Thailand’s Junta Turns Its Attention to State Enterprises; Company Heads Told to Submit Reviews, Business Plans and Get Option to Resign

Thailand’s Junta Turns Its Attention to State Enterprises

Company Heads Told to Submit Reviews, Business Plans and Get Option to Resign

JAKE MAXWELL WATTS And NOPPARAT CHAICHALEARMMONGKOL

May 31, 2014 11:06 a.m. ET

Thailand’s ruling military on Saturday gave the heads of the country’s largest state enterprises, many of them affiliated with the ousted civilian government, a two-day deadline to submit a review of their operations and invited them to resign if they wished.

Just over a week since the army ousted Thailand’s caretaker government and suspended the constitution, military chief Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha has been under pressure to lay out plans for reviving a spluttering economy in which state enterprises play a significant role in sectors ranging from banking to transport and energy. Read more of this post

Online banking thefts hit Japan firms prompting compensation rethink

Online banking thefts hit Japan firms prompting compensation rethink

Fri, May 30 2014

By Taiga Uranaka and Taro Fuse

TOKYO (Reuters) – Hackers stole nearly $2 million from the online bank accounts of Japanese businesses in April, a surge in theft that has prompted some banks to curtail online services and rethink compensation policies, executives and regulators say.

In April there were 50 cases of theft from online accounts held by Japanese businesses with nearly 200 million yen stolen, according to a person with knowledge of the industry-wide tally, which has not been made public. That was more than the entire previous year. Read more of this post

The Tiananmen Square massacre, 25 years on

May 30, 2014 6:32 pm

The Tiananmen Square massacre, 25 years on

By Jonathan Fenby

The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim, OUP USA, RRP£16.99/$24.95, 240 pages

Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Rowena Xiaoqing He, Palgrave Macmillan, RRP£18/$29, 240 pages

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Bodley Head, £20/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, RRP$27, 416 pages Read more of this post

Thailand’s junta stokes stifled anger of ‘red shirts’

May 30, 2014 2:49 pm

Thailand’s junta stokes stifled anger of ‘red shirts’

By Michael Peel in Ubon Ratchathani

Phangsri still wears her blood-red top with pride to signal her disgust at Thailand’s coup and her opposition to a junta that has forbidden criticism during an ever-tightening crackdown.

The shop owner and her allies in the popular “red shirt” political movement are lying low for now, but say they are ready to rise – peacefully – if the generals fail to deliver on a promise to return the country to parliamentary rule. Read more of this post

An astonishing record – of complete failure: ‘In 2008, the consensus from forecasters was that not a single economy would fall into recession in 2009’

May 30, 2014 1:04 pm

An astonishing record – of complete failure

By Tim Harford

‘In 2008, the consensus from forecasters was that not a single economy would fall into recession in 2009’

In the 2001 issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, an economist from the International Monetary Fund, Prakash Loungani, published a survey of the accuracy of economic forecasts throughout the 1990s. He reached two conclusions. The first was that forecasts are all much the same. There was little to choose between those produced by the IMF and the World Bank, and those from private sector forecasters. The second conclusion was that the predictive record of economists was terrible. Loungani wrote: “The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished.” Read more of this post

Narendra Modi prepares to raise India’s FDI limits

May 30, 2014 10:39 am

Narendra Modi prepares to raise India’s FDI limits

By Victor Mallet in New Delhi

India’s new government is preparing to ease restrictions on foreign direct investment in the country, including in arms manufacturing, as part of its plan to boost economic growth and create jobs, government officials in New Delhi said on Friday.

Although Bharatiya Janata party leaders had signalled before their election victory that they intended to liberalise India’s complex foreign investment regime, shares in affected Indian companies rose sharply in response to news of reform plans drafted by the ministries of finance and commerce and industry. Read more of this post

The rise of the global capital; ‘Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite. They want to join the global elite’

May 30, 2014 1:00 pm

The rise of the global capital

By Simon Kuper

‘Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite. They want to join the global elite’

It was one of those paceless mornings that make Amsterdam so agreeable. A friend and I were sitting in a dinky café on a canal, armed with good coffee, aimlessly leafing through the newspapers. My friend is an art dealer, and inevitably another art dealer wandered in, and inevitably they knew each other: Amsterdam is an upscale bohemian village. Read more of this post

Corporate citizens of the world owe fealty to us all; Multinationals need to lay down roots wherever they grow

May 30, 2014 7:50 pm

Corporate citizens of the world owe fealty to us all

By Andrew Hill

Multinationals need to lay down roots wherever they grow

The head of a British multinational declared this week that he opposed the idea of companies that exist “somewhere in the ether”. It may be “odd to be British, but it’s even odder to say you’re nobody”, this chief executive said. “Who in the world would applaud you for saying that you are rootless?” The answer was, until recently: most business leaders and investors – the very people who were listening to him address a private session at the Inclusive Capitalism conference in London.

Global companies in the past 30 years have done all they can to shrug off the uncomfortable trappings of nationality, tax domicile and regulatory jurisdiction in pursuit of profit and efficiency. Read more of this post

Bigger graft crackdown for China’s energy sector still to come

Bigger graft crackdown for China’s energy sector still to come

Staff Reporter

2014-05-30

The Chinese government has extended the reach of its anti-corruption campaign to the energy sector by ousting a number of major figures in the field, which, said insiders, may be just the start of an even bigger crackdown.

There have been 21 energy-related ranking officials on the blacklist including three from the National Energy Administration, former chief Liu Tienan, former deputy chief Xu Yongsheng, and the former director of the administration’s new energy and renewable energy department Wang Jun. Read more of this post

Auditors Eye Hydropower Project Linked to Disgraced Mining Boss, Zhou Bin; Examiners want to know why state-owned CPIC paid premium for firm that planned to build hydroelectric plants that were never finished

05.29.2014 19:30

Auditors Eye Hydropower Project Linked to Disgraced Mining Boss, Zhou Bin

Examiners want to know why state-owned CPIC paid premium for firm that planned to build hydroelectric plants that were never finished

By staff reporter Yu Ning

(Beijing) – Government auditors in Harbin, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, are looking into large deals by state-owned China Power Investment Corp. (CPIC). The auditing started on April 17 and is to finish in July. Read more of this post

Chinese Regulator Ready to Roll out New Rules for P2P Lending, Sources Say

05.30.2014 16:04

Regulator Ready to Roll out New Rules for P2P Lending, Sources Say

Discussions over new regulations focused on giving P2P lending services enough room to work without breaking existing laws, one company’s boss says

By staff reporters Wang Shenlu and Liu Ran

(Beijing) – The banking regulator is working on the country’s first regulations for the peer-to-peer (P2P) loan industry by treating it as a type of private lending, sources with knowledge of the matter say. Read more of this post

Investors’ – and Wall Street’s – Love for ‘Smart Beta’ ETFs, in a Chart

May 30, 2014, 9:27 A.M. ET

Investors’ — and Wall Street’s — Love for ‘Smart Beta’ ETFs, in a Chart

By Brendan Conway

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

Were those words penned by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or by investors in smart-beta ETFs?

I’ll go with Browning, but the accompanying chart seems at first glance to make a different case. “Smart beta” is the term these days for any index-based fund which deviates from the market-weight approach of the S&P 500 and several other familiar benchmarks. The surging purple isJ.P. Morgan’s estimate of the group’s assets in the U.S. market. Read more of this post

Harnessing China’s Competitive Streak

ANDREW SHENG

Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Fung Global Institute and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His latest book is From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.

XIAO GENG

Xiao Geng is Director of Research at the Fung Global Institute.

MAY 29, 2014

Harnessing China’s Competitive Streak

HONG KONG – China’s State Council recently unveiled a comprehensive blueprint for capital-market reform until 2020, in which it identifies two key objectives: “to support open, fair, and integral market processes, and to protect investors, particularly the legal rights of small investors.” Achieving these goals, as the blueprint recognizes, will require policymakers to weigh market autonomy against state authority, innovation against stability, investor protection against caveat emptor, and the temptation of rapid reform against the need for pragmatism. Can it be done? Read more of this post

Serving the base of the pyramid: five tips from emerging-market experts

Serving the base of the pyramid: five tips from emerging-market experts

The idea of serving the world’s poorest populations while expanding into developing countries is alluring, but has proven difficult in practice. Here’s some advice from the trenches

Bruce Watson

theguardian.com, Friday 30 May 2014 17.02 BST

For companies looking to expand their markets, emerging markets represent an attractive target: billions of consumers, eager for jobs, goods and services that will bring them further into the global economy. Read more of this post

Getting swallowed by bigger government-linked companies (GLCs) really didn’t spell the end for some of Malaysia’s top property entreprenuers

Updated: Saturday May 31, 2014 MYT 7:49:13 AM

Resilient chieftains

BY ANGIE NG

GETTING swallowed by bigger government-linked companies (GLCs) really didn’t spell the end for some of the country’s top property entreprenuers. The stalwarts of the acquired companies are still around strutting their stuffs and living their dreams of building landmark projects.

The famous trio that come to mind are Datuk Tong Kooi Ong of the Sunrise Bhdfame, Datuk Terry Tham and Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin who are synonymous with Eastern & Oriental Bhd (E&O) and SP Setia Bhd respectively. Read more of this post

Value-add main criterion for admitting foreign entrepreneurs

PUBLISHED MAY 31, 2014

Value-add main criterion for admitting foreign entrepreneurs

JAIRA KOH

JAIRAKOH@SPH.COM.SG  

AN “accident”, is how Casa Italia chief executive Phippo Hardegger describes founding his gelato company in Singapore.

Unable to secure an Australian visa, the Swiss was persuaded by a friend to come here instead. Finding regulations that do not hinder, and a government forthcoming with the information he needed, sealed the decision, he says. Read more of this post

Three things Asean must do – now

Updated: Saturday May 31, 2014 MYT 8:00:10 AM

Three things Asean must do – now

FIRST, take stock. Of course, given the three pillars of the community-building process and the end-2015 timeline, the progress against the blueprints for the political-security, economic and socio-cultural communities has to be determined and shortfalls addressed.

For example, for the Asean Economic Community (AEC), there is a lag against stated objectives, even by official measure. What more against actual business experience, documented by reports commissioned by the Asean Business Club (ABC). Read more of this post

Shadow banking has made quite a mess and there is no easy way out

Updated: Saturday May 31, 2014 MYT 8:02:51 AM

Shadow banking has made quite a mess and there is no easy way out

THE lure of shadow banking is ever present.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney points to shadow banking in emerging markets as the greatest danger to the world economy.

That’s serious. Indeed, I receive regular requests to unravel this phenomenon and why it creates such an all-round “con-attitude” every time the concept surfaces. Read more of this post