Filipinos are losing patience with the slow relief effort and increasingly angry with President Benigno Aquino, a popular figure who has until now navigated multiple crises during his three years in office

Aquino faces growing anger

MANILA — Six days after devastating Typhoon Haiyan swept through the midsection of the impoverished island nation, Filipinos are losing patience with the slow relief effort and increasingly angry with President Benigno Aquino, a popular figure who has until now navigated multiple crises during his three years in office.

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4 HOURS 32 MIN AGO

MANILA — Six days after devastating Typhoon Haiyan swept through the midsection of the impoverished island nation, Filipinos are losing patience with the slow relief effort and increasingly angry with President Benigno Aquino, a popular figure who has until now navigated multiple crises during his three years in office. Read more of this post

Crédit Lyonnais: Sting in the tail; More bad news from a 20-year-old bank bail-out; Crédit Lyonnais is not the only bad bank with poison in its long tail.

Crédit Lyonnais: Sting in the tail; More bad news from a 20-year-old bank bail-out; Crédit Lyonnais is not the only bad bank with poison in its long tail.

Nov 16th 2013 | PARIS |From the print edition

COUNTRIES struggling to return their bailed-out banks to normal (Britain and RBS spring to mind) will take little cheer from France this week. On November 13th the cabinet authorised borrowing €4.5 billion ($6.1 billion) next month to pay off the last of the debt incurred in rescuing Crédit Lyonnais two decades ago. The bank will have cost French taxpayers almost €15 billion in all. Read more of this post

Federal Student Loans Surpass $1 Trillion; Delinquency Rate Soars To All Time High

Federal Student Loans Surpass $1 Trillion; Delinquency Rate Soars To All Time High

Tyler Durden on 11/14/2013 13:27 -0500

There is a reason why US consumer revolving (credit card) credit growth is getting lower and lower and lower and at last check posted a mere 0.2% annual increase. That reason is that as the NY Fed disclosed moments ago, federal student loans officially crossed the $1 trillion level for the first time ever. Notably: the quarterly student loan balance has increased every quarter without fail for the past 10 years! And just to prove that while credit card balances are plunging due to more stringent bank repayment requirements, this is more than offset by borrowers shifting to student loans, where the delinquency rate on student loans is soaring and has just hit an all time high of 11.83%, an increase of almost 1% compared to last quarter. Even according to just the government lax definition of delinquency, a whopping $120 billion in student loans will be discharged. Thank you Uncle Sam for your epically lax lending standards in a world in which it is increasingly becoming probably that up to all of the loans will end up in deliquency.

Europe’s Health Cuts Leave Mentally Ill Struggling

Europe’s Health Cuts Leave Mentally Ill Struggling

Alfonso Rodriguez, a 30-year-old Spaniard struggling with mental-health problems for a decade, was able to live independently until last month. Following cutbacks in community support, his condition deteriorated and he was forced into an overcrowded, understaffed hospital ward with peeling paint and ancient furniture in his hometown of Alicante. He can’t even satisfy his desire for a cigarette. Read more of this post

Denmark Feeds World’s Biggest Home Debt Load as Caps Spurned

Denmark Feeds World’s Biggest Home Debt Load as Caps Spurned

Denmark’s government has no plans to curtail private lending and is instead working on measures to help the world’s most indebted households maintain access to cheap credit. While authorities in neighboring Norway and Sweden are probing ways to limit borrowing, Denmark says indebtedness is no threat because households can tap pensions and home equity if they get into trouble. Danes owe their creditors 310 percent of disposable incomes, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. That’s almost double the level in Sweden, where the central bank has suggested imposing a 200 percent cap on debt to safeguard financial stability. Read more of this post

Corporate default risk models are broken

November 14, 2013 8:39 am

Corporate default risk models are broken

By Vivianne Rodrigues and Tracy Alloway in New York

Half a decade of loose monetary policy in the US has produced a curious reaction in the analytical frameworks that attempt to forecast the rate at which the country’s companies will default – the models have gone mild. Even as leverage and signs of credit deterioration build up in the system, most of the models used by investors to forecast the probability of companies not paying back their debt have yet to predict a rise in corporate defaults. Other models, analysts say, have been forecasting a spike in defaults that never materialises. Read more of this post

Captive reinsurance: Life in the shadows; American life-insurers are less robust than they seem

Captive reinsurance: Life in the shadows; American life-insurers are less robust than they seem

Nov 16th 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition

THE word reinsurance has a reassuring ring, conjuring up an image of layer upon layer of precaution. And that, roughly, is the intention of the product, allowing insurers to insure themselves. By assuming a share of the liabilities of many different insurance firms, reinsurance firms make it possible for mammoth claims following a storm or earthquake to be paid without bringing down the insurers that issued most of the policies in the affected area. A new form of reinsurance proliferating in America, however, does more or less the opposite. Read more of this post

Conglomerates Bounce Back; Borrowing clout gives large companies an edge in a financial crisis

Posted: November 14, 2013

Matt Palmquist is a freelance business journalist based in Oakland, Calif.

Conglomerates Bounce Back

Bottom Line: The Great Recession had a positive effect on the stock prices of conglomerates around the world, especially in regions with well-developed capital markets and strong investor safeguards. 

Conglomerates lost much of their luster decades ago. Indeed, skeptical investors often factor in a “conglomerate discount” by valuing diversified companies at less than the sum of their parts. But the Great Recession has restored some of their shine. Read more of this post

The Year of the Lego

November 11, 2013

The Year of the Lego

Posted by Ted Trautman

Earlier this year, Lego overtook Hasbro to become the world’s second-largest toymaker, after Mattel. It was more than just one company outperforming another—it was Lego’s one brand generating more revenue than Hasbro’s sixty-eight brands, which include G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Mr. Potato Head. While Hasbro and Mattel have grown by creating and acquiring a diverse array of toys, Lego has adopted the opposite strategy: focus on the one, iconic product, but get more kids to play with it. There is little room left for Lego to grow in the United States, where it already controls eighty-five per cent of the construction-toy sector, besting imitators like Mattel’s Mega Bloks and has-beens such as Lincoln Logs and Erector sets. Lego’s revenue of nearly two billion dollars in the first half of 2013—compared with $1.43 billion for Hasbro—was boosted in large part by its growth of seventy per cent in China. That country, where parents are increasingly seeking out educational toys, has become the world’s second-largest toy market. The Asia-Pacific region will likely overtake North America as the largest regional toy market sometime next year. Read more of this post

Bitcoins being used in the Shanghai property market

Bitcoins being used in the Shanghai property market

Staff Reporter

2013-11-14

Three buildings on a 700,000 square-meter plot of land in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China look just like any of the other buildings in the city. What makes them different, however, is that space in these buildings can be purchased using bitcoins, a digital currency that is circulated on the internet and functions without the intermediation of a central authority. Read more of this post

China owns 7% of the arable land in the world, but it uses 35% of the total amount of chemical fertilizer and pesticide used in the world

China using 35% of the world’s chemical fertilizer

Staff Reporter

2013-11-14

The excessive use of chemical fertilizer needs to be curtailed to improve China’s soil quality, said Mao Yushi, a Chinese economist, at a conference on ecology and agriculture held in Beijing on Nov. 9. “Our country has the highest concentration of chemical fertilizer use, which has a seriously damaging effect on the soil,” said Mao in a Beijing Times report. Statistics presented during the conference show that the number of patients with chronic diseases in China has been growing annually by 3 million. Some experts regard food safety problem to be the main cause. Read more of this post

China’s logistics companies leaking customer data; One express sheet could be sold for 0.3 to 0.5 yuan (US$0.06-$0.16). A box containing 1,000 sheets could get 300 to 500 yuan (US$50-$80)

China’s logistics companies leaking customer data

Staff Reporter

2013-11-14

Single’s Day, which fell on Nov. 11, was a major shopping holiday for China’s e-commerce marketplaces and consumers, marking a peak season for express deliveries. Before the day arrived, Shanghai-based YTO Express, a major logistics company, had to apologize to its clients for privacy breaches leading to leaked personal data general chaos, according to the Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald. Read more of this post

Swatch leaves luxury watchmakers in a quandary

Swatch leaves luxury watchmakers in a quandary

November 13, 2013: 8:18 AM ET

A court ruling in Switzerland is shaking up the centuries-old, multi-billion dollar watch industry.

By Lynnley Browning

FORTUNE — Inside a white chalet in the tiny village of Magglingen, tucked into the Jura mountains in the northwest corner of Switzerland, skilled artisans create luxury watches like the Dentelle et Diamants et Roses, an 18-carat gold confection with 101 pink and white diamonds that fetches up to $89,100. But the establisseurs, or assemblers, at Delance SA, one of dozens of tiny firms in this cradle of Swiss mechanical watchmaking, are not feeling Delance’s motto of “audacious, erotic, feminine, and powerful” these days. Read more of this post