefully disguised loans that require borrowers to sign over all or part of their monthly pension checks. They carry interest rates that are often many times higher than those on credit cards. In lean economic times, people with public pensions — military veterans, teachers, firefighters, police officers and others — are being courted particularly aggressively by pension-advance companies, which operate largely outside of state and federal banking regulations, but are now drawing scrutiny from Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The pitches come mostly via the Web or ads in local circulars. Read more of this post

Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

by MATT TAIBBI

APRIL 25, 2013

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps. Read more of this post

Bitcoin: the Berlin streets where you can shop with virtual money; “There is no middle man involved.. I like the fact that Bitcoin scares people in suits, because if this thing were to really take off, it would bankrupt a lot of bankers.”

Bitcoin: the Berlin streets where you can shop with virtual money

The digital currency is rising in popularity among traders in the rebellious Kreuzberg area of Germany’s capital

Kate Connolly and Guy Grandjean in Berlin

guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 April 2013 11.08 BST

In Kreuzberg, Berlin, Bitcoin has expanded off the internet into the local economy.Link to video: Bitcoin: world’s fastest growing currency migrates off the internet

Nadim Chebli remembers well the first of his customers who decided to pay for the records they bought with virtual currency rather than cash or credit cards. “I’d only just agreed to accept Bitcoins,” said the 36-year-old owner of the Long Player record shop, “and the first sales I made in it came pretty quickly, from a guy about my age who bought Tom Waits’s The Big Time and a young woman who bought a Beatles compilation from 1967.” In the few months since Chebli signed up to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, he finds it hard to come up with definitive characteristics for the “typical” Bitcoin user who walks off the street into what he describes as his “vinyl living room”. “There’s no typical age group, or sex, just, well, regular folk,” he said. Florentina Martens has had the same experience since opening her Parisian-style cafe Floor’s two months ago just a couple of streets away. “There is not a prototype Bitcoin payer,” she said. “It’s random people. Not only nerds, let me put it that way.”

Like Chebli, Martens, whose Kersenvlaai (cherry cake) from her native Maastricht is rated as one of the best culinary offerings of the area, says she decided to accept Bitcoins because of the ease, cheapness and transparency of its payment system. “It’s an easier way of digital payment than credit cards, which cost me a lot of money as a business and to which I’m forced to sign up for years,” she says. Read more of this post

Can You Get a Refund From a Bad Hedge Fund?

April 26, 2013, 5:08 p.m. ET

Can You Get a Refund From a Bad Hedge Fund?

By JASON ZWEIG

Disgruntled hedge-fund investors might be able to make new use of an old technique to erase some of their losses. Earlier this month, David Blass, chief counsel of the division of trading and markets at the Securities and Exchange Commission, gave a speech before an investment-law group in which he warned that many “private funds”—hedge funds, private-equity portfolios and the like—might be breaking the law when they sell to investors. Mr. Blass’s message wasn’t entirely new. Unless they can meet a series of tests to be exempt, private-fund managers have long been required to register as broker-dealers if they solicit outside investors by selling interests in their funds. Registering compels them to follow SEC rules on how they sell their wares. But Mr. Blass’s speech also threw a fresh spotlight on the question of whether the hedge-fund industry has been following the law. And it reminded alert investors of an unusual—but rare and difficult—way to bail out of a rotten fund.

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The Criminal Mind: Advances in genetics and neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of violent behavior—as well as ideas about how to prevent and punish crime

April 26, 2013, 7:28 p.m. ET

The Criminal Mind

Advances in genetics and neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of violent behavior—as well as ideas about how to prevent and punish crime.

By ADRIAN RAINE

Donta Page’s brain scan, left, shows the reduced functioning of the ventral prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain that helps regulate emotions and control impulses—compared to a normal brain, right.

In studying brain scans of criminals, researchers are discovering tell-tale signs of violent tendencies. WSJ’s Jason Bellini speaks with Professor Adrian Raine about his latest discoveries. The scientific study of crime got its start on a cold, gray November morning in 1871, on the east coast of Italy. Cesare Lombroso, a psychiatrist and prison doctor at an asylum for the criminally insane, was performing a routine autopsy on an infamous Calabrian brigand named Giuseppe Villella. Lombroso found an unusual indentation at the base of Villella’s skull. From this singular observation, he would go on to become the founding father of modern criminology. Lombroso’s controversial theory had two key points: that crime originated in large measure from deformities of the brain and that criminals were an evolutionary throwback to more primitive species. Criminals, he believed, could be identified on the basis of physical characteristics, such as a large jaw and a sloping forehead. Based on his measurements of such traits, Lombroso created an evolutionary hierarchy, with Northern Italians and Jews at the top and Southern Italians (like Villella), along with Bolivians and Peruvians, at the bottom. These beliefs, based partly on pseudoscientific phrenological theories about the shape and size of the human head, flourished throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lombroso was Jewish and a celebrated intellectual in his day, but the theory he spawned turned out to be socially and scientifically disastrous, not least by encouraging early-20th-century ideas about which human beings were and were not fit to reproduce—or to live at all. Read more of this post

Bee venom has become the buzziest antiaging ingredient. The ingredient appears in a number of high-end beauty products from Guerlain to Manuka Doctor; “Your brain thinks that [you’ve been] bitten and it sends back a signal that the skin needs to heal itself”

April 26, 2013, 2:50 p.m. ET

Here’s the Sting

Bee venom has become the most buzzed-about antiaging ingredient

By ELIZABETH HOLMES

The toxic ingredient appears in a growing number of high-end anti-aging serums, masks and moisturizers from various companies. Manuka Doctor, a line from New Zealand, boasts a purifying process that removes extraneous elements such as pollen dust or bee bits. The U.K. brand Heaven Skincare claims to use a secret ingredient that activates the bee venom.

The key ingredient is said to improve skin by setting off an elaborate chain reaction. “Your brain thinks that [you’ve been] bitten and it sends back a signal that the skin needs to heal itself,” said Maria Hatzistefanis, founder of Rodial, a London-based skin care line known for its use of exotic ingredients, which recently debuted bee venom products. Once this brain signal has been sent, as the theory goes, blood rushes to the area, triggering an increase in the production of wrinkle-smoothing collagen. Deborah Mitchell, maker of Heaven, describes venom products as a topical, natural alternative to Botox. “Straight away, the skin tightens and firms,” she said, noting that many users report a slight tingling—a sign the product is working. Read more of this post

Instant noodle sales top 100 billion units a year

Instant noodle sales top 100 billion units a year

“The results show that instant noodles have become a global standard dish,” said Norio Sakurai, an official with the Osaka-based association. -AFP
Fri, Apr 26, 2013, AFP

Tokyo – Global sales of instant noodles have topped 100 billion units annually, an industry group said Friday – more than one monthly serving of the portable meal for every person on the planet. Five decades after the easy-to-cook food’s launch, sales climbed again last year with China, Indonesia and Japan rounding out the world’s top-three consumers, according to the Japan-based World Instant Noodles Association. “The results show that instant noodles have become a global standard dish,” said Norio Sakurai, an official with the Osaka-based association. “We think global sales will continue growing particularly in some developing nations.” Of the 101.4 billion units sold worldwide last year, China, including Hong Kong, accounted for 44.0 billion servings, followed by Indonesia with 14.1 billion units, Japan at 5.4 billion units and Vietnam close behind with 5.1 billion units. Instant noodles, which come dried or pre-cooked and can be boiled quickly with accompanying flavour packets, were invented in Japan by Momofuku Ando, founder of major noodle maker Nissin Foods, in 1958.

Weak yen puts POSCO, Hyundai out on limb

2013-04-26 17:01

Weak yen puts POSCO, Hyundai out on limb

Korean automobile, steel and electronics manufacturers are singing the blues due to falling margins from exports, caused by the yen’s weakness, while Japanese rivals are seeing an uptick in global sales

By Na Jeong-ju

South Korean firms are suffering heavy setbacks in global markets due to the weakening yen, while their Japanese rivals are rebounding strongly on their price competitiveness. Hardest hit are Korean automobile, steel and electronics manufacturers that compete neck-and-neck with Japanese firms in major markets around the world. The yen’s weakness has cut the earnings of Korean exporters. Hyundai Motor, the country’s largest automaker, said its first-quarter net profit dropped 14.9 percent from a year to 2.08 trillion won ($1.8 billion), compared with 2.4 trillion won a year earlier. In the January-March period, sales rose 6 percent on-year to 21.3 trillion won, but operating profit dropped 10.7 percent to 1.8 trillion won. “We earlier predicted the yen-dollar rate would move between 86 to 87 yen in the first quarter, but the average rate was 94 yen. That negatively affected our profitability,” an executive of Hyundai Motor said. Hyundai Motor, which competes with Toyota, Honda and other Japanese carmakers, could lose its competitive edge for some time as the yen’s weakness is expected to continue for the time being. Kia Motors, the second-largest automaker affiliated with Hyundai Motor, also announced its first-quarter net profit fell 34.7 percent from a year earlier to 783.9 billion won during the same period. Its operating profit dropped 35.1 percent to 704.2 billion won, as sales fell 6 percent to 11.08 trillion won. POSCO, the country’s leading steelmaker, also suffered damage. Its first-quarter net profit sank 54 percent from a year earlier to 292 billion won. Sales dipped 10.6 percent on-year to 14.58 trillion won, and operating income also dropped 4.7 percent to 717 billion won. The poor performances by Korean exporters are in stark contrast to a strong recovery of Japanese firms. Read more of this post

Beyond Korean style: Shaping a new growth formula; Reduce housing payments + End the education “arms race.” + Create an entrepreneurial SME sector

Beyond Korean style: Shaping a new growth formula

April 2013 | byWonsik Choi, Richard Dobbs, Dongrok Suh, Jan Mischke, Eunjo Chon, Hangjip Cho, Boyoung Kim, and Hyunmin Kim

Beginning in the 1960s, South Korea has set economic-development records with a growth formula that focused on heavy-industry and manufactured exports. GDP has tripled in just the past 20 years, and South Korea became the first nation to go from being a recipient of aid from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to being a member of its donor committee. South Korea is the leading supplier of LCD screens, memory chips, and mobile phones and is the world’s number-five automaker. Yet the nation’s GDP growth is increasingly decoupled from the lives of its middle- income citizens. The number of middle-income households—earning 50 to 150 percent of median income—has fallen from 75.4 percent of the population to 67.5 percent since 1990, and more than half of middle-income households are cashflow constrained when the full costs of housing payments are counted. The squeeze contributes to trends that could affect future growth, including a plummeting personal-saving rate and one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Beyond Korean style: Shaping a new growth formula, a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), explores the causes of these economic challenges and makes specific recommendations for combatting them. Among the report’s findings: Read more of this post

Changing times force Taiwan to raise welfare spending

24 April 2013 Last updated at 21:05 GMT

Changing times force Taiwan to raise welfare spending

By Cindy SuiBBC News, Taipei

Working six days a week at a Taipei noodle stall, Hsu Ching-ni earns only $500 a month, not nearly enough to support her family of seven including three children, or even pay rent.

Instead, they have to survive on welfare. “I’m the only one in my family working. My husband suffered a stroke and can’t work. My parents-in-law are elderly. If it weren’t for the welfare, I don’t know where we’d be,” says Ms Hsu. The number of people like her in Taiwan is on the rise. But whereas in previous decades residents mostly depended on themselves, the government has been forced to restructure its social welfare system to help them. Read more of this post