Tag: Wal-Mart

November 20, 2017

Perspective

VC – Walmart Nation: Mapping the Largest Employers in the U.S. – Jeff Desjardins 11/17

NYT – A Great Migration From Puerto Rico Is Set to Transform Orlando – Lizette Alvarez 11/17

  • “More than 168,000 people have flown or sailed out of Puerto Rico to Florida since the hurricane, landing at airports in Orlando, Miami and Tampa, and the port in Fort Lauderdale. Nearly half are arriving in Orlando, where they are tapping their networks of family and friends. An additional 100,000 are booked on flights to Orlando through Dec. 31, county officials said. Large numbers are also settling in the Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach areas.”
  • “With so many arriving so abruptly, the migration is expected to transform Orlando, a city that has already become a stronghold of Puerto Ricans, many of them fleeing the island’s economic crisis in recent years. The Puerto Rican population of Florida has exploded from 479,000 in 2000 to well over one million today, according to the Pew Research Center, with the better part settling in Orlando.”

WSJ – Daily Shot: Moody’s – Global Demographic Shifts 11/17

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

A Teachable Moment – If You Are Reading This, You Already Won the Genetic Lottery – Anthony Isola 11/16

A Teachable Moment – 6 Ways to Foil a Financial Predator – Dina Isola 11/17

CNBC – Homeownership doesn’t build wealth, study finds – Diana Olick 11/16

  • Essentially, depends where you live and how disciplined you are with your savings. Further, if you live in a part of the world where home price appreciation has lagged, there is value in having flexibility to move to parts of the country where it hasn’t (which of course further builds on that trend).

FT – Donald Trump’s silence over Roy Moore speaks volumes – Edward Luce 11/16

  • “…Then there is the evangelical vote. Mr Trump appears single-handedly to have changed their moral position. In 2011, 70% of white evangelicals said bad private behavior should disqualify an individual from public office, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. That had dropped to just 28% last year. It is perhaps the most astonishing sea change among any group of voters in recent years. It is also a good example of ‘negative partisanship’ — no matter how bad your candidate might be, he or she could not possibly be worse than the other party’s.”

FT – Prepare to bet against bitcoin as it becomes civilized – Gillian Tett 11/16

  • “If the cryptocurrency ceases to be a ringfenced product, the normal rules of investing will apply.”

NYT – Middle-Class Families Confront Soaring Health Insurance Costs – Robert Pear 11/16

WSJ – Upbeat Moody’s Misses the Mark on India – Anjani Trivedi 11/17

  • “Ratings company’s upgrade is its first in more than a decade, but still looks premature.”

Finance

FT – Investors sue Monte dei Paschi over cancelled bonds – Rachel Sanderson, Robert Smith, and Thomas Hale 11/16

China

Bloomberg – China’s Outbound Investment Plunges as Irrational Deals Curbed – Jeff Kearns and Jessica Sui 11/15

WSJ – Daily Shot: China 5yr AAA Average Corporate Bond Yield 11/16

FT – China tightens rules on asset management to rein in risky lending – Tom Mitchell 11/17

  • “China’s central bank outlined sweeping new regulations aimed at curbing financial risk in the asset management industry on Friday, in the latest signal of its determination to rein in the country’s runaway shadow banking sector.”
  • “The new rules, affecting $15tn of asset-management products, are aimed at unifying regulatory practices across the financial industry and will come into force in June. They will prohibit asset managers from promising investors a guaranteed rate of return, while also requiring them to set aside 10% of the management fees they collect for provisioning purposes.”
  • “Fears about the potential impact of regulatory tightening have contributed to a recent spike in Chinese sovereign bond yields, with the China 10-years rising through 4% this week for the first time since 2014.”
  • “On Thursday the PBoC injected almost $50bn into the financial system to calm investor fears, its largest intervention in almost a year. But Friday’s regulations indicated that Mr Xi’s administration will not back away from the more stringent approach it has adopted towards risk management.”
  • “In a party congress speech last month that marked the beginning of his second five-year term in office, Mr Xi indicated that his administration was prepared to accept lower rates of economic growth in order to defuse financial risks.”
  • “In August the International Monetary Fund warned that non-financial sector debt was poised to exceed 290% of GDP by 2022, compared with 235% at the end of last year.”

South America

WSJ – Daily Shot: Venezuelan Household Purchasing Power 11/17

FT – Exodus the only answer for thousands of Venezuelans – Gideon Long and John Paul Rathbone 11/17

June 23, 2017

Perspective

WSJ – Wal-Mart to Vendors: Get Off Amazon’s Cloud – Jay Greene and Laura Stevens 6/21

  • “To do business with Wal-Mart, the retailer requires some tech providers to build the services on AWS cloud rivals.”

WSJ – Daily Shot: Brookings – Midlife mortality from “deaths of despair” 6/22

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

FT – Inevitable Chinese slowdown ‘a myth’ – Steve Johnson 6/21

  • Essentially, there is precedence when looking at China’s Asian neighbors that would provide examples why the country has room to run. However, the credit boom of late is still a major concern.

FT – China has no choice but to walk financial tightrope – Diana Choyleva 6/21

  • “The warning signs of significant financial distress have grown in tandem with a surge in interbank borrowing and lending over the past couple of years. The strains have intensified since Beijing’s leaders made it clear in late 2016 that they were determined to rein in runaway debt and started nudging up money market rates as well as cracking down on nefarious shadow banking activities.”
  • “The risk of contagion is a key reason why China’s regulators are striving to rein in Wealth Management Products (WMPs), which totaled Rmb30tn at the end of April. The complex structure of WMPs typically yokes together any number of banks and NBFIs, which are now the largest borrowers on the interbank market.”
  • “Beijing is especially wary of banks allocating cash raised through WMPs to external asset managers. City commercial banks, which depend heavily on WMPs for funding, are particular enthusiasts of these ‘entrusted investments’, which totaled more than Rmb5tn at the end of 2016.”
  • “Regulators have taken aim at entrusted investments because they hide further layers of leverage and obscure the ultimate borrower. In recent weeks, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, under new chairman Guo Shuqing, has issued a flurry of directives to haul banks back into line. Banks have responded by pulling back their cash from the capital markets, increasing the very strains that the regulators want to avert.”
  • “A looming shake-out in the young, burgeoning interbank market for negotiable certificates of deposit (NCDs) could intensify a cash crunch. Regulators recently required banks to count NCDs as part of their lending and borrowing totals, dimming their attraction. More than 60% of outstanding NCDs will mature over the next four months, a big headache for those banks that rely on this source of funding.”
  • “Banks are not the only weak link. Insurance companies are net interbank lenders, but the breakneck expansion of some insurers is fanning concerns. China’s insurance regulator, worried about the risk of mismatched maturities, has clamped down on so-called universal life insurance policies, which are thinly disguised WMPs.”

Energy

WSJ – Daily Shot: BMI Research – U.S. Shale Output 6/22

WSJ – Daily Shot: GasBuddy – U.S. Average Retail Gas Price Chart 6/22

  • “It’s worth noting that despite these sharp declines in crude futures, US gasoline prices at the pump have barely budged.”

Environment / Science

NYT – 95-Degree Days: How Extreme Heat Could Spread Across the World – Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich 6/22

China

FT – Alibaba taps user data to drive growth spurt – Louise Lucas 6/21

  • Data, data, data. The more I know about your customers, the more you’re willing to pay me to broker transactions. And the more I know about you (consumer), the better able I am to match you (sell you) with products you’d want.

FT – Big China companies targeted over ‘systemic risk’ – Lucy Hornby, Yuan Yang, Gabriel Wildau 6/22

  • “This is a game changer for Chinese M&A and could pretty much stop all outbound deal making in its tracks.” – Keith Pogson, EY’s senior partner for financial services in Asia.