Orange i mBank wspólnie zbudują nowy bank. Oby nie wyszło im to za dobrze ;-)

"Jeśli jest prawdą hipoteza, że strategiczne sojusze firm telekomunikacyjnych z bankami ustalą na długie lata nowy układ sił w branży finansowej, to właśnie jesteśmy świadkami najważniejszego momentu w tej grze. mBank, trzeci największy bank w Polsce, poinformował w poniedziałek wieczorem o strategicznym porozumieniu z koncernem Orange, z którego usług korzysta ponad 15 mln Polaków. Umowa przewiduje, że w drugiej połowie roku partnerzy powołają wspólnie bank, który będzie oferował specjalnie sprofilowane usługi klientom Orange."

" Wiedza o terminowości opłacania i wysokości rachunku za telefon jest jedną z najważniejszych w ocenie zdolności kredytowej klienta (bo każdy kto ma kłopoty finansowe najpierw przestaje płacić za telefon). Otwiera się też gigantyczne pole do współpracy na niwie Big Data. Wiedza, jaką mają operatorzy telekomunikacyjni na temat naszego życia, jest niemała. Wiedzą którymi ulicami chodzimy, do których sklepów zaglądamy, które centrum handlowe najbardziej lubimy oraz jak często robimy siusiu. Banki z kolei wiedzą ile zarabiamy, co kupujemy, gdzie wydajemy pieniądze."

http://samcik.blox.pl/2014/03/Orange-i-mBank-maja-strategiczny-sojusz-otworza.html

Raport: Koszty korków w 7 największych miastach Polski

"Trzecia edycja raportu analizującego korki w 7 największych miastach Polski, tj. Warszawie, Łodzi, Wrocławiu, Krakowie, Katowicach, Poznaniu i w Gdańsku. Raport został przygotowany przez firmę doradczą Deloitte i serwis Targeo.pl.

Czas spędzony w korkach nie jest wykorzystywany produktywnie, gdyż można byłoby go przeznaczyć na pracę lub odpoczynek. Z ekonomicznego punktu widzenia jest to więc strata, której rozmiar można oszacować jako koszt utraconych korzyści. Celem analizy było oszacowanie korków w wyrażeniu pieniężnym dla mieszkańca-kierowcy, osoby pracującej oraz dla budżetu państwa.

Zwieńczeniem raportu jest ranking miast oraz rekomendacje na zmniejszenie korków."

http://www.deloitte.com/view/pl_PL/pl/publikacje/raporty/7535f4e59a0d4410VgnVCM1000003256f70aRCRD.htm

Lessons from the Greek PSI

"Lesson 4 (Biggest Lesson of Them All): Prolonging an unavoidable debt re-structure makes the problem far, far worse, especially when a bailout is given in order to shift bad assets from the banks’ books to the taxpayers on condition of austerity that causes both the private and the public sectors to shrink. Introducing a PSI after this sinister error is implemented, while exempting the official sector that implemented it (including the ECB’s SMP bond purchases), is to add insult to injury. And to make a much larger OSI more pressing and more painful for future governments around Europe."

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/03/12/lessons-from-the-greek-psi/

The Relentless Bid, Explained

"Whereas yesterday’s brokers were principally concerned with keeping money in motion and generating activity each month, today’s brokers – who call themselves wealth managers by the way – are principally concerned with making client retirement accounts stretch out over decades. Stocks are increasingly the answer to this puzzle. Bonds, with their fixed rate of income, by definition cannot get the job done. This means a bias toward buying equities everyday and almost never selling. It means adding to stocks sheepishly on up days and voraciously on the (rarely occurring) down ones.

In short, it means a relentless bid as the torrent of assets comes flowing in every day, week and month of the year."

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2014/03/05/the-relentless-bid-explained/

(Znalezione na profilu Rafała Hirscha.)

Shadow Banking Is Hurting China’s Banks — And That’s a Good Thing

"How can the world’s second-largest economy function at all? Enter shadow bankers - broadly defined as lenders outside the formal banking system. They include mom-and-pop lending operations, companies lending excess cash to each other, pawnshops, and recently tech companies running money market funds. Unlike shadow banking in the West, shadow banking in China is a necessity, helping build factories, mines, infrastructure projects, and other activities, and creating jobs."

http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/03/10/shadow-banking-is-hurting-chinas-banks-and-thats-a-good-thing/

Facebook’s horrible, stroke-of-genius IPO

"At the time of the Facebook IPO, 21 months ago, the markets knew full well what the biggest challenge facing Facebook was. The desktop product was wildly popular, but the mobile product wasn’t, and it was far from clear how Facebook could thrive in a world based around the smartphone. Zuckerberg had one job above all others: manage the transition to mobile, and do it as fast and as aggressively as possible.

And that’s exactly what he did.

By the time last quarter’s earnings came out, Facebook was getting 53% of its revenue from its 945,000,000 mobile users: nobody saw that coming at the time of the IPO."

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/02/20/facebooks-horrible-stroke-of-genius-ipo/

[IMF] Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth

"Economists are increasingly focusing on the links between rising inequality and the fragility of growth. Narratives include the relationship between inequality, leverage and the financial cycle, which sowed the seeds for crisis; and the role of political-economy factors (especially the influence of the rich) in allowing financial excess to balloon ahead of the crisis. In earlier work, we documented a multi-decade cross-country relationship between inequality and the fragility of economic growth. Our work built on the tentative consensus in the literature that inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of shocks, and thus that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth."

"Our main findings are:

First, more unequal societies tend to redistribute more. It is thus important in understanding the growth-inequality relationship to distinguish between market and net inequality.

Second, lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth, for a given level of redistribution. These results are highly supportive of our earlier work.

And third, redistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth; only in extreme cases is there some evidence that it may have direct negative effects on growth. Thus the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution—including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality—are on average pro-growth."

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf

The Financial Economists Roundtable Weighs in on Financial Transaction Taxes

"Many concerns motivate these proposed taxes. Some people want the financial sector to pay for the tremendous economic costs that they believe it imposed on everyone in the global financial crisis of 2008. Others believe that the financial sector should bear its “fair share” of taxes; such beliefs are particularly strong in countries where financial transactions are exempt from value-added taxes and therefore “escape” taxation. Still others simply want new revenues to support additional government spending, reduce the deficit, or provide tax relief to other sectors. Finally, some commentators believe that too much financial activity focuses on short-term rather than long-term goals. They believe that a transaction tax would force investors and businesses to focus more on long-term values and less on short-term activities that they perceive to be wasteful."

"Not all taxes are economically sensible, regardless of how desirable they may appear. A transaction tax imposed at any economically meaningful rate by only some countries would cause many transactions to be shifted to other countries, resulting in far less revenue than a simple static analysis might suggest. Furthermore, to the extent that a financial transaction tax would generate substantial revenue, the tax and the associated reduction in liquidity would lower asset prices. Lower asset prices would cause decreased corporate investment, resulting in less capital per worker in the long run and thus lower wages throughout the economy. Therefore, governments should be extremely wary of introducing or increasing financial transaction taxes."

http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/02/27/the-financial-economists-roundtable-weighs-in-on-financial-transaction-taxes/

Credit Value Adjustment (CVA) implementation comes of age

"In banking, particularly recently, one often hears the term “Credit Value Adjustment” or CVA. Is it a new fashion trend in the world of finance world is it there more to it? Why are traders, quants, and risk officers at large institutions feverishly trying to deal with this topic all of a sudden? It turns out that the increased focus on counterparty risk after the financial crisis as well as the new Basel requirements for bank capitalization (see document) have added urgency to the CVA implementation by international banks, forcing them to focus on the topic."

"The CVA measure is different from the concept of standard Credit Risk because it combines the uncertainty of exposure with the bilateral nature of exposure. It measures the risk that the counterparty to a financial contract will default prior to its expiration and will not make the specified payments. At the same time the amount of those specified payments may have increased due to market movements." 

http://soberlook.com/2013/10/credit-value-adjustment-cva.html

The Fed’s Actions in 2008: What the Transcripts Reveal

"On Friday, the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of the 2008 meetings of its Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy. The transcripts provide a detailed account of some of the Fed's key decisions during that crisis year. Here is a look at the fuller picture that the documents have provided."

"Federal Reserve officials are unaware in January 2008 that the economy has already entered a recession. But the Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and his closest advisers are feeling nervous. They worry that the Fed's actions at the end of 2007 have been insufficient, and that tumbling stock prices represent the start of a broader pullback in investment."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/21/business/federal-reserve-2008-transcripts.html