China’s appetite for Brazil’s meat grows
When President Dilma Rousseff visited China last week, she said she would be pressuring Brazil’s largest trading partner to import more than just iron ore and soya.
In response, China seems to have said: “Sure, we’ll have more chicken, and a little more beef. Oh, and we’ll try the pork.” Continue reading »
Qatar & UAE: still waiting for MSCI
By Sarah Mishkin in Abu Dhabi
Qatar may have snagged the World Cup and even post-crash Dubai is overrun with Wall Streeters, but the countries’ equity markets don’t even rank as emerging – MSCI, the influential index provider, still classifies them as frontier markets, alongside countries such as Serbia, Lebanon and Pakistan.
MSCI, whose indices are tracked by funds worth billions of dollars, will announce in June whether Qatar and the UAE’s bourses will qualify for its Emerging Markets index. But by the looks of it, investors are not optimistic that the countries will make the cut. Continue reading »
Dogan Yayin: cutting a branch to save the tree?
Has Aydin Dogan, the billionaire owner of Turkey’s biggest media group, finally settled his differences with the government? Continue reading »
Russia: worrying about the birth rate
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin made some eye-catching promises in a speech to Parliament on Wednesday. A possible increase in pensions in August, for example, conveniently timed in advance of next year’s presidential elections. And a promise to double annual GDP per head by 2020 to $35,000.
But most startling of all was his plan to boost life expectancy and raise the birth rate by 25-30 per cent by 2015. Putin is worried about population decline – and clearly wants to do something about it. But, as other European states have discovered, controlling demography is difficult. Continue reading »
Gulf’s piracy nod a financial mismatch
By Michael Peel in Abu Dhabi
Somali piracy is a big and damaging business – and for the first time, a country in the oil-rich Gulf has given some money to the United Nations fund set up to fight it. It was a modest start: the United Arab Emirates donated $1.4m, part of a total of about $5m raised at a big conference on piracy in Dubai this week.
But that’s still less than the average ransom for a hijacked ship these days – and a fraction of the $7bn to $12bn that piracy is estimated by one report to cost the world economy annually. Continue reading »
The Indian world order
India has published a ranking of what it considers the 50 most powerful countries, called the National Security Index. It’s the first time the index has appeared in four years.
New Delhi is, naturally, near the top of the pecking order. Continue reading »
China: booming with a frown
“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it does bring a more pleasant form of misery,” comic Spike Milligan’s famous one-liner looks like a neat description for ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’.
Despite soaring growth, surging wages, and a general feeling that China is ‘on the up’, the latest Gallup Wellbeing Survey suggests that most Chinese people are down in the dumps. Continue reading »
Russia: long queue for Eurobonds
Russian corporate borrowers are taking the Eurobond market by storm. Since the start of the month, Russian companies have raised close to $3.5bn on the international debt market, as bond holders look to Russia for higher yields and exposure to rising commodity prices.
Steel producer Evraz and Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private lender, have raised a collective $1.85bn this week, bringing this month’s total to nearly $4.5bn. Moreover, Russian companies are now able to borrow for longer. Continue reading »
Volvo-Geely: Happily ever after?
It seems things are all sweetness and light and cross-cultural understanding after the China car industry’s largest outbound acquisition, of Volvo by Geely. And it seems to be based on the principle that good fences made good business partners. Continue reading »
Cold feet: China’s Spanish bailout
By Victor Mallet in Wednesday’s FT.
Even for an unwary western traveller, it was an avoidable pitfall.
Basking in the effusive warmth of the official welcome he had received in Beijing, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, left the Chinese capital last week convinced he had secured the promise of billions of dollars of investment in Spain’s struggling savings banks. Continue reading »
HK’s first renminbi IPO: overhyped?
Hong Kong’s first renminbi-denominated IPO has raised an impressive Rmb10.48bn ($1.6bn) – but demand from investors has been unexpectedly lackluster, as the FT reports today. People involved in the offering of Hui Xian have blamed the lower-than-expected demand on recent volatility in global markets amid debt problems in Europe.
But there are several other potential explanations for why one of the most talked-about equity deals of the year hasn’t quite lived up to its hype. Continue reading »
New York headlines
* Singapore aims to be renminbi hub
* India: FDI in multi-brand retail may come with riders
* Brazil job figures fuel inflation fears
* Hong Kong’s first renminbi IPO raises $1.6bn
* Vodafone may consider Indian IPO, similar to South Africa Continue reading »
Thailand raises rates, inflation looms
Another meeting of the Bank of Thailand’s Monetary Policy Committee and another rate rise.
The MPC lifted the benchmark one-day repo rate by 25bp to 2.75 per cent on Wednesday for the sixth time over the last seven meetings, stressing that inflationary pressure is still a problem. Continue reading »
Markets bounce back, but for how long?
Panic over. The wave of selling that hit emerging markets earlier this week as it swept around global markets has ebbed away almost as fast as struck in the first place.
The MSCI EM index was up 1.9 per cent on Wednesday at 1188.57 at 10.20 London time, wiping out the losses triggered by the sudden outbreak of concern about US debt. Indeed, EM equities are back to where they were more than a week ago, before the latest round of worries about oil, inflation, and EM interest rates. So that means those problems have all gone away? Not at all. Continue reading »
Further reading: Rushdie on China
Wednesday’s best picks from the beyondbrics team: deciphering crossed wires between Spain and China, Europe on fifteen hundred yuan a day, and asking whether the battle between Putin and Medvedev real or just light entertainment.
And, Salman Rushdie on Ai Weiwei and his dangerous art. Continue reading »
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