Fixing Thailand’s broken politics requires the government, the opposition and the monarchy all to change

Fixing Thailand’s broken politics requires the government, the opposition and the monarchy all to change

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

YET again, anarchy threatens Thailand. Rival crowds of pro- and anti-government protesters have gathered in Bangkok. The (far more numerous) antis have occupied government ministries, prompting the government to extend special security laws across the capital. The government has seen off a no-confidence motion in parliament but its future remains in doubt, in the face of challenges not just on the streets but also in the courts. Violence may return. Blame for the resurgence of the chaos that plagued Thailand in 2006-10 lies with the government, the opposition and the institution to which they both look for their legitimacy—the monarchy. Read more of this post

Malaysian Westport Billionaire May Let Shipping Lines Invest in Malaysian Terminals

Billionaire May Let Shipping Lines Invest in Malaysian Terminals

Malaysian billionaire G. Gnanalingam said he is open to shipping-line clients investing in Westports (WPRTS) Holdings Bhd.’s terminals to help retain their business as it expands port capacity. “We won’t sell equity in the port but will welcome joint-venture terminals,” Westports founder and Chairman Gnanalingam, 69, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur yesterday. “The advantage is that the customer will stay.” Read more of this post

What a Higher Minimum Wage Does for Workers and the Economy

What a Higher Minimum Wage Does for Workers and the Economy

By Peter Coy and Susan Berfield November 27, 2013

Tom Wolfe himself couldn’t have imagined a better New York juxtaposition. Pizza, Pepsi, and hot chicken wings were out on the table one November evening at Strive New York, an agency in East Harlem that helps ex-convicts and other chronically unemployed people get and keep jobs. Luz Droz, 32, who has a 10-month-old son, explained that she was trying to turn things around after “a little situation in my life,” which turned out to be two prison sentences totaling eight years for dealing drugs and passing bad checks. She detests being on welfare but was turned down recently for a minimum-wage job at Burlington Coat Factory (BURL). “I thought I was going to get it,” she said. “Once I get a job, I’m off to the races.” Read more of this post

UBS shrinks corporate advisory team for rich in emerging markets

UBS shrinks corporate advisory team for rich in emerging markets

5:50am EST

By Katharina Bart and Dinesh Nair

ZURICH/DUBAI (Reuters) – Swiss lender UBS is scaling back corporate advisory and investment banking services for ultra-rich clients in some key emerging market countries to reduce overlaps with other departments, three sources familiar with the plan said. The bank’s Corporate Advisory Group (CAG) offers services such as advice on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and initial public offerings (IPOs), financing options and structured equity products to ultra-high-net-worth individuals and entrepreneurs who were the bank’s wealth management customers. Read more of this post

There Are 199,235 “Ultra High Net Worth” People In The World With Over $30 Million In Assets

There Are 199,235 “Ultra High Net Worth” People In The World With Over $30 Million In Assets

Tyler Durden on 11/29/2013 10:39 -0500

It is no secret that the bulk of “very rich people” in recent years has been created in Asia (where some $15 trillion in liquidity has entered broad circulation in just the past five years). As the FT reports, “Asia is producing more new wealth than any other part of the world at any point in history. Over the past five years, the assets of rich individuals have grown at triple the rate of the wealthy elsewhere, while the number of rich people has increased by twice that of other regions. Their number grew by almost 10 per cent to reach 3.7m last year, according to the survey, while their wealth expanded by 12 per cent to $12tn.” However, to find the truly ultra-high-net-worthy (UHNW), those with over $30 million in net assets, one has to go to the US and Europe – the places where Ben’s print baby print policy has most aggressively inflated the latest asset bubble, making the richest richester. “More people from the US and Europe entered this club in the past year than from anywhere else – the population in China and Brazil actually declined slightly.” So how many ultra-high-net-worth individuals are there? The answer: 199,235. Read more of this post

The struggle of low-income workers, many in retailing, is adding momentum to efforts to increase the federal minimum wage

November 28, 2013

On Register’s Other Side, Little to Spend

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

In many stores around the country, the workers stocking the shelves and ringing up the gifts are at the very heart of this season’s retail lament —many Americans are so financially strapped that projections for holiday sales have grown bleaker by the week. And more so than in years past, the focus is on retail workers as more stores open on Thanksgiving Day, requiring many more to work on the holiday. Even if they have the option of staying home, those still stuck at the bottom economic rung long after the recession’s end have little choice but to take on extra shifts. Read more of this post

The founder of one of the earliest virtual currencies has re-emerged with a rival toBitcoin, more than five years after his first venture, e-gold, was shut down by the US Department of Justice

November 28, 2013 2:44 pm

E-gold founder backs new Bitcoin rival

By Stephen Foley in New York

The founder of one of the earliest virtual currencies has re-emerged with a rival toBitcoin, more than five years after his first venture, e-gold, was shut down by the US Department of Justice. Douglas Jackson is consulting for a membership organisation called Coeptis that hopes to launch a new version of his gold-backed currency, which attracted millions of users at its height. Read more of this post

Regulators want banks and asset managers that arrange deals for collateralized loan obligations to have some skin in the game

Loan Rules Raise Squawks

Lenders, Managers Say Keeping Skin in the Game Could Hamper CLO Market

STEPHANIE ARMOUR

Nov. 28, 2013 8:46 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—An attempt by regulators to prevent the kind of lax underwriting that exacerbated the financial crisis is running into resistance from corporations, investors and asset managers who said new rules will cripple a $300 billion market for loans to U.S. companies. Regulators want those who manage or arrange collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, to retain some of the loans’ risk on their books. Policy makers said requiring such skin in the game will ensure loans sliced, packaged and sold to investors are of high quality and help protect against default. Read more of this post

No quick exit from West’s economic malaise

No quick exit from West’s economic malaise

2:16am EST

By Alan Wheatley, Global Economics Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – Ending the Great Stagnation that is taxing Western policy makers may depend as much on the Chinese Communist Party as it does on the world’s leading central banks. Six years after the global financial crisis erupted, there is any number of explanations why Europe cannot shake off a Japan-style balance-sheet recession and why the United States is experiencing sub-par growth and high unemployment. Read more of this post

Mexico’s Surprising Engineering Strength

Mexico’s Surprising Engineering Strength

By Brendan Case November 27, 2013

As global automakers pour billions of dollars into their Mexican factories, Marcos Perez is trying to make sure the nation’s future goes beyond assembly lines. The head of product development at Ford Motor’s (F) Mexico unit, Perez has helped the company almost triple its local engineering staff, to nearly 1,000, since 2010. His engineers have filed for 40 U.S. patents in the last three years, including one for a low-cost crash protection system that boosts safety ratings without adding much weight or cost. “It’s an inflection point,” Perez says. “We used to be a simple-assembly kind of country, and we moved to a truly core manufacturing country, where most of our assembly plants are hitting record numbers on productivity, on quality, on cost. Now we are transitioning from Made in Mexico to Designed in Mexico.” Read more of this post

In Bogle Family, It’s Either Passive or Aggressive; While Vanguard Group’s Founder May Be the Father of Passive Investing, His Fund-Manager Son Sides With Active Stock-Picking

In Bogle Family, It’s Either Passive or Aggressive

While Vanguard Group’s Founder May Be the Father of Passive Investing, His Fund-Manager Son Sides With Active Stock-Picking

LIAM PLEVEN

Updated Nov. 28, 2013 5:59 p.m. ET

On their regular Friday morning phone calls, Jack Bogle and his son, John, catch up on family news. Sometimes they will compare notes on a particularly gnarly crossword. But the conversation often turns to a big topic among the Bogle clan: the best strategy for investing in stocks. For them, it is more than just shooting the breeze. Read more of this post

How Canada’s pension funds changed their conservative ways to become global buyout kings

How Canada’s pension funds changed their conservative ways to become global buyout kings

Katia Dmitrieva and Matthew Campbell, Bloomberg News | 28/11/13 | Last Updated:28/11/13 7:32 AM ET

Mark Wiseman, the chief executive of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, walked into the high-end New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s looking for a suit. He left empty-handed. “I couldn’t afford anything there — I probably still can’t,” said Wiseman, sitting in the $192.8 billion fund’s headquarters in Toronto last month. “Is that where I shop? No, thanks. But there are a lot of people who do.” Read more of this post

Howard Marks: “Markets Are Riskier Than At Any Time Since The Depths Of The 2008/9 Crisis”

Howard Marks: “Markets Are Riskier Than At Any Time Since The Depths Of The 2008/9 Crisis”

Tyler Durden on 11/27/2013 20:43 -0500

In Feb 2007, Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks wrote ‘The Race to the Bottom’, providing a timely warning about the capital market behavior that ultimately led to the mortgage meltdown of 2007 and the crisis of 2008 as he worried about “carelessness-induced behavior.” In the pre-crisis years, as described in his 2007 memo, the race to the bottom manifested itself in a number of ways, and as Marks notes, “now we’re seeing another upswing in risky behavior.” Simply put, Marks warns, “when people start to posit that fundamentals don’t matter and momentum will carry the day, it’s an omen we must heed,” adding that “the riskiest thing in the investment world is the belief that there’s no risk.” Read more of this post

How Poland Became Europe’s Most Dynamic Economy

How Poland Became Europe’s Most Dynamic Economy

By Stephan Faris November 27, 2013

The oldest coffee shop in Warsaw has been in operation nearly without interruption since the end of the 18th century. In the upstairs room, a young Frédéric Chopin played one of his last concerts before emigrating to Paris. During the Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945, the cafe was strictly for Germans. When the city rose up at the end of the war, the building, like much of the old city around it, was completely destroyed—then reconstructed from photographs in the years following. The cafe was state-owned under communism and privatized in 1989 after the fall of the Iron Curtain, sold to a journalist and a jazz musician. “And now,” says Polish businessman Adam Ringer, sitting in the cafe in early October, “it’s been bought by an international company.” Read more of this post

Flirting With Money-Market Madness; SEC proposals that would increase instability are worse than no reform at all

Flirting With Money-Market Madness

SEC proposals that would increase instability are worse than no reform at all.

ERIC S. ROSENGREN

Nov. 28, 2013 4:44 p.m. ET

Five years after the financial crisis, we know what caused much of the chaos. Many aspects of the financial system have been strengthened, reducing the likelihood of future problems. And yet for money-market mutual funds, fundamental reform has not been enacted. Unfortunately, some reforms proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission might actually work against financial stability, instead of enhancing it. Read more of this post

European Banks Could Take Their Hits Early; Banks Face Up to Next Year’s Asset Review by ECB

European Banks Could Take Their Hits Early

Banks Face Up to Next Year’s Asset Review by ECB

ANDREW PEAPLE

Nov. 28, 2013 1:05 p.m. ET

European banks could be in for a painful end to 2013. European banks are already facing up to a huge potential capital shortfall next year, thanks to several regulatory pressures. The European Central Bank will carry out an asset quality review aimed at ensuring banks’ balance sheets conform to uniform rules in areas like bad loans; stress tests will examine how robust banks might be in a downturn. Read more of this post

Central bankers’ diverging paths could create damaging disharmony

November 28, 2013 12:01 pm

Central bankers’ diverging paths could create damaging disharmony

By Claire Jones and Ralph Atkins

For the past six years, the world’s main central banks have sung largely from the same hymn sheet – shoring up financial systems and printing money to support economies. Now, they are doing their own thing. Weak eurozone inflation data on Friday could fuel expectations of further stimulus measures from the European Central Bank. The Bank of Japan, meanwhile,has dropped heavy hints that if its aggressive asset purchase, or “quantitative easing” programmes do not drag the country out of deflation, it will step up action. Read more of this post

Cheap money feeds QE addiction and inequality

Cheap money feeds QE addiction and inequality
Friday, November 29, 2013
By Mike Dolan, Reuters

LONDON–The message is sinking in — economies of the rich world face super-easy money far into the future and central banks are now convinced it’s the least of all policy evils. Despite rumblings of dissent about the financial bubbles and iniquities associated with zero interest rates and money printing, 2013 is ending with a remarkable certainty among global investors that cheap money is around for the long haul. Read more of this post