Greece-induced market chaos only a matter of time. Charles Dallara says regulators need to look at the unintended consequences of their focus on strengthening bank capital. Photo: Rob Homer The man who negotiated the bailout of Greece in 2012 says that whatever the outcome of this Sunday's election in Greece, it is "highly likely" global financial markets will yet again be thrown into turmoil over the beleaguered country's debt burden and the long-term sustainability of the euro.
And with markets transfixed by the US Federal Reserve interest rate decision due on Friday morning, Charles Dallara, the executive vice-chairman of heavyweight investor Partners Group, says the unwinding of central bank-induced asset bubbles will remain a source of volatility, along with a lack of liquidity in bond markets and the rise of high-frequency trading. "Globally, we have some distortions that need to work themselves through and the sooner the better as far as I am concerned," he said.
Missed opportunity Unsustainable model World expert on bailouts. Une start-up affirme avoir fabriqué des spermatozoïdes humains in vitro. LE MONDE | • Mis à jour le | Par Sandrine Cabut C’est, selon ses auteurs, une première mondiale qui ouvre des perspectives passionnantes pour préserver la fertilité de jeunes garçons traités pour des cancers, et pour remédier à certaines causes de stérilité masculine. Des chercheurs d’une start-up lyonnaise, Kallistem, annoncent avoir réussi à obtenir en laboratoire des spermatozoïdes humains complets, à partir de spermatogonies, les cellules souches germinales.
Ils devaient présenter leur technologie jeudi 17 septembre. La spermatogenèse, c’est-à-dire la fabrication de spermatozoïdes dans les testicules à partir de cellules souches, est un processus complexe, qui dure soixante-douze à soixante-quatorze jours dans l’espèce humaine. . « Première mondiale »... sans preuve scientifique Le brevet décrivant l’ensemble du dispositif, nommé Artistem, ayant été publié le 25 juin, la start-up, qui est en pleine levée de fonds, a décidé de franchir un nouveau pas. . « Difficile de se prononcer » Goldman’s Blankfein on September Rate Hike: ‘I Wouldn’t Do It’ - MoneyBeat. Welcome to Forbes. Liberal leadership: Investment bankers such as Malcolm Turnbull make good PMs, says Simon Mordant.
Simon Mordant points to the success of another former investment banker – New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. Photo: Pat Scala Investment bankers make good prime ministers. That's the view of Simon Mordant – one of Australia's most experienced investment bankers who is now executive co-chairman of Luminis Partners – who says Malcolm Turnbull has a much broader array of skills than a traditional investment banker but he will be able to take Australia forward, with his optimism an important trait that will enable Australia to start developing some better momentum. "We've got a driven, focused, passionate person who is very dynamic and is an optimistic person by character," Mr Mordant said on Tuesday of the new Prime Minister. Mr Turnbull is being sworn in on Tuesday. Mr Mordant pointed to the success of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in advancing the New Zealand economy and being able to lead the reform process as an example of what may be possible now for Australia.
Broad background. Theconversation. The Minerals Council of Australia’s recent coal adverts, extolling the virtues of the “little black rock”, have provoked an inevitable Twitter backlash. Industry is clearly still learning how to cope in the “web 2.0” world of social media and instant snark. But perhaps the campaign is addressing other audiences beyond the twittersphere, and a bit of sarcasm may well be seen as a small price to pay.
The advertisement, if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen it, shows extreme close-ups of what seems to be an asteroid but (spoiler alert) turns out to be a lump of coal. A voice-over explains that “this can provide endless possibilities. It can create light and jobs”, before giving some statistics about wages, jobs and carbon emissions. Everything happens very fast on the internet, so the inevitable spoof videos (one of the highest-profile of which has since been removed) emerged within hours of the campaign’s release. Web 1.0: birth of the spoof video Playing to the crowd. Theconversation. A leader widely perceived as ideologically hidebound and out of touch is toppled by those within his own party at the second attempt, but big decisions about international climate policy are apparently already locked in ahead of an important global meeting.
This happened yesterday and it happened in December 1991 too, when Paul Keating replaced Bob Hawke as Labor leader and prime minister. The cases are perhaps only superficially similar, but there may be things to learn from the comparison. The big international pressure for Keating was the upcoming meeting to sign a global climate convention. Pressure had been building since 1988, and formal negotiations had begun in early 1991. Keating was one of the few Western leaders who didn’t go to the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro at which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed, sending instead his environment minister, Ros Kelly.
Turnbull said: Policies are reviewed and adapted all the time. Marc Hudson | Words, ideas, videos. Malcolm Turnbull and the road trip into the soul of the new PM. It was 4 am and Malcolm Turnbull was outside my inner-city flat, waiting in his large, beige-coloured Mercedes. The Merc's motor emitted that regular hum one associates with a well-tuned, hi-end classic car.
He had two takeaway coffees, ready for the long drive to Scone, at the northern tip of the Hunter Valley in NSW. We drank our coffee as we drove up a misty F3 highway, heading due north out of Sydney. The talk droned on for a while about ins and outs at the office; we both worked for Kerry Packer's Australian Consolidated Press. Somehow, the conversation moved to politics. The topic quickly found its focus, which was what HE would do if HE became Prime Minister. Monday's events, where Turnbull, now 60, toppled a sitting Liberal Prime Minister to grab the long-sought-after keys to The Lodge, show that while the car talk may have been premature, it was also prescient. Across the detail The conversation about policy was long and detailed. Challenging childhood Lawyer Malcolm. Retrain your investment brain | Stockspot Blog. We are hard-wired to be idiot investors. Worse than that, we’re not getting any smarter regardless of how much we read, research and educate ourselves.
Nobel Economics Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, showed that even knowing about our own psychological weaknesses doesn’t make us better investors. In fact, over the past 30 years the average share market investor in the US earned an average annual return of just 3.7% compared to the S&P 500’s 11.1% annual return.1 Much of this lacklustre performance can be attributed to our own behavioural biases. We are born risk-averse, which leads to us forgo profitable opportunities to avoid the possibility of losses. Kahneman discovered that we feel the pain of losses twice to 3x more than the enjoyment of gains. Source: Westpac survey This fear of losses is exacerbated by availability-bias because we put too much weight on the recent past. And we have an overwhelming tendency to follow others into popular trends. Mark Karpelès, imparfait escroc à Tokyo. Jusqu’à l’année dernière, personne ne connaissait le nom de Mark Karpelès.
Développeur français né à Dijon en 1985, passé un temps par le jeu vidéo, ce passionné de culture nippone s’est longtemps fait appeler Robert par ses connaissances. En 2005, il quitte la France, séjourne par intermittence en Israël puis au Japon, où il finit par s’installer. C’est là-bas qu’il se lance dans un nouveau secteur, le bitcoin, monnaie électronique alors en pleine expansion. En 2011, il reprend une plateforme d’échange, Mt.Gox, sise à Tokyo. Selon la presse japonaise, il lui est reproché d’avoir manipulé à trente reprises au moins les données de comptes bitcoins pour en augmenter le solde de façon artificielle. «Geek extrême». Taciturne, il endosse volontiers la caricature du geek solitaire. Ses amis ? A l’écran, il semble satisfait de cette image qu’il renvoie, se vautre volontiers dans cette caricature.
C’est l’autre facette du personnage, qui refait surface depuis la faillite de Mt.Gox. Weekend Economist: Get ready for Fed lift-off. Next week will be highlighted by a hugely significant event. We expect the US Federal Reserve to start raising rates next week, the first time it has instigated a tightening cycle since June 2004. The market is not prepared for this historic event. We have been forecasting that the Fed would start raising rates in September 2015 for around two years.
It has been a long wait and despite market pricing only giving a 30 per cent probability to the hike occurring, we are sticking with the view. I think Fed authorities might see that decision as, in hindsight, adding unnecessary uncertainty to the market and forcing a major policy change into a time of limited market liquidity. The US labour market and inflation, rather than global demand or equity market volatility, will be the key drivers of the Fed’s decision.
The chair of the Fed, Janet Yellen, is a renowned labour economist. These measures point to significant healing in the US labour market. Figure 1 Figure 2. Businessspectator.com. †Introductory offers to be billed 4 weekly as per the following - Business Spectator Digital Subscription $4 per week to be billed as $16 4-weekly; Business Spectator Digital Subscription + The Weekend Australian (delivered Saturday) $4 per week to be billed as $16 4-weekly; Business Spectator Digital Subscription + 6 day paper delivery $8 per week to be billed as $32 4-weekly. At the end of the initial 12 weeks, subscriptions will automatically renew to the higher price to be billed 4 weekly as per the following - Business Spectator Digital Subscription $8 per week to be billed as $32 4-weekly; Business Spectator Digital Subscription + The Weekend Australian (delivered Saturday) $8 per week to be billed as $32 4-weekly; Business Spectator Digital Subscription + 6 day paper delivery $16 per week to be billed as $64 4-weekly.
Renewals occur unless cancelled. Payments in advance by credit/debit card or Paypal only. Astro Teller at Fishburners. Westpac's accounting, targets queried by analysts. Westpac has been criticised for taking restructuring charges below the line. Photo: Gabriele Charotte Westpac Banking Corp's decision to take restructuring costs "below-the-line" at its upcoming full year results has disappointed analysts who fear they may be recurring rather than one-off costs, while the bank's 15 per cent return-on-equity target has been greeted with scepticism given regulatory imposts being piled upon the sector.
Westpac shares bounced back on Tuesday morning to be trading up 1.6 per cent at $30.29 at midday in a stronger banking sector, after they lost 0.5 per cent on Monday following the bank's strategy update. Westpac said on Monday it would lift investment spending by 20 per cent to $1.3 billion with most of this to be deployed towards technology. However, it also flagged that higher advance expenses would be partly offset by below-the-line restructuring charges in the full 2015 and 2016 years, which have not yet been quantified.
The Russia, China Alliance: What Does “The Dragonbear” Aim To Achieve In Global Affairs? | EMerging Equity. By Velina Tchakarova Much has been written and speculated over an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China, which I gave the name ‘the Dragonbear’ in the geopolitics of the 21st century. Interpretations of the context of deepening bilateral relations range from very sceptic to very optimistic prognoses for the future. But what does the Dragonbear really aim to achieve in global affairs?
First and foremost, it is about counterbalancing arising centrifugal forces in all fields – from economy, finance and trade, to diplomacy and political links, to military, defence and strategic alliances. Let us start with geopolitics. As I outlined in my recent piece on the emerging system’s bipolarity, the current system of international relations is moving towards a new equilibrium of two system poles. Concurrently, the emergence of China as a second system pole has already started shaping Beijing’s long-term geostrategy. Courtesy of The Guardian Source: Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Past little guide to future of Aussie super growth. Australian super funds' big bias towards equities may finally have become a liability as their stellar growth is stalled by central banks hitting rock bottom interest rates just as the local economy looks dicey. Australia's biggest funds – including the Future Fund, Australian Super and Q Super – grew their funds under management at a compound average growth rate of 11 per cent a year between 2009 and 2014 compared with a global average for the top 300 funds of 6.4 per cent, and 3.9 per cent for the Asia Pacific.Only China, Norway and South Korea grew faster. But the decline of the Australian All Ordinaries by 3 per cent in 2014, compared to a 3 per cent rise in the MCSI index of global stocks, suggests the stellar run is over.
The top 300 global funds on average grew by 3.4 per cent in 2014, down from 6 per cent in 2013 and 10 per cent in 2012, according to Towers Watson's annual P&I/Towers Watson Global 300 study. No Australian funds were in the top 20. Hartzer to define his place in history. Westpac Banking Corp chief executive Brian Hartzer is reading The Innovators, by Steve Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson. Published last year, the book details the history of computing through the personal stories of the scientific and business leaders who have created the digital revolution. Starting with Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, Isaacson reveals how proficiency in both literature and mathematics encouraged her to publish the world's first computer program in 1843.
The stories of other technology luminaries follow, including Alan Turing, who envisaged the world's first universal computer a century after Lovelace, and latter-day icons such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee. At 1030am AEST on Monday morning, Hartzer will deliver a highly significant market update that presents him with the opportunity to set down his strategic thinking at a time the bank remains under scrutiny over its asset mix and costs.
Australia services exports. GDP: How Australia's second quarter national accounts compare. The economy is growing at its slowest since the Abbott government and Joe Hockey were elected. Photo: Nick Moir Australians will be reeling at Wednesday's gross domestic product numbers that put their country as one of the world's slowest growing developed economies, behind even financially beleaguered Greece. Australia's GDP growth from April until June came in lower than expectations at 0.2 per cent, the economy's weakest quarter of growth in two years. The underwhelming data has Australia growing faster than Brazil, Japan and Canada, all of which are experienced negative economic growth, but more slowly than Greece, Poland, South Korea and most other developed nations.
Commodity-reliant economies have been hit hard. "For some time we have been forecasting a marked easing in GDP growth in response to the collapse in commodity prices and the end of the mining boom. This now appears to be underway," senior Asia economist at Capital Economics Daniel Martin said. Business ideas - Riding the fintech WAIV to a $100 million valuation. Corporate Resources Australia Ltd > The Australia-Latin America Business Council. WAIV. Financial Services. The Economist - Capital spending. Australia set to rack up world’s longest growth streak. Introducing AirShr. Westpac Innovation Challenge Agribusiness w/ Blue Chilli. Crossroads-2015.pdf.
PwC-Google-The-startup-economy-2013.pdf. Gazelles are the key to Australia’s economic future but we are obsessed with mice and elephants. Sendle: Cheaper, easier, smarter than post. 2025%20-Superannuation%20in%20a%20Decade.pdf. Australian dollar plummets after China’s currency gambit. Rise of the machines as ANZ brings in robot workers to do the 'boring' jobs. London wants to pinch best Aussie fintech start-ups. Westpac's Reinventure backs rebranded Beat the Q Posse Group cafe app. Westpac's Reinventure backs rebranded Beat the Q Posse Group cafe app.
Time for Stone & Chalk to deliver for start-ups after months of build-up. Markets Live: ASX at two-year lows. Fears grow that central banks have run out of ammunition to fire at markets. Uber fight: How Aussie startup GoCatch plans survival against a global juggernaut. The incredible shrinking Fortescue Metals Group. SelfWealth's Andrew Ward says CBA needed '5000 meetings to get anything done' SelfWealth's Andrew Ward says CBA needed '5000 meetings to get anything done'
Treasurer Joe Hockey wants to 'short-circuit' bracket creep. ASIC calls out banks on interest-only home loans. Banks under threat from secured peer-to-peer car loans. John Howard: Why bipartisanship is crucial to economic reform. This peer-to-peer lender is going after the heart of Australia's banking industry, offering secured personal loans | Business Insider. Banks under threat from secured peer-to-peer car loans. Economics, Finance & Banking News and Insights from ANZ | ANZ BlueNotes.
What if Mao still ran China?
Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections | VentureBeat | Social | by Mark Sullivan. Westpac Follows The Herd On Mortgage Repricing - DFA Blog. Westpac swings into action to fix interest rate headache. Superannuation. Allan Moss backs local consulting start-up Expert360. Battle of the internet giants: Facebook, WhatsApp and the rise of China's WeChat.
Michelle Williams - founder of Ideaction - Ideas Hoist | Australians Making Ideas Happen. Competition, rising costs, regulation: why Australian banks are finding it tough. Wall-street-invests-in-fintech-startups-2015-3?_ga=1.159291642.1990552514. A massive wave of startups is coming to crush the big banks. SMSFs face growing risks | Stockspot Blog. Battery technologies jostle for share of large-scale storage market. Gas business seen setting Origin Energy apart from rivals. Banks face stiffer penalties for luring customers to superannuation.
Australia leads the world in mobile banking. Jerks do finish first – but there's a sting in this tale. Making Australia Great | DVD | ABC Shop. National Australia Bank's Andrew Thorburn gets to grips with his to-do list. Support grows for $2.5 million superannuation limit.
Politics 2015. China meltdown "Black Monday" (2015-08-24) 2015 Credit Bubble (+ housing) New crisis coming (commodities) 2015. Commodities Crash 2014. FinTech Unicorns Tammy etc. ROBO-ADVISORS. NOBL. Nabo.com.au. Global 2015 Refresh. Banking + Wealth Summit #afrbanking15. Michael Pettis - The Great Rebalancing. Uber + Airbnb.