China baby boom fears outweigh evidence of falling fertility rates

November 19, 2013 1:32 pm

China baby boom fears outweigh evidence of falling fertility rates

By Lucy Hornby

Fears of a baby boom are leading China to keep a tight grip on family size, with only a minor relaxation in the Communist party’s one-child policy despite evidence that birth rates have already fallen faster than intended. The party announced on Friday that couples where one spouse is an only child may have a second child, a policy change that could result in about 1m additional births a year but still fundamentally limits most couples’ ability to choose. Read more of this post

CBRC Promotes Interbank De-leveraging; Interbank business is just another channel for banks in their never-ending quest to circumvent regulatory controls, which is becoming increasingly complex and hidden

CBRC Promotes Interbank De-leveraging

11-19 14:15 Caijing

Interbank business is just another channel for banks in their never-ending quest to circumvent regulatory controls, which is becoming increasingly complex and hidden.

By staff reporters Dong Yuxiao and You Xi

Interbank financing has surged in China in the past few years, spurring banking regulators to introduce regulatory policies that will tighten their grip on interbank operations and limit growth of banks’ off-balance sheet assets. Caijing learned that relevant authorities at the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) have drafted the Interbank Financing Management Rules for Commercial Banks (the “Rules”). The Rules are expected to be approved and implemented in Feb. 2014 after being submitted to CBRC leadership in November. Read more of this post

Anger and Angst in Hospitals Where Doctors Die; Another deadly stabbing has forced soul-searching over China’s overcrowded hospitals and their underpaid doctors

11.20.2013 15:51

Anger and Angst in Hospitals Where Doctors Die

Another deadly stabbing has forced soul-searching over China’s overcrowded hospitals and their underpaid doctors

By staff reporters Lan Fang, Li Yan, Luo Jieqi, Ren Zhongyuan and Lin Jinbing and intern reporter Han Xiaomei

(Beijing) – There was a time when the words of the Hippocratic Oath meant a lot to Dr. Wen Mei. She’ll never forget standing proudly with her classmates, each in a sparkling white coat, and reciting the oath in unison on their first day of medical school. Wen’s idealistic school days are long gone. Like many hospital doctors in China, she’s had to change her perspective in the face of harsh workplace conditions, including dangers posed by angry patients, overcrowding that some experts say is behind a patient rage phenomenon in China, and puny salaries. Read more of this post

Will China and India Destroy the World?

Will China and India Destroy the World?

As Lawrence Summers makes a splash with a new research report about China and India, I’m reminded of a chat we had in Japan in May 2007. We were in Kyoto, where the Asian Development Bank was holding its annual meeting. I moderated a panel discussion, and Summers was asked to join us for the last 30 minutes to offer his take on the next wave of Asian tiger economies. Summers isn’t known for subtlety, and he bluntly questioned whether it was wise for rich nations to be shored up financially by developing ones in Asia that could crash at any time. The crowd was aghast. It was as if he’d belched into the microphone. Read more of this post

Tsunami-Blocking Mangroves Lure Carbon Investors: Southeast Asia; “Where the mangroves are, the people are happy”

Tsunami-Blocking Mangroves Lure Carbon Investors: Southeast Asia

Replanted mangrove trees in Southeast Asia are getting credit for protecting against deadly tsunamis and typhoons such as Haiyan in the Philippines and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Mangrove regeneration in Northern Samar, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the worst-hit Philippine city of Tacloban, helped minimize damage from the Nov. 8 storm, according to the Trowel Development Foundation, which oversaw the plantings. On Indonesia’s Sumatra island, where a 2004 tsunami killed 170,000 residents, companies including Danone and Credit Agricole SA (ACA) have put up about $4 million in exchange for tradable carbon offsets tied to the reforestation. Read more of this post

Large Investors Find Asian Hedge-Fund Options Limited

Large Investors Find Asian Hedge-Fund Options Limited

Asian Hedge Funds Are Performing Well, but Large Ones Are in Short Supply

MIA LAMAR And CHAO DENG

Updated Nov. 19, 2013 9:06 p.m. ET

Large overseas investors can’t get enough of big-name Asian hedge funds. Too bad there aren’t more of them. Deep-pocketed pension and endowment funds—many from the U.S.—are coming to Asia in droves, ready to put cash in the region’s hedge funds as the industry rounds out what is shaping up to be a second straight year of outperforming peers in the U.S. and Europe. Read more of this post

Asia’s New Aging Rich Break Family Bonds for Gilded Retirement

Asia’s New Aging Rich Break Family Bonds for Gilded Retirement

After P.S. Ramachandran turned 80, he and his wife decided it was time to stop living alone. Rather than take the traditional path of moving in with their son, the Ramachandrans chose an option once rare in India: a retirement community. “We wanted to be independent,” said Ramachandran, now 85, a former government official who moved to the Brindavan Senior Citizen Foundation’s retirement village overlooking the Nilgiri hills near Coimbatore city in southern India. “We have company and everything we need here, and activities to keep us busy as long as we’re physically able.” Read more of this post

CHANOS: Big Oil Companies Are The Next Value Trap

CHANOS: Big Oil Companies Are The Next Value Trap

KATYA WACHTEL, REUTERS NOV. 19, 2013, 10:08 PM 3,741 9

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Short-seller Jim Chanos said Tuesday it is time for typical equity investors to be “a little more cautious” even as the stock market may continue to rise. Chanos, speaking the Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit in New York said his fund Kynikos Associatesis “very bearish on coal” and he is “pretty much short” all the U.S. leveraged coal companies. Chanos also said he was bearish on national oil companies and the integrated majors like Exxon-Mobil, which he said are experiencing a “dropping return on capital” that “is really ominous.” The famous short-seller said Exxon-Mobil and other oil companies like it increasingly look like “value trap.” He also said investors would be “well warned” to analyze Caterpillar Inc’s financial unit.

Why The Retail Industry Can’t Keep Up With Zara

Why The Retail Industry Can’t Keep Up With Zara

ASHLEY LUTZ NOV. 19, 2013, 4:57 PM 3,392 1

Brands like Zara are rapidly expanding, while other specialty retailers struggle to get customers in stores. A recent report by Goldman Sachs perfectly sums up why fast fashion retailers are challenging traditional ones. “Unlike fast fashion retailers which have buying teams sourcing current trending fashion from third-party vendors, traditional specialty retailers have design teams creating product they believe is going to be trending 12-months out,” the researchers write.  Read more of this post

Paul Smith, 60 percent owner of a fashion house with sales of $288 million; Smith opened his tiny first store in Nottingham back in 1970 with future wife Pauline, a Royal College of Art graduate who became a lifelong influence

Paul Smith Collects Banksy, No Slave to Shareholders

Paul Smith picked an unlikely venue for his first international collection in 1976: an unglamorous ground-floor hotel room in Paris’s Latin Quarter. “I laid some black fabric over the bed, laid out my shirts, and two pieces of knitwear and two jackets in the wardrobe, and sat there, and nobody came!” recalls the designer with a laugh. On the last day, “one person came at four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was off. That was the start.” Read more of this post

For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share

New landscape for ‘big four’ supermarkets

For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share

By Telegraph View

11:47PM GMT 19 Nov 2013

Britain’s supermarket industry has entered a new era. For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share, according to Kantar. This is not just a statistical anomaly, it is a reflection that the supermarket industry has become ex-growth. There are straightforward reasons for this. Between the 1950s and 2008, grocery retailers rushed to open new self-service stores and then out-of-town supermarkets across the country. Read more of this post

Tea traders hope for imminent recovery

November 20, 2013 9:10 am

Tea traders hope for imminent recovery

By Javier Blas in Nairobi

When Williamson Tea Kenya, one of the biggest growers of the leaf in Africa, released its quarterly results earlier this month, it had a blunt warning: the price drop to a five-year low had created a “commercially unsustainable” market. The agribusiness group was not exaggerating:black tea prices have tumbled more than 40 per cent since January as top importers Pakistan and Egypt cut purchases just as output surged on the back of favourable weather in late 2012 and early 2013. Read more of this post

Oysters Boom as Raw Bars Drive Demand for More Varieties

Oysters Boom as Raw Bars Drive Demand for More Varieties

“Everyone’s growing oysters,” Chris Quartuccio says over his shoulder as he paddles a neon-orange kayak across Long Island’s Great South Bay, where he’s raising some 300,000 Blue Island oysters on the shallow seafloor, 50 miles east of Manhattan. He might be right. Close to a hundred oyster farms have sprung up during the past decade or so, in bays, creeks and tidal ponds strung along the Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Holiday 2013 issue. Read more of this post

Coal Seen as New Tobacco Sparking Investor Backlash: Commodities

Coal Seen as New Tobacco Sparking Investor Backlash: Commodities

About $8 trillion of known coal reserves lie beneath the earth’s surface. The companies planning to mine and burn them are being targeted by a growing group of investors concerned with the greenhouse gases that will be made. Storebrand ASA (STB), which manages $74 billion of assets from Norway, sold out of 24 coal and oil-sands companies since July including Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), the largest U.S. coal producer, citing a desire to cut fossil-fuel industry holdings. This month Norway’s opposition Labour Party proposed banning the country’s $800 billion sovereign wealth fund from coal investments. Read more of this post

Bitter aftertaste in Myanmar Breweries JV follows F&N takeover by Thai tycoon

Bitter aftertaste follows F&N takeover

Wednesday, Nov 20, 2013

Goh Eng Yeow

The Straits Times

For those who make it to the big time, reputation is everything. In fact, it is priceless. So publicity-shy Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi must find extremely discomfiting the bad publicity dogging Fraser & Neave (F&N). He now owns 90.3 per cent of the conglomerate after mounting a costly $13.7 billion takeover which ended in February. Read more of this post

Singapore Property Boom Fuels Malaysia Spillover Bubble

Singapore Property Boom Fuels Malaysia Spillover Bubble

Chris Metcalf commutes for 45 minutes to Singapore each day from Iskandar, a region just over the border in Malaysia, to work as a lawyer at Clyde & Co LLP. “It’s too expensive to live in Singapore,” said Metcalf, who moved across the Johor Strait in June after finding he could no longer afford the island-state on a local salary and with four children. “We’re selling a house in the U.K. and when we do we’ll consider buying in Malaysia because it’s definitely better value.” Read more of this post

As Myanmar Modernizes, Old Trades Are Outpaced By New Competitors

November 19, 2013

As Myanmar Modernizes, Old Trades Are Outpaced By New Competitors

By THOMAS FULLER

YANGON, Myanmar — For years they poured out their hearts on the broken pavements of Myanmar’s cities and towns, young lovers desperate for privacy yet with no choice but to use what the Burmese call roadside phone shops. Daw Myint Myint Than, who rents out her two phone lines in central Yangon, has heard it all: the sobbing, heartbroken women; the angry spouses; the duplicitous boyfriends who gush sweet nothings to one girlfriend, hang up and repeat the same sweet nothings to another. Read more of this post