More than most other places in the world, this
southern African nation with a long history of monetary
dysfunction has staked its financial system on mobile money, which allows
funds to change hands through the touch of a few buttons on an old-school
cellphone or through a smartphone app.
But now, amid power cuts lasting for up to 17 hours a
day, EcoCash breaks down frequently. The outages are blocking everyday economic
activity and exacerbating a financial crisis that has left Zimbabwe’s
government bankrupt and some five million people, about a third of its
population, in need of food aid.
Eight out of 10 transactions in Zimbabwe—from buying
milk to filling up a car or settling a utility bill—are done via cellphones,
almost exclusively on EcoCash.
“We are more or less a cashless economy,” said Ashok
Chakravarti, an economist based in Harare who believes that the EcoCash outages
will hurt Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product, which the International Monetary
Fund expects to shrink by 5.2% this year.
A government austerity program and limits on issuing
T-bills haven’t stopped the new Zimbabwean dollar from losing value. Inflation
spiked to 176% in June. Last month, the finance minister announced Zimbabwe’s
statistics agency would stop publishing annual inflation data until February,
saying it was distorted by the reintroduction of a local currency.
“Petrol prices jumped at the fastest pace in 18 years in May, with an average increase of 6p per liter from the previous month, according to roadside assistance and insurance company RAC.”
“Unleaded petrol rose from 123.43p to 129.41p ($6.46 per gallon) over the month, taking the cost of filling up a 55-litre (14.53 gallon) family car to £71.18 ($93.79), an increase of £3.29 in just one month, according to RAC Fuel Watch data.”
“Price rises were driven by a jump in oil prices combined with the weakening of the pound against the dollar, said RAC.”
“Debt collectors in China are harnessing new technologies such as artificial intelligence in a bid to collect on an estimated Rmb1.3tn ($200bn) debt bubble that has formed in the country’s peer-to-peer lending industry.”
“An estimated Rmb1.3tn in outstanding P2P debt as of May, according to online lending intelligence firm Wdzj.com, and a rising number of defaults have opened the door to a wave of start-ups using new technologies to try to recover tardy loans.”
“’People’s usage of P2P debt is very high but the government only monitors the banking system closely,’ said Cherry Sheng, chief executive of Shanghai-based debt collection group Ziyitong and a former manager at Citigroup and ANZ Bank. ‘This has become an opportunity for start-ups with advanced technology to move into this market.’”
“Ziyitong, which has sought to recover Rmb150bn since it was set up in 2016, recently launched an AI platform to help recover delinquent loans for some 600 debt collection agencies, and more than 200 lenders including Alibaba Group and Postal Savings Bank of China, Ms. Sheng said.”
“The system scrapes the internet for information on borrowers and their friends, then contacts the borrower via phone using a dialogue robot. The conversations are recorded and analyzed by an algorithm that then determines the phrasing with the highest likelihood of pressuring the person to pay back the loan. The system also calls friends of the borrower and asks them to relay the urgency of making payments.”
“In May the AI system had a recovery rate of 41% for large clients on loans delinquent for up to one week, according to Ms. Sheng, compared with a rate of as low as 20% via traditional debt collection methods for similar loans. Ziyitong plans to expand the system to loans that have been unpaid for longer periods of time.”
“Yigou, another debt collection start-up, has launched a mobile phone application that allows collection agents to search thousands of individual debt records and choose cases, streamlining connections between lenders and collectors. The company can also provide geo-locational data on some borrowers to help the agents track them down.”
“The virtual currency boom has gotten so heated that it is throwing the list of the world’s richest people into disarray.”
“Consider what has happened to the founders of an upstart virtual currency known as Ripple, which has seen its value skyrocket in recent weeks.”
“At one point on Thursday, Chris Larsen, a Ripple co-founder who is also the largest holder of Ripple tokens, was worth more than $59 billion, according to figures from Forbes. That would have briefly vaulted Mr. Larsen ahead of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg into fifth place on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.”
“Other top Ripple holders would have also zoomed up that list as the value of their tokens soared more than 100% during the last week — and more than 30,000% in the last year. The boom has turned Ripple into the second largest virtual currency, within striking distance of the original behemoth, Bitcoin.”
“While most of these currencies were worth nearly nothing a year ago, many are now responsible for creating billionaires — albeit with rapidly fluctuating fortunes. If this is a tulip fever, the fever has spread to chrysanthemums and poppies.”
“Ripple, whose tokens are known as XRP, is far from the only virtual currency being fueled by the hysteria. In 2017, there were 29 tokens — including Einsteinium and Byteball — that rose more than Bitcoin’s remarkable 1,600% jump, according to OnChainFx, a data provider.”
“Nearly 40 virtual currencies are worth more than $1 billion — when all the outstanding tokens are counted at their current value — despite many of them not having been used in any sort of transaction other than speculative trading.”
For perspective, “… all the outstanding Ripple tokens were worth $140 billion on Thursday, while all Bitcoin were worth $250 billion.”
“Mr. Larsen was Ripple’s chief executive from 2012 until he stepped down last year to become the company’s executive chairman. During his tenure, Ripple focused on helping banks use its software to shift money between different foreign currencies, something that most banks currently do through a cumbersome process involving separate accounts in every country where they operate.”
“Ripple has said it has signed up more than 100 banks to use the company’s technology, including American Express and Banco Santander.”
“But banks do not need to use Ripple tokens for Ripple’s software to transfer dollars, euros and yen. That point appears to be lost on many small time investors who are buying Ripple tokens.”
“Most of the buying and selling of Ripple tokens is happening in South Korea, according to data providers that track virtual currency exchanges, where ordinary investors have thrown money at a wide array of virtual currencies.”
“…Even virtual currency analysts who believe in Ripple’s software have said there is a big difference between Ripple the company being successful, and Ripple the token gaining enough traction to justify current prices.”
“’An impossibly long list of things already needs to go right for XRP to become a reserve currency for banks,’ Ryan Selkis, a virtual currency analyst, wrote in a post on Thursday.”
“But, Mr. Selkis added, that doesn’t mean Ripple’s price won’t keep ascending. Why? ‘Because this is crypto, and everyone in the industry is now slinging crack crypto cocaine to retail addicts,’ he wrote.”
“Though the U.S. saw $112 billion of mobile payments in 2016, by a Forrester Research estimate, such payments in China totaled $9 trillion, according to iResearch Consulting Group, a Chinese firm.”
“For Alibaba and Tencent, the payoff isn’t just the transaction fees they make from merchants, typically 0.6%. It’s also the consumer data collected, which can transform their apps into marketing platforms for an expanding array of services, from bike sharing to travel.”
“Conditions in China made it ripe for this innovation. Credit cards never caught on in a big way. Discretionary spending wasn’t an option for most people until recent years, and there has long been a cultural aversion to debt in China. On top of that, the government made it tough for Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. to set up shop.”
“The rise of tech companies as financial powers has dealt a blow to traditional banks. China’s state-owned banks lost nearly $23 billion in fees in 2015 they might have collected from card fees, according to a November 2016 report from EY (formerly Ernst & Young) and Singapore’s DBS Bank. The report projected the annual fee loss could widen to $60 billion by 2020.”
“The larger problem for banks might be that Alibaba and Tencent often know more about their customers than they do. If a Beijing car dealer uses a bank debit card for a business trip to Shanghai, the bank knows what airline he or she flew, as well as the hotel and restaurants patronized. ‘But if the ‘customer interface’ is happening elsewhere, the bank has zero visibility over transactions,’ said James Lloyd, Asia-Pacific FinTech Leader at EY. ‘That’s not a good situation to find yourself in’.”
“Tencent and Alibaba say they have no plans to push their payment platforms to U.S. consumers. Many Americans don’t see the need for mobile payments, since their plastic cards and cash are welcomed and some merchants still accept checks.”
“’Any new way of paying has to prove itself to be incrementally better than any other options you have,’ said James Wester of research firm IDC Financial Insights. In the U.S., ‘plastic is convenient, widely accepted and understood by the customer’.”
“If the big US tax cut that brought 2017 to a conclusion has its intended consequences, then capital expenditures will start to rise in the next year, as will wages. With consumer confidence high, that should lead to higher consumption. It would also lead to monetary policy at the tightest end of what currently seems probable. The European Central Bank and Bank of Japan would indeed desist from their asset purchases, the Federal Reserve would reduce its balance sheet, and liquidity would flow out of world markets. The Fed could be expected to raise rates four times.”
“This would be a consummation devoutly to be wished, vindicating both the belated fiscal stimulus that the US has just administered and the desperate muddle-through strategy that preceded it. But significantly higher rates and lower liquidity would be bad news for equity markets, which look historically expensive. High valuations can be justified while rates are historically low. Future earnings can be discounted at a low rate and the cash yields on stocks look attractive. But if all goes according to the US Republican party’s plan, interest rates will need to be significantly higher a year from now, and valuations will come under pressure.”
“The alternative scenario is that the tax cut achieves no meaningful stimulus, and is merely put towards higher corporate dividends and expensive mergers and acquisitions. The synchronized global economic recovery of the past year peters out, as other brief post-crisis recoveries have done. In this situation, the Fed tightens far less aggressively, other central banks blink and keep buying assets, and bond yields stay where they are, or even fall. On this gloomy prognosis, the legacy of the tax cut would be no more than greater inequality. But equity markets would enjoy much the same benign conditions they have had this year.”
“Amid Wall Street’s bullish prognoses for 2018, an inverse relationship is becoming clear. Those who are more optimistic for the economy tend to be more pessimistic about the prospects for risk assets. Some say they are so bullish they are bearish.”
“This is realistic. If monetary stimulus really does give way to a successful fiscal stimulus, investors should expect much higher volatility, and probably outright price falls, from equity markets.”
“Fund manager to keep 1m sq ft space in Canary Wharf Group towers.”
“Brian Kingston, chief executive of Brookfield Property Partners, said property prices in London had ‘always been high’, but were now ‘very high’.”
“’You would always have people starting out renting, but they would graduate to owning,’ said Mr Kingston. ‘But in New York and London, you could be a fairly well-compensated individual and you could still not afford to buy’.”
“Chinese stockholders are ramping up borrowing against shares, driving revenue for securities houses but creating risk of a chain reaction in the event of a sharp market downturn.”
“Shareholders in 317 Shanghai and Shenzhen-listed companies had pledged shares worth at least 40% of those companies by December 18, up from 224 companies on the same date a year earlier, according to Wind Info.”
“Share-pledging is especially common for small and mid-cap companies, where a single shareholder often owns a large stake. Controlling shareholders sometimes reinvest the proceeds into company projects or buy additional company shares on the secondary market to boost the share price.”
“In September China’s two main bourses published draft rules that would tighten regulation on share pledging. One provision caps the value of loans secured by shares at 60% of the market value of the pledged shares, ensuring a buffer that will protect the lender in case a share price falls.”
At least the mainland exchanges require that such pledges be disclosed, unlike the Hong Kong exchange, where other shareholders can be surprised.
