Dưới lòng Đồng bằng sông Hồng, sâu đến - 3500m là một bể than lớn, trữ lượng 210 tỷ tấn. Tổng công ty Than cho biết sau năm 2010 sẽ mở mỏ khai thác với sản lượng 1,5 triệu tấn/năm.
Vào thập kỷ 70 của thế kỷ trước, các nhà địa chất trong lúc khoan thăm dò dầu khí tại khu vực Đồng bằng sông Hồng đã phát hiện ra nhiều vỉa than có trữ lượng lớn. Thông tin này được các nhà địa chất tâm huyết của Việt Nam rất quan tâm và quyết định phải xem xét cụ thể. Nhiệm vụ được giao cho Viện Địa chất Khoáng sản (Tổng cục Địa chất). Sau khi tập hợp các báo cáo từ khoan thăm dò dầu khí, kết hợp với điều tra, khảo sát, đến 1986 báo cáo về "Tổng kết địa chất và độ chứa than miền võng Hà Nội" đã được hoàn thành.
Theo báo cáo này than dưới lòng Đồng bằng sông Hồng nằm trên diện tích 3500km2, trải dài từ Hà Nội - Hưng Yên - Hải Dương - Thái Bình... rồi kéo thẳng ra biển. Có khoảng vài chục vỉa than với tổng trữ lượng dự báo là 210 tỷ tấn. Các vỉa than này có chiều dày lớn, dao động từ 2-3m đến 10-20m, ít lớp kẹp, vỉa nằm thoải, duy trì ổn định, chất lượng tốt...
Ngày 25/11/1998 tại Hà Nội, Tổng công ty Than Việt Nam và Tổ chức Phát triển công nghệ công nghiệp và Năng lượng mới Nhật Bản (NEDO) đã ký văn bản cùng tham gia Dự án Thăm dò khảo sát than Đồng bằng sông Hồng Việt Nam, trong thời gian 5 năm. Dự án đã được tiến hành từ 1998 và kết thúc vào năm 2002. Vùng khảo sát của Dự án được thực hiện trên diện tích 962km2, bao gồm các tỉnh Hưng Yên, Thái Bình, một phần tỉnh Hà Tây và Hà Nội, với 19 lỗ khoan, tổng khối lượng 9.516,80m, đo địa chấn... Bên cạnh đó là khảo sát, nghiên cứu sử dụng 50 lỗ khoan của Việt Nam đã thực hiện trước đó trong quá trình thăm dò dầu khí và than.
Theo số liệu khảo sát trên diện tích 962km2, thì trữ lượng than dự báo khoảng 30 tỷ tấn( khảo sát đến độ sâu -1700m). Trong đó tổng diện tích tìm kiếm tại huyện Khoái Châu (80km2) có trữ lượng than trên 1,5 tỷ tấn. Riêng khu vực Bình Minh (Khoái Châu) với diện tích thăm dò 25km2 đạt thăm dò sơ bộ trữ lượng 456 triệu tấn (khảo sát đến độ sâu -600m). Đây là loại than á BitumB, có chất lượng tốt, rất có giá trị cho sản xuất công nghiệp nhất là luyện kim.
Hiện nay Tổng công ty Than đang tiếp tục công tác thăm dò chi tiết nơi dự định sẽ mở mỏ đầu tiên tại Bình Minh (Khoái Châu) để chuẩn xác về trữ lượng, chất lượng than, cùng các điều kiện địa chất thuỷ văn, địa chất công trình, môi trường... chuẩn bị cho việc khai thác vào sau 2010.
Theo Tổng công ty Than vấn đề phức tạp nhất hiện nay là lựa chọn công nghệ khai thác nào cho phù hợp. Hiện tại ở một số nước trên thế giới đã khai thác than ở độ sâu -1000m, nhưng ở những nơi đó có cấu tạo địa chất rất bền vững. Còn khu vực Đồng bằng sông Hồng có cấu tạo địa chất không ổn định, lớp đất đá và vách trụ mềm, rất khó khăn cho việc khai thác. Đã có nhiều hội thảo được tổ chức để tìm ra phương án khai thác cho mỏ than này, cũng có nhiều công nghệ được đề cập đến. Nhưng phương án truyền thống là khai thác hầm lò vẫn được quan tâm hơn cả. Theo ông Nguyễn Trọng Khiêm, Trưởng ban Địa chất Trắc địa Tổng công ty Than thì phương án khai thác phải đảm bảo an toàn môi trường, để than lấy lên vẫn có giá trị thương mại, còn nếu chi phí khai thác lại lớn hơn giá bán trên thị trường thì khó thực hiện.
Dự báo nhu cầu than Việt Nam sẽ tăng lên trên 30 triệu tấn/năm vào 2020. Ngoài việc khai thác những mỏ than hiện có, Chính phủ cũng đã giao nhiệm vụ cho Tổng công ty Than trong giai đoạn 2003-2010 phải tập trung đẩy mạnh công tác thăm dò đến mức -300m, đồng thời triển khai việc tìm kiếm, điều tra cơ bản dưới mức - 300m bể than Quảng Ninh; từng bước thăm dò bể than Đồng bằng sông Hồng cùng các mỏ than bùn khác để phục vụ cho chiến lược phát triển năng lượng của quốc gia. Việc tiến hành khai thác mỏ than tại Bình Minh (Khoái Châu) nằm trong "Qui hoạch phát triển ngành Than Việt Nam giai đoạn 2003-2010 có xét triển vọng đến năm 2020" đã được Chính phủ phê duyệt.
Tổng công ty Than cho biết khi mỏ than này đi vào hoạt động, sẽ đầu tư xây dựng nhà máy nhiệt điện tại đây để dùng than phát điện, nhằm tăng hiệu quả sử dụng tài nguyên và góp phần tăng sản lượng điện phục vụ phát triển kinh tế - xã hội.
Trần Thuỷ (Vietnamnet, 21-4-2004)
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Rating Agency kiếm tiền thế nào và vận hành ra sao?
Rating Agency kiếm tiền từ việc bán sản phẩm là kết quả xếp hạng tín dụng.
Ai mua?
(i) Nhà đầu tư: để quyết định mua/bán/giữ sản phẩm tài chính. Nhà đầu tư có cần bỏ tiền ra mua không hay sẽ được cung cấp miễn phí?
(ii) Người phát hành sản phẩm tài chính: để bán và định giá bán cho thị trường.
Ai đóng góp nhiều doanh số hơn cho Rating Agency, nhà đầu tư hay người phát hành?
S&P không dám yêu cầu các định chế tài chính phố Wall cung cấp dữ liệu bởi họ lo ngại rằng nếu đòi hỏi nhiều quá thì những khách hàng này sẽ chuyển sang sử dụng dịch vụ của Moody's.
Moody's có lo lắng điều tương tự? 'Có!'.
Kết cục: các kết quả xếp hạn tín dụng được công bố như bình thường dù dữ liệu có rất ít, hoặc không có dữ liệu.
Ai mua?
(i) Nhà đầu tư: để quyết định mua/bán/giữ sản phẩm tài chính. Nhà đầu tư có cần bỏ tiền ra mua không hay sẽ được cung cấp miễn phí?
(ii) Người phát hành sản phẩm tài chính: để bán và định giá bán cho thị trường.
Ai đóng góp nhiều doanh số hơn cho Rating Agency, nhà đầu tư hay người phát hành?
S&P không dám yêu cầu các định chế tài chính phố Wall cung cấp dữ liệu bởi họ lo ngại rằng nếu đòi hỏi nhiều quá thì những khách hàng này sẽ chuyển sang sử dụng dịch vụ của Moody's.
Moody's có lo lắng điều tương tự? 'Có!'.
Kết cục: các kết quả xếp hạn tín dụng được công bố như bình thường dù dữ liệu có rất ít, hoặc không có dữ liệu.
Tổng thống Philippines bán xe sang
VNExpress, 7-7-2011 - Ông Benigno Aquino III ngày 6-7 cho biết đã bán chiếc xe riêng hạng sang hiệu Porsche vì vấn đề an ninh, chứ không phải do những lời chỉ trích đây là chiếc xe không thích hợp cho lãnh đạo một nước còn nghèo.
Tổng thống Philippines mua chiếc xe thể thao nói trên qua tay vài người với giá 4,5 triệu Peso (tương đương 102.000 USD). Nhà lãnh đạo 50 tuổi này cho biết ông đã bán chiếc xe đúng bằng với giá mua. Nhưng ông cũng phàn nàn về việc có quá nhiều tin tức và bình luận về chiếc xe của ông.
Ông Aquino III giải thích lý do bán xe là do cảm giác dễ bị tấn công khi ngồi trong chiếc Porsche quá nổi bật, chứ không phải vì bị chỉ trích xài xe sang. "Chiếc xe mang đến rủi ro không cần thiết và giống như quảng cáo rằng tôi đang có mặt trong chiếc xe vậy", AP dẫn lời nhà lãnh đạo Philippines.
Nguồn tin từ văn phòng tổng thống cho biết chiếc xe được bán cho một người bạn của ông Aquino. Năm 2010, ông đã bán chiếc xe thể thao hiệu BMW để mua chiếc Porsche cũ mới chạy được dưới 10.000 km. Ông phải lên tiếng biện minh cho việc đổi xe và giải thích không phải ông muốn thử cảm giác mạnh.
Những ý kiến chỉ trích nhằm vào ông Aquino vì nhiều người cho rằng việc ông mua một chiếc xe hạng sang không phù hợp với lời kêu gọi thắt lưng buộc bụng. Dinh tổng thống thì khẳng định ông mua chiếc xe bằng tiền riêng và không mâu thuẫn với chính sách thắt chặt chi tiêu công.
Tuy vậy, tranh cãi về chiếc xe được coi là nguyên nhân khiến Tổng thống Aquino bị giảm mức độ hài lòng từ công chúng. Trước đây ông sử dụng một chiếc Lexus LX570 mượn từ anh rể. Hiện ông không còn dùng chiếc xe này, nhưng vẫn sở hữu một chiếc Toyota Land Cruiser và một chiếc Ford Everest.
Tổng thống Philippines mua chiếc xe thể thao nói trên qua tay vài người với giá 4,5 triệu Peso (tương đương 102.000 USD). Nhà lãnh đạo 50 tuổi này cho biết ông đã bán chiếc xe đúng bằng với giá mua. Nhưng ông cũng phàn nàn về việc có quá nhiều tin tức và bình luận về chiếc xe của ông.
Ông Aquino III giải thích lý do bán xe là do cảm giác dễ bị tấn công khi ngồi trong chiếc Porsche quá nổi bật, chứ không phải vì bị chỉ trích xài xe sang. "Chiếc xe mang đến rủi ro không cần thiết và giống như quảng cáo rằng tôi đang có mặt trong chiếc xe vậy", AP dẫn lời nhà lãnh đạo Philippines.
Nguồn tin từ văn phòng tổng thống cho biết chiếc xe được bán cho một người bạn của ông Aquino. Năm 2010, ông đã bán chiếc xe thể thao hiệu BMW để mua chiếc Porsche cũ mới chạy được dưới 10.000 km. Ông phải lên tiếng biện minh cho việc đổi xe và giải thích không phải ông muốn thử cảm giác mạnh.
Những ý kiến chỉ trích nhằm vào ông Aquino vì nhiều người cho rằng việc ông mua một chiếc xe hạng sang không phù hợp với lời kêu gọi thắt lưng buộc bụng. Dinh tổng thống thì khẳng định ông mua chiếc xe bằng tiền riêng và không mâu thuẫn với chính sách thắt chặt chi tiêu công.
Tuy vậy, tranh cãi về chiếc xe được coi là nguyên nhân khiến Tổng thống Aquino bị giảm mức độ hài lòng từ công chúng. Trước đây ông sử dụng một chiếc Lexus LX570 mượn từ anh rể. Hiện ông không còn dùng chiếc xe này, nhưng vẫn sở hữu một chiếc Toyota Land Cruiser và một chiếc Ford Everest.
Benz or Bentley: Vietnam car sales on the rise
By Ian Timberlake | AFP – Wed, Jul 6, 2011
A young woman in a tight silver dress posed on the front of a black Audi A6 sedan at a Hanoi auto show, hoping to entice buyers.
Luxury cars are increasingly irresistible for many Vietnamese, say industry players who report rising sales even as daily life becomes harder for the majority struggling to cope with one of the world's highest rates of inflation.
Audi's A6, launched at the Vietnam Auto Expo last month, costs almost $142,000 -- which would take the average Vietnamese worker 182 years to earn.
Yet Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Audi and other high-end brands are increasingly common on the narrow streets of Hanoi, where they vie for space with the motorcycles which are standard transport for most people.
Even more exclusive names including Bentley and Rolls-Royce can be spotted, leading to concerns about growing social inequality.
"We have been doubling our sales every year and I think we'll do the same again," said Laurent Genet, general director of Automotive Asia Ltd, Audi's official importer to Vietnam.
Ford, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and others have been assembling vehicles in Vietnam for several years.
But only since the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2007 has the market been open to official importers, Genet said, meaning it is still in its infancy and attracting an increasing number of brands.
Auto Motors Vietnam, the official Renault importer, arrived in Vietnam late last year with its Koleos, which retails for 1.429 billion dong (U.S 68,048).
"Sales have started pretty well from the beginning," said managing director Xavier Casin.
France's Citroen returned to Vietnam this year and Range Rover, which has been in the country for three years, says sales are up by about 50 percent in 2011 -- even though its models at the Hanoi show retailed for about U.S 200,000.
"Land Rover is very expensive. The market knows that," said sales manager Tran Nhat Tu.
The Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers' Association reported a year-on-year increase of almost 38 percent in car and SUV-style vehicle sales for the first four months of 2011.
The increase comes despite an economy beset by a high trade deficit, a struggling currency and inflation that has risen every month since last August.
With inflation running at 21 percent in June, ordinary people -- whose average monthly salary is 1,365,000 dong (U.S 65) -- have been cutting back on expenses.
As part of efforts to stabilise the economy the central bank wants growth in credit to stay below 20 percent this year, with lenders limiting the proportion of loans for "non-productive sectors", notably property and stocks.
But the restrictions have not affected the high-end car market, said Genet.
"In our case we are selling expensive cars for people who don't really need financing," he said. "For them it's prestige. It's almost an investment."
Tran Minh Tuan, 28, is an example. The real estate trader visited the auto show thinking of upgrading from a less-prestigious brand to Audi.
"The car you drive shows your social class, your identity," he said.
"I think the demand for luxury cars in Vietnam has always been high. Although the economy sometimes is not good, there are still a lot of people who have money, who want to change to more expensive cars."
In 1986 communist Vietnam began to turn away from a planned economy to embrace the free market, a policy which led to growth among the fastest in Asia.
Despite recent economic instability the growth has continued, inevitably bringing with it the "conspicuous consumption" evident in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, said John Hendra of the United Nations.
"The wealth gap is rising between the rich and the poor," he said in May before ending his term as UN country director.
But while displays of wealth are sometimes a sign of success, many ordinary Vietnamese doubt the money was acquired honestly, said Matthieu Salomon, international senior adviser for Towards Transparency, the local affiliate of global anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.
Saloman said a survey by his group, due for release in August, found that about a quarter of urban Vietnamese youth believe people are most likely to succeed if they are not following the rules.
Hanoi's Young Business Association recently told a World Bank-backed forum that the "supercars and expensive houses" of a few rich people reflect waste, bureaucracy and corruption in public spending.
For most Vietnamese, a car is still out of reach and the auto show was a chance for people like state employee Nguyen Tuan Hung, 37, to fantasise.
"I drive a motorcycle," he said. "I don't have money to buy a car. But of course, I dream of buying one."
A young woman in a tight silver dress posed on the front of a black Audi A6 sedan at a Hanoi auto show, hoping to entice buyers.
Luxury cars are increasingly irresistible for many Vietnamese, say industry players who report rising sales even as daily life becomes harder for the majority struggling to cope with one of the world's highest rates of inflation.
Audi's A6, launched at the Vietnam Auto Expo last month, costs almost $142,000 -- which would take the average Vietnamese worker 182 years to earn.
Yet Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Audi and other high-end brands are increasingly common on the narrow streets of Hanoi, where they vie for space with the motorcycles which are standard transport for most people.
Even more exclusive names including Bentley and Rolls-Royce can be spotted, leading to concerns about growing social inequality.
"We have been doubling our sales every year and I think we'll do the same again," said Laurent Genet, general director of Automotive Asia Ltd, Audi's official importer to Vietnam.
Ford, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and others have been assembling vehicles in Vietnam for several years.
But only since the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2007 has the market been open to official importers, Genet said, meaning it is still in its infancy and attracting an increasing number of brands.
Auto Motors Vietnam, the official Renault importer, arrived in Vietnam late last year with its Koleos, which retails for 1.429 billion dong (U.S 68,048).
"Sales have started pretty well from the beginning," said managing director Xavier Casin.
France's Citroen returned to Vietnam this year and Range Rover, which has been in the country for three years, says sales are up by about 50 percent in 2011 -- even though its models at the Hanoi show retailed for about U.S 200,000.
"Land Rover is very expensive. The market knows that," said sales manager Tran Nhat Tu.
The Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers' Association reported a year-on-year increase of almost 38 percent in car and SUV-style vehicle sales for the first four months of 2011.
The increase comes despite an economy beset by a high trade deficit, a struggling currency and inflation that has risen every month since last August.
With inflation running at 21 percent in June, ordinary people -- whose average monthly salary is 1,365,000 dong (U.S 65) -- have been cutting back on expenses.
As part of efforts to stabilise the economy the central bank wants growth in credit to stay below 20 percent this year, with lenders limiting the proportion of loans for "non-productive sectors", notably property and stocks.
But the restrictions have not affected the high-end car market, said Genet.
"In our case we are selling expensive cars for people who don't really need financing," he said. "For them it's prestige. It's almost an investment."
Tran Minh Tuan, 28, is an example. The real estate trader visited the auto show thinking of upgrading from a less-prestigious brand to Audi.
"The car you drive shows your social class, your identity," he said.
"I think the demand for luxury cars in Vietnam has always been high. Although the economy sometimes is not good, there are still a lot of people who have money, who want to change to more expensive cars."
In 1986 communist Vietnam began to turn away from a planned economy to embrace the free market, a policy which led to growth among the fastest in Asia.
Despite recent economic instability the growth has continued, inevitably bringing with it the "conspicuous consumption" evident in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, said John Hendra of the United Nations.
"The wealth gap is rising between the rich and the poor," he said in May before ending his term as UN country director.
But while displays of wealth are sometimes a sign of success, many ordinary Vietnamese doubt the money was acquired honestly, said Matthieu Salomon, international senior adviser for Towards Transparency, the local affiliate of global anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.
Saloman said a survey by his group, due for release in August, found that about a quarter of urban Vietnamese youth believe people are most likely to succeed if they are not following the rules.
Hanoi's Young Business Association recently told a World Bank-backed forum that the "supercars and expensive houses" of a few rich people reflect waste, bureaucracy and corruption in public spending.
For most Vietnamese, a car is still out of reach and the auto show was a chance for people like state employee Nguyen Tuan Hung, 37, to fantasise.
"I drive a motorcycle," he said. "I don't have money to buy a car. But of course, I dream of buying one."
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Temasek Holdings Raises $3.63 Billion Selling Stakes in Bank of China, CCB
By Zijing Wu, Cathy Chan and Lee Spears - Jul 6, 2011 5:12 PM GMT+0800
An employee walks past the logo of Temasek Holdings Pte at the company's headquarters, in Singapore. Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg
Temasek Holdings Pte raised HKD28.2 billion (USD3.63 billion) selling stakes in China Construction Bank Corp. (939) and Bank of China Ltd., hours after Moody’s Investors Service said the credit outlook for lenders may sour.
Singapore’s state-owned investment company sold about HKD18.8 billion of stock in Bank of China, the nation’s third- largest lender by assets, and about HKD9.4 billion of second- ranked Construction Bank at discounts of at least 3 percent yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Bank of China and Construction Bank slumped in Hong Kong, leading the nation’s lenders lower for a second day after Moody’s said loans to local governments may exceed official estimates. Construction Bank has more than doubled and Bank of China gained over 30 percent since Temasek bought the stakes before their initial public offerings more than five years ago.
“The selldown is part of Temasek’s consolidation of their share holdings in Chinese banks,” said Stanley Li, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities (HK) Ltd. in Hong Kong who rates Bank of China and Construction Bank as “hold.” “This may reflect some of its concerns about the banks.”
Bank of China dropped 3.6 percent, the most in a month, and traded at HKD3.72 at the close of trading in Hong Kong. Beijing- based Construction Bank fell as much as 3.2 percent.
Temasek continues to hold “substantial positions” in Chinese banks, Jeffrey Fang, a spokesman for Temasek in Singapore, said in an e-mail. “This sale is part of our portfolio rebalancing, which we do from time to time.”
Trimming Stakes
Foreign investors including Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) have trimmed more than D20 billion in holdings in Chinese lenders since 2009 to bolster capital as global regulators tightened requirements following the credit crisis.
Temasek, which has focused on emerging markets investments, will probably say in its annual report that the value of its assets rose to about SD200 billion (D163 billion) in the 12 months to March 31, according to Victoria Barbary, a senior analyst at Monitor Group in London, and Song Seng Wun, an economist at CIMB Research Pte. in Singapore. That would surpass the SD186 billion record reached a year earlier.
Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte, a unit of Temasek, sold 5.19 billion Bank of China shares for HKD3.63 each, 6 percent less than yesterday’s closing price in Hong Kong. Cairnhill Investments (Mauritius) Pte and Crescent Investments (Mauritius) Pte, both controlled by Temasek, sold 1.5 billion Construction Bank shares for HKD6.26 each, or a 3.4 percent discount.
Debt Concern
The extra 3.5 trillion yuan (USD540 billion) of local governments’ liabilities reported by Moody’s yesterday, coming on top of the national audit office’s findings last week of 10.7 trillion yuan in debt, may fuel concern that lenders will be unable to absorb losses on defaults when the economy cools.
Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, may sell some of its almost D22 billion stake in Construction Bank, three people briefed on the plans said last month. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender was the second-biggest shareholder in Construction Bank at year end, with Temasek being the third- largest investor, according to Bloomberg data.
A lockup on 12.4 billion Hong Kong-listed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. (3988) shares held by investors including Standard Chartered Plc and Qatar Investment Authority expires this month. The Chinese bank’s listing raised D22.1 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering in July 2010.
Temasek, set up in 1974, bought D1 billion of stock in China Construction Bank’s initial public offering in 2005. The IPO price was HKD2.35. It also purchased a 5.1 percent stake in the Chinese lender from China SAFE Investments Ltd. in August the same year, according to its annual report that year.
Offer Price
Fullerton Financial offered the shares in Bank of China for HKD3.60 to HKD3.67 each, the term sheet showed. Temasek owned about 10.5 billion shares, or 12.5 percent of Bank of China’s Hong Kong-listed stock, according to a Dec. 31 filing. It paid about D1.5 billion for a 5 percent stake in the lender before its IPO in June 2006.
Cairnhill Investments and Crescent Investments offered about 1.5 billion shares in China Construction Bank for HKD6.22 to HKD6.35 each. Temasek held 7 percent, or 16.9 billion Hong Kong-listed shares, of Construction Bank, according to filings.
Morgan Stanley (MS) led the sales by Temasek’s units, according to the offering term sheets.
To contact the reporters on this story: Zijing Wu in London at zwu17@bloomberg.net; Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at kchan14@bloomberg.net;
An employee walks past the logo of Temasek Holdings Pte at the company's headquarters, in Singapore. Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg
Temasek Holdings Pte raised HKD28.2 billion (USD3.63 billion) selling stakes in China Construction Bank Corp. (939) and Bank of China Ltd., hours after Moody’s Investors Service said the credit outlook for lenders may sour.
Singapore’s state-owned investment company sold about HKD18.8 billion of stock in Bank of China, the nation’s third- largest lender by assets, and about HKD9.4 billion of second- ranked Construction Bank at discounts of at least 3 percent yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Bank of China and Construction Bank slumped in Hong Kong, leading the nation’s lenders lower for a second day after Moody’s said loans to local governments may exceed official estimates. Construction Bank has more than doubled and Bank of China gained over 30 percent since Temasek bought the stakes before their initial public offerings more than five years ago.
“The selldown is part of Temasek’s consolidation of their share holdings in Chinese banks,” said Stanley Li, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities (HK) Ltd. in Hong Kong who rates Bank of China and Construction Bank as “hold.” “This may reflect some of its concerns about the banks.”
Bank of China dropped 3.6 percent, the most in a month, and traded at HKD3.72 at the close of trading in Hong Kong. Beijing- based Construction Bank fell as much as 3.2 percent.
Temasek continues to hold “substantial positions” in Chinese banks, Jeffrey Fang, a spokesman for Temasek in Singapore, said in an e-mail. “This sale is part of our portfolio rebalancing, which we do from time to time.”
Trimming Stakes
Foreign investors including Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) have trimmed more than D20 billion in holdings in Chinese lenders since 2009 to bolster capital as global regulators tightened requirements following the credit crisis.
Temasek, which has focused on emerging markets investments, will probably say in its annual report that the value of its assets rose to about SD200 billion (D163 billion) in the 12 months to March 31, according to Victoria Barbary, a senior analyst at Monitor Group in London, and Song Seng Wun, an economist at CIMB Research Pte. in Singapore. That would surpass the SD186 billion record reached a year earlier.
Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte, a unit of Temasek, sold 5.19 billion Bank of China shares for HKD3.63 each, 6 percent less than yesterday’s closing price in Hong Kong. Cairnhill Investments (Mauritius) Pte and Crescent Investments (Mauritius) Pte, both controlled by Temasek, sold 1.5 billion Construction Bank shares for HKD6.26 each, or a 3.4 percent discount.
Debt Concern
The extra 3.5 trillion yuan (USD540 billion) of local governments’ liabilities reported by Moody’s yesterday, coming on top of the national audit office’s findings last week of 10.7 trillion yuan in debt, may fuel concern that lenders will be unable to absorb losses on defaults when the economy cools.
Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, may sell some of its almost D22 billion stake in Construction Bank, three people briefed on the plans said last month. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender was the second-biggest shareholder in Construction Bank at year end, with Temasek being the third- largest investor, according to Bloomberg data.
A lockup on 12.4 billion Hong Kong-listed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. (3988) shares held by investors including Standard Chartered Plc and Qatar Investment Authority expires this month. The Chinese bank’s listing raised D22.1 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering in July 2010.
Temasek, set up in 1974, bought D1 billion of stock in China Construction Bank’s initial public offering in 2005. The IPO price was HKD2.35. It also purchased a 5.1 percent stake in the Chinese lender from China SAFE Investments Ltd. in August the same year, according to its annual report that year.
Offer Price
Fullerton Financial offered the shares in Bank of China for HKD3.60 to HKD3.67 each, the term sheet showed. Temasek owned about 10.5 billion shares, or 12.5 percent of Bank of China’s Hong Kong-listed stock, according to a Dec. 31 filing. It paid about D1.5 billion for a 5 percent stake in the lender before its IPO in June 2006.
Cairnhill Investments and Crescent Investments offered about 1.5 billion shares in China Construction Bank for HKD6.22 to HKD6.35 each. Temasek held 7 percent, or 16.9 billion Hong Kong-listed shares, of Construction Bank, according to filings.
Morgan Stanley (MS) led the sales by Temasek’s units, according to the offering term sheets.
To contact the reporters on this story: Zijing Wu in London at zwu17@bloomberg.net; Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at kchan14@bloomberg.net;
Brookings: Bàn về khủng hoảng lương thực
Homi Kharas có ý kiến Brookings cho là đáng để mắt (trên EuropeWorld). Kharas cho rằng, vấn đề lương thực thế giới hiện không phải là lượng cung, mà chính là khả năng tiếp cận nguồn cung đó và chất lượng lương thực. Nhưng có nhiều nghiên cứu rất có ảnh hưởng, lại đưa ra các nguyên nhân bí hiểm, khiến cho nhận thức vấn đề bị chệch đi đáng kể. Sự "bí hiểm" đó tiêu biểu là:
1) Định hướng lương thực giá rẻ, dồi dào.
2) Nguyên nhân giới đầu cơ tài chính gây ảnh hưởng tiêu cực.
3) Các tổ chức quốc tế và toàn cầu cần "làm nhiều hơn nữa, nhưng vẫn theo chiều hướng cũ" (do more of the same!)
Kharas rất đáng đọc, nên tôi để nguyên phần comment của ông ở đây:
COMMENTARY ON "But don’t perpetrate the three food security myths" by Homi Kharas.
Franz Fischler’s plan to banish starvation hits all the right notes, yet he also reinforces three myths about food security that distract from the real issues.
The first is that expanding food supply will be an insuperable problem. People increasingly ask whether the world can really produce enough to satisfy the explosion of demand from more people with the income to buy meat, dairy, fish and other proteins? And whether constraints on land, water and other resources mean we are reaching the limits of agricultural production? The short answer to these is, “yes” the world can produce enough food, and “no” we’re not yet reaching binding constraints.
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, world grain production has risen from 824m tonnes in 1960 to around 2.2bn tones last year. There have been some fluctuations, but production has remained steady with 27m tonnes being added to production every year. This trend suggests that by 2050 the increase in grain production relative to today would be exactly 50%, the target Fischler sets as the global goal. In other words, major reform is not needed as we already have far better agronomic practices, seeds and fertilisers than ever. The one disclaimer has to be climate change. But that is still so unpredictable in its impact on agriculture that it has to be treated as a “wild card”.
The real issue isn’t global food supply but access to food – its distribution and its nutritional quality. Fischler portrays a world in which food will be cheap and affordable, but that is the strategy that has led to large agricultural subsidies and a focus on increasing yield through monocrops. An alternative strategy should be for food to be local, fresh and nutritious even if that means somewhat higher prices.
Higher prices might even be useful to reduce waste. Post-harvest losses amount to about 14% of total production, mostly in developing countries, and another 15% is lost in distribution and in household waste, mostly in rich countries. In India an estimated half of the wheat and a third of the rice distributed to the poor in government programmes is lost. Put another way, three-fifths of the total supply increase needed by 2050 could be obtained if we just stopped wasting food.
Hunger has much more to do with conflict, lack of income, inequalities within households in access to food along with lack of nutritional education than it has to do with global food supply. By focusing on subsistence farmers, Fischler recognises some of this, but he distorts the message by wrapping it in the overall narrative that “with the right programmes we can produce enough food to go around.”
A second myth is that financial speculators are responsible for higher food prices because of the money they pour into futures markets. For that to be true, speculators would have to buy food today, store it away from the market and hope to sell it in the future at higher prices. But the opposite is happening; grain stocks are lower than ever before, so speculators certainly cannot be blamed for taking food off the market. Certainly it would be good to improve the functioning of global food markets by having rich countries reform their farm policies, as Fischler advocates, but the politics of this are daunting. Food markets are overwhelmingly national and don’t respond one-to-one to international prices. Improving local and national food markets would seem far easier.
The third myth is that the international institutions should be allowed to do more of the same. Fischler mentions successful EU and FAO programmes, but the reality is that the international community doesn’t yet take food security seriously. At the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009, world leaders committed to investing USD 20bn in developing countries’ agriculture. A new Global Agriculture and Food Security Program was established with much fanfare, but so far it has received only USD 900m in promises and half that in cash – a fortieth of the target.
It is all too easy for international institutions to talk about helping smallholders, but they focus on small projects with only a few beneficiaries, and whose design flaws mean they can never be scaled up to reach the one billion hungry people who Fischler writes about. Only the comparatively small International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) formally incorporates scaling up in its operational policies.
To banish starvation, we must rethink global food strategies. The first priority is to act on the demand side. Few rich people go hungry, so development policies that raise incomes are crucial. And while striving for an integrated global food market, we should put more effort into vibrant local markets featuring foods consistent with a healthy diet. When international institutions are involved, they need to think much-harder about how to scale up their efforts.
Và đây là bài gốc của Fischler: http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21839/language/en-US/Default.aspx
1) Định hướng lương thực giá rẻ, dồi dào.
2) Nguyên nhân giới đầu cơ tài chính gây ảnh hưởng tiêu cực.
3) Các tổ chức quốc tế và toàn cầu cần "làm nhiều hơn nữa, nhưng vẫn theo chiều hướng cũ" (do more of the same!)
Kharas rất đáng đọc, nên tôi để nguyên phần comment của ông ở đây:
COMMENTARY ON "But don’t perpetrate the three food security myths" by Homi Kharas.
Franz Fischler’s plan to banish starvation hits all the right notes, yet he also reinforces three myths about food security that distract from the real issues.
The first is that expanding food supply will be an insuperable problem. People increasingly ask whether the world can really produce enough to satisfy the explosion of demand from more people with the income to buy meat, dairy, fish and other proteins? And whether constraints on land, water and other resources mean we are reaching the limits of agricultural production? The short answer to these is, “yes” the world can produce enough food, and “no” we’re not yet reaching binding constraints.
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, world grain production has risen from 824m tonnes in 1960 to around 2.2bn tones last year. There have been some fluctuations, but production has remained steady with 27m tonnes being added to production every year. This trend suggests that by 2050 the increase in grain production relative to today would be exactly 50%, the target Fischler sets as the global goal. In other words, major reform is not needed as we already have far better agronomic practices, seeds and fertilisers than ever. The one disclaimer has to be climate change. But that is still so unpredictable in its impact on agriculture that it has to be treated as a “wild card”.
The real issue isn’t global food supply but access to food – its distribution and its nutritional quality. Fischler portrays a world in which food will be cheap and affordable, but that is the strategy that has led to large agricultural subsidies and a focus on increasing yield through monocrops. An alternative strategy should be for food to be local, fresh and nutritious even if that means somewhat higher prices.
Higher prices might even be useful to reduce waste. Post-harvest losses amount to about 14% of total production, mostly in developing countries, and another 15% is lost in distribution and in household waste, mostly in rich countries. In India an estimated half of the wheat and a third of the rice distributed to the poor in government programmes is lost. Put another way, three-fifths of the total supply increase needed by 2050 could be obtained if we just stopped wasting food.
Hunger has much more to do with conflict, lack of income, inequalities within households in access to food along with lack of nutritional education than it has to do with global food supply. By focusing on subsistence farmers, Fischler recognises some of this, but he distorts the message by wrapping it in the overall narrative that “with the right programmes we can produce enough food to go around.”
A second myth is that financial speculators are responsible for higher food prices because of the money they pour into futures markets. For that to be true, speculators would have to buy food today, store it away from the market and hope to sell it in the future at higher prices. But the opposite is happening; grain stocks are lower than ever before, so speculators certainly cannot be blamed for taking food off the market. Certainly it would be good to improve the functioning of global food markets by having rich countries reform their farm policies, as Fischler advocates, but the politics of this are daunting. Food markets are overwhelmingly national and don’t respond one-to-one to international prices. Improving local and national food markets would seem far easier.
The third myth is that the international institutions should be allowed to do more of the same. Fischler mentions successful EU and FAO programmes, but the reality is that the international community doesn’t yet take food security seriously. At the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009, world leaders committed to investing USD 20bn in developing countries’ agriculture. A new Global Agriculture and Food Security Program was established with much fanfare, but so far it has received only USD 900m in promises and half that in cash – a fortieth of the target.
It is all too easy for international institutions to talk about helping smallholders, but they focus on small projects with only a few beneficiaries, and whose design flaws mean they can never be scaled up to reach the one billion hungry people who Fischler writes about. Only the comparatively small International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) formally incorporates scaling up in its operational policies.
To banish starvation, we must rethink global food strategies. The first priority is to act on the demand side. Few rich people go hungry, so development policies that raise incomes are crucial. And while striving for an integrated global food market, we should put more effort into vibrant local markets featuring foods consistent with a healthy diet. When international institutions are involved, they need to think much-harder about how to scale up their efforts.
Và đây là bài gốc của Fischler: http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21839/language/en-US/Default.aspx
The 25 Documents You Need Before You Die
By Saabira Chaudhuri , The Wall Street Journal
It isn't enough simply to sign a bunch of papers establishing an estate plan and other end-of-life instructions. You also have to make your heirs aware of them and leave the documents where they can find them.
Consider: At least 10 states have been investigating whether some of the country's largest insurers are failing to pay out unclaimed life policies to beneficiaries. California and Florida have held public hearings on the issue in recent weeks.
Insurers say they are behaving lawfully. Under policy contracts, they aren't required to take steps to determine if a policyholder is still alive, but instead pay a claim when beneficiaries come forward.
You can avoid such problems by securing important documents and telling your family where they are stored.
Jean Parr is grateful that her mother obsessed about the subject. "I really didn't want to think about it," says Ms. Parr, 54 years old, a manager at the American Chemical Society in Washington. But when her mom died in 2005, she knew exactly where to look for the will, the key to a safe-deposit box and documents indicating her mother had paid and arranged for her own funeral.
The financial consequences of failing to keep your documents in order can be significant. According to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, state treasurers currently hold U.S 32.9 billion in unclaimed bank accounts and other assets. (You can search for unclaimed assets at MissingMoney.com .)
Most experts recommend creating a comprehensive folder of documents that family members can access in case of an emergency, so they aren't left scrambling to find and organize a hodgepodge of disparate bank accounts, insurance policies and brokerage accounts.
You can store the documents with your attorney, lock them away in a safe-deposit box or keep them at home in a fireproof safe that someone else knows the combination to.
That isn't to say you should keep everything. Sometimes people hold onto so many papers that loved ones can't find the important ones easily.
In 2008, Jane Bissler, a counselor in Kent, Ohio, approached her then-87-year-old mother about organizing her documents. Because her mom was a widow with relatively simple finances and two homes, Ms. Bissler, 57, says she figured it would be a relatively simple task.
Instead, it took an entire year for Ms. Bissler and her mother to go through all of her papers, which included documents from eight bank accounts, utility bills from the 1950s and reams of canceled checks.
The two of them pared down the stash from four four-drawer filing cabinets to one two-drawer cabinet, shredding anything extraneous. Ms. Bissler and her mother visited banks and brokerages to ensure she was listed on all of her mother's accounts. Her mother died in May 2009.
"It would have been a total nightmare if we hadn't gone through it all with her," Ms. Bissler says. "It was that Depression-era stuff where you keep everything and hide other things." Ms. Bissler estimates that having the documents organized ahead of time spared them from ordering an additional 15 copies of the death certificate and "years" of time.
Here is a rundown of the most important documents you'll need to have signed, sealed and delivered. You should start collecting these as soon as possible and update them every few years to reflect changes in assets and preferences. Some—such as copies of tax returns or recent child-support payments—need to be updated more often than others.
The Essentials
An original will is the most important document to keep on file.
A will allows you to dictate who inherits your assets and, if your children are underage, their guardians. Dying without a will means losing control of how your assets are distributed. Instead, state law will determine what happens.
Wills are subject to probate—legal proceedings that take inventory, make appraisals of property, settle outstanding debt and distribute remaining assets. Not having an original document means this already-onerous process could be much more of an ordeal, since family members can challenge a copy of a will in court.
Rick Law , founder of estate-planning firm Law ElderLaw LLP in Aurora, Ill., says estate planners increasingly recommend revocable trusts in addition to wills, since they are more private and harder to dispute. "Every will is like a compass that points toward the closest courthouse," he says.
A revocable living trust can be changed anytime during your lifetime. After you transfer ownership of various assets to the trust, you can serve as the trustee on behalf of beneficiaries you designate. Provided you do so, there aren't any ongoing fees.
If your family can't find the original trust documents, you are "basically setting your estate up for litigation," says Duncan Moseley , vice president of Sanders Financial Management in Atlanta.
It isn't enough simply to sign a bunch of papers establishing an estate plan and other end-of-life instructions. You also have to make your heirs aware of them and leave the documents where they can find them.
Consider: At least 10 states have been investigating whether some of the country's largest insurers are failing to pay out unclaimed life policies to beneficiaries. California and Florida have held public hearings on the issue in recent weeks.
Insurers say they are behaving lawfully. Under policy contracts, they aren't required to take steps to determine if a policyholder is still alive, but instead pay a claim when beneficiaries come forward.
You can avoid such problems by securing important documents and telling your family where they are stored.
Jean Parr is grateful that her mother obsessed about the subject. "I really didn't want to think about it," says Ms. Parr, 54 years old, a manager at the American Chemical Society in Washington. But when her mom died in 2005, she knew exactly where to look for the will, the key to a safe-deposit box and documents indicating her mother had paid and arranged for her own funeral.
The financial consequences of failing to keep your documents in order can be significant. According to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, state treasurers currently hold U.S 32.9 billion in unclaimed bank accounts and other assets. (You can search for unclaimed assets at MissingMoney.com .)
Most experts recommend creating a comprehensive folder of documents that family members can access in case of an emergency, so they aren't left scrambling to find and organize a hodgepodge of disparate bank accounts, insurance policies and brokerage accounts.
You can store the documents with your attorney, lock them away in a safe-deposit box or keep them at home in a fireproof safe that someone else knows the combination to.
That isn't to say you should keep everything. Sometimes people hold onto so many papers that loved ones can't find the important ones easily.
In 2008, Jane Bissler, a counselor in Kent, Ohio, approached her then-87-year-old mother about organizing her documents. Because her mom was a widow with relatively simple finances and two homes, Ms. Bissler, 57, says she figured it would be a relatively simple task.
Instead, it took an entire year for Ms. Bissler and her mother to go through all of her papers, which included documents from eight bank accounts, utility bills from the 1950s and reams of canceled checks.
The two of them pared down the stash from four four-drawer filing cabinets to one two-drawer cabinet, shredding anything extraneous. Ms. Bissler and her mother visited banks and brokerages to ensure she was listed on all of her mother's accounts. Her mother died in May 2009.
"It would have been a total nightmare if we hadn't gone through it all with her," Ms. Bissler says. "It was that Depression-era stuff where you keep everything and hide other things." Ms. Bissler estimates that having the documents organized ahead of time spared them from ordering an additional 15 copies of the death certificate and "years" of time.
Here is a rundown of the most important documents you'll need to have signed, sealed and delivered. You should start collecting these as soon as possible and update them every few years to reflect changes in assets and preferences. Some—such as copies of tax returns or recent child-support payments—need to be updated more often than others.
The Essentials
An original will is the most important document to keep on file.
A will allows you to dictate who inherits your assets and, if your children are underage, their guardians. Dying without a will means losing control of how your assets are distributed. Instead, state law will determine what happens.
Wills are subject to probate—legal proceedings that take inventory, make appraisals of property, settle outstanding debt and distribute remaining assets. Not having an original document means this already-onerous process could be much more of an ordeal, since family members can challenge a copy of a will in court.
Rick Law , founder of estate-planning firm Law ElderLaw LLP in Aurora, Ill., says estate planners increasingly recommend revocable trusts in addition to wills, since they are more private and harder to dispute. "Every will is like a compass that points toward the closest courthouse," he says.
A revocable living trust can be changed anytime during your lifetime. After you transfer ownership of various assets to the trust, you can serve as the trustee on behalf of beneficiaries you designate. Provided you do so, there aren't any ongoing fees.
If your family can't find the original trust documents, you are "basically setting your estate up for litigation," says Duncan Moseley , vice president of Sanders Financial Management in Atlanta.
For Europe’s start-ups, Silicon Valley still calls Is there life outside of California for Europe’s tech community?
By Kim Hjelmgaard, MarketWatch
LONDON (MarketWatch) — “Go West,” young technology company. That sentiment, with its compass-point directive, is both a rallying cry and a death knell in Europe’s war to assert the credentials of its homespun technology entrepreneurs.
Divided by geography, language, regulation and, in some cases, just old-fashioned cultural prejudice, the region has struggled to shed fully its image as a place where men and women with ideas are born, but where they do not necessarily stay, prosper or secure funding.
And that’s despite some global-headline-grabbing deals recently for some of the Old World’s most innovative and promising young companies. Evidence that this unofficial tradition of European entrepreneurs leaving for the U.S. in order to make good on their business models is, at the very least, undergoing a period of critical self-examination.
In May, for example, Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.49% paid U.S 8.5 billion to buy Luxembourg-headquartered Skype Technologies S.A., while social-media darling Twitter opened its wallet to the tune of U.S 40 million for London’s TweetDeck. Swedish music-streaming service Spotify, meanwhile, is steadily inching closer to a U.S. launch and back in 2007, CBS Corp.’s CBS +0.18% CBS Interactive division acquired U.K. music website Last.fm for about U.S 280 million.
The area around London’s Old Street, in the east of the city, increasingly known for its relative high density of technology start-ups, has even eagerly latched on to — although some are now just as keen to disavow it — the “Silicon Roundabout” sobriquet. View a 360-degree panorama of London’s Silicon Roundabout
The capital injections keep coming, in fact. There was Rovio Mobile Ltd.’s (Finland) runaway success with “Angry Birds,” which led to U.S 42 million in financing from Accel Partners and others; U.S 24 million for Germany’s social-games developer Wooga; and U.S 119 million for Britain’s e-lender Wonga. And there’s more, potentially, for targets from Madrid to Revkjavik.
But the U.S., and in particular the fertile technology corridor of California’s Silicon Valley, is still regarded by some Europeans as a kind of venture-capital-finance Shangri-La, with backers in the area very much viewed as that most digestible type of fruit: the low-hanging kind.
“There is a culture among venture capitalists in the U.K. of not really understanding the Internet,” said Mark Rock, founder and chief executive officer of London-based Audioboo, a social-networking tool that allows users to make instant, on-the-go podcasts and to easily share them.
“In the U.K., everyone hates failure, and that’s an old story here and it hasn’t really changed,” said Rock, who, in addition to putting his own money into Audioboo, has secured funding from a couple of British-based business angels as well as Imagination Technologies Group PLC UK:IMG +2.34% and UBC Media Group.
Still, for European technology entrepreneurs like Rock, a common refrain they come up against is “you’re too early.” Venture capitalists in Britain, Rock said, “prefer to invest in things, not ideas — historically, we like factories.”
But this attitude toward funding, outdated or not, while it poses some more fundamental questions about the region’s approach to risk as well as indirectly interrogating the guile of its entrepreneurial community, also speaks to the cultural waters in which some start-ups here swim.
“‘Get a proper job and pay the mortgage’ is deeply ingrained in the British psyche,” said Rock. “Whereas I always say that what I do is ‘shoot the gun, then go looking for the target.’”
Loic Le Meur, who was in London last month to talk with British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government about moving Le Meur’s influential Internet conference LeWeb from Paris to London in time for the 2012 Olympics, told a not dissimilar story.
“In the [San Francisco Bay Area] you feel like everything you do relates to technology,” he said. “Everything is about raising money, getting funded and doing deals.”
Le Meur, who moved to San Francisco four years ago and now runs Seesmic, a software company that makes it easier for users to corral all of their social network activity in one spot, said that while in Europe a start-up’s reach and capacity for success early on is often curtailed by geography, in Silicon Valley he feels as if he lives and works on a technology campus.
“It’s all right here and that’s why I moved. If you’re in Europe and you want to do something in Germany, say, you’d have to go to five different cities alone.” Listen to Loic Le Meur talk with Kim Hjelmgaard about being a technology entrepreneur in Europe.
LONDON (MarketWatch) — “Go West,” young technology company. That sentiment, with its compass-point directive, is both a rallying cry and a death knell in Europe’s war to assert the credentials of its homespun technology entrepreneurs.
Divided by geography, language, regulation and, in some cases, just old-fashioned cultural prejudice, the region has struggled to shed fully its image as a place where men and women with ideas are born, but where they do not necessarily stay, prosper or secure funding.
And that’s despite some global-headline-grabbing deals recently for some of the Old World’s most innovative and promising young companies. Evidence that this unofficial tradition of European entrepreneurs leaving for the U.S. in order to make good on their business models is, at the very least, undergoing a period of critical self-examination.
In May, for example, Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.49% paid U.S 8.5 billion to buy Luxembourg-headquartered Skype Technologies S.A., while social-media darling Twitter opened its wallet to the tune of U.S 40 million for London’s TweetDeck. Swedish music-streaming service Spotify, meanwhile, is steadily inching closer to a U.S. launch and back in 2007, CBS Corp.’s CBS +0.18% CBS Interactive division acquired U.K. music website Last.fm for about U.S 280 million.
The area around London’s Old Street, in the east of the city, increasingly known for its relative high density of technology start-ups, has even eagerly latched on to — although some are now just as keen to disavow it — the “Silicon Roundabout” sobriquet. View a 360-degree panorama of London’s Silicon Roundabout
The capital injections keep coming, in fact. There was Rovio Mobile Ltd.’s (Finland) runaway success with “Angry Birds,” which led to U.S 42 million in financing from Accel Partners and others; U.S 24 million for Germany’s social-games developer Wooga; and U.S 119 million for Britain’s e-lender Wonga. And there’s more, potentially, for targets from Madrid to Revkjavik.
But the U.S., and in particular the fertile technology corridor of California’s Silicon Valley, is still regarded by some Europeans as a kind of venture-capital-finance Shangri-La, with backers in the area very much viewed as that most digestible type of fruit: the low-hanging kind.
“There is a culture among venture capitalists in the U.K. of not really understanding the Internet,” said Mark Rock, founder and chief executive officer of London-based Audioboo, a social-networking tool that allows users to make instant, on-the-go podcasts and to easily share them.
“In the U.K., everyone hates failure, and that’s an old story here and it hasn’t really changed,” said Rock, who, in addition to putting his own money into Audioboo, has secured funding from a couple of British-based business angels as well as Imagination Technologies Group PLC UK:IMG +2.34% and UBC Media Group.
Still, for European technology entrepreneurs like Rock, a common refrain they come up against is “you’re too early.” Venture capitalists in Britain, Rock said, “prefer to invest in things, not ideas — historically, we like factories.”
But this attitude toward funding, outdated or not, while it poses some more fundamental questions about the region’s approach to risk as well as indirectly interrogating the guile of its entrepreneurial community, also speaks to the cultural waters in which some start-ups here swim.
“‘Get a proper job and pay the mortgage’ is deeply ingrained in the British psyche,” said Rock. “Whereas I always say that what I do is ‘shoot the gun, then go looking for the target.’”
Loic Le Meur, who was in London last month to talk with British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government about moving Le Meur’s influential Internet conference LeWeb from Paris to London in time for the 2012 Olympics, told a not dissimilar story.
“In the [San Francisco Bay Area] you feel like everything you do relates to technology,” he said. “Everything is about raising money, getting funded and doing deals.”
Le Meur, who moved to San Francisco four years ago and now runs Seesmic, a software company that makes it easier for users to corral all of their social network activity in one spot, said that while in Europe a start-up’s reach and capacity for success early on is often curtailed by geography, in Silicon Valley he feels as if he lives and works on a technology campus.
“It’s all right here and that’s why I moved. If you’re in Europe and you want to do something in Germany, say, you’d have to go to five different cities alone.” Listen to Loic Le Meur talk with Kim Hjelmgaard about being a technology entrepreneur in Europe.
The next, worse financial crisis; Commentary: Ten reasons we are doomed to repeat 2008
By Brett Arends, MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with USD500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a USD500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent USD474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
5. Stocks are skyrocketing again. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index SPX +0.10% has now doubled from the March 2009 lows. Isn’t that good news? Well, yes, up to a point. Admittedly, a lot of it is just from debasement of the dollar (when the greenback goes down, Wall Street goes up, and vice versa). And we forget there were huge rallies on Wall Street during the bear markets of the 1930s and the 1970s, as there were in Japan in the 1990s. But the market boom, targeted especially toward the riskiest and junkiest stocks, raises risks. It leaves investors less room for positive surprises and much more room for disappointment. And stocks are not cheap. The dividend yield on the S&P is just 2%. According to one long-term measure — “Tobin’s q,” which compares share prices with the replacement cost of company assets — shares are now about 70% above average valuations. Furthermore, we have an aging population of Baby Boomers who still own a lot of stocks, and who are going to be selling as they near retirement.
6. The derivatives time bomb is bigger than ever — and ticking away. Just before Lehman collapsed, at what we now call the height of the last bubble, Wall Street firms were carrying risky financial derivatives on their books with a value of an astonishing $183 trillion. That was 13 times the size of the U.S. economy. If it sounds insane, it was. Since then we’ve had four years of panic, alleged reform and a return to financial sobriety. So what’s the figure now? Try $248 trillion. No kidding. Ah, good times.
7. The ancient regime is in the saddle. I have to laugh whenever I hear Republicans ranting that Barack Obama is a “liberal” or a “socialist” or a communist. Are you kidding me? Obama is Bush 44. He’s a bit more like the old man than the younger one. But look at who’s still running the economy: Bernanke. Geithner. Summers. Goldman Sachs. J.P. Morgan Chase. We’ve had the same establishment in charge since at least 1987, when Paul Volcker stood down as Fed chairman. Change? What “change”? (And even the little we had was too much for Wall Street, which bought itself a new, more compliant Congress in 2010.)
8. Ben Bernanke doesn’t understand his job. The Fed chairman made an absolutely astonishing admission at his first press conference. He cited the boom in the Russell 2000 Index RUT +0.43% of risky small-cap stocks as one sign “quantitative easing” had worked. The Fed has a dual mandate by law: low inflation and low unemployment. Now, apparently, it has a third: boosting Wall Street share prices. This is crazy. If it ends well, I will be surprised.
9. We are levering up like crazy. Looking for a “credit bubble”? We’re in it. Everyone knows about the skyrocketing federal debt, and the risk that Congress won’t raise the debt ceiling next month. But that’s just part of the story. U.S. corporations borrowed $513 billion in the first quarter. They’re borrowing at twice the rate that they were last fall, when corporate debt was already soaring. Savers, desperate for income, will buy almost any bonds at all. No wonder the yields on high-yield bonds have collapsed. So much for all that talk about “cash on the balance sheets.” U.S. nonfinancial corporations overall are now deeply in debt, to the tune of USD7.3 trillion. That’s a record level, and up 24% in the past five years. And when you throw in household debts, government debt and the debts of the financial sector, the debt level reaches at least as high as USD50 trillion. More leverage means more risk. It’s Econ 101.
10. The real economy remains in the tank. The second round of quantitative easing hasn’t done anything noticeable except lower the exchange rate. Unemployment is far, far higher than the official numbers will tell you (for example, even the Labor Department’s fine print admits that one middle-aged man in four lacks a full-time job — astonishing). Our current-account deficit is running at USD120 billion a year (and hasn’t been in surplus since 1990). House prices are falling, not recovering. Real wages are stagnant. Yes, productivity is rising. But that, ironically, also helps keep down jobs.
You know what George Santayana said about people who forget the past. But we’re even dumber than that. We are doomed to repeat the past not because we have forgotten it but because we never learned the lessons to begin with.
Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with USD500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a USD500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent USD474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
5. Stocks are skyrocketing again. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index SPX +0.10% has now doubled from the March 2009 lows. Isn’t that good news? Well, yes, up to a point. Admittedly, a lot of it is just from debasement of the dollar (when the greenback goes down, Wall Street goes up, and vice versa). And we forget there were huge rallies on Wall Street during the bear markets of the 1930s and the 1970s, as there were in Japan in the 1990s. But the market boom, targeted especially toward the riskiest and junkiest stocks, raises risks. It leaves investors less room for positive surprises and much more room for disappointment. And stocks are not cheap. The dividend yield on the S&P is just 2%. According to one long-term measure — “Tobin’s q,” which compares share prices with the replacement cost of company assets — shares are now about 70% above average valuations. Furthermore, we have an aging population of Baby Boomers who still own a lot of stocks, and who are going to be selling as they near retirement.
6. The derivatives time bomb is bigger than ever — and ticking away. Just before Lehman collapsed, at what we now call the height of the last bubble, Wall Street firms were carrying risky financial derivatives on their books with a value of an astonishing $183 trillion. That was 13 times the size of the U.S. economy. If it sounds insane, it was. Since then we’ve had four years of panic, alleged reform and a return to financial sobriety. So what’s the figure now? Try $248 trillion. No kidding. Ah, good times.
7. The ancient regime is in the saddle. I have to laugh whenever I hear Republicans ranting that Barack Obama is a “liberal” or a “socialist” or a communist. Are you kidding me? Obama is Bush 44. He’s a bit more like the old man than the younger one. But look at who’s still running the economy: Bernanke. Geithner. Summers. Goldman Sachs. J.P. Morgan Chase. We’ve had the same establishment in charge since at least 1987, when Paul Volcker stood down as Fed chairman. Change? What “change”? (And even the little we had was too much for Wall Street, which bought itself a new, more compliant Congress in 2010.)
8. Ben Bernanke doesn’t understand his job. The Fed chairman made an absolutely astonishing admission at his first press conference. He cited the boom in the Russell 2000 Index RUT +0.43% of risky small-cap stocks as one sign “quantitative easing” had worked. The Fed has a dual mandate by law: low inflation and low unemployment. Now, apparently, it has a third: boosting Wall Street share prices. This is crazy. If it ends well, I will be surprised.
9. We are levering up like crazy. Looking for a “credit bubble”? We’re in it. Everyone knows about the skyrocketing federal debt, and the risk that Congress won’t raise the debt ceiling next month. But that’s just part of the story. U.S. corporations borrowed $513 billion in the first quarter. They’re borrowing at twice the rate that they were last fall, when corporate debt was already soaring. Savers, desperate for income, will buy almost any bonds at all. No wonder the yields on high-yield bonds have collapsed. So much for all that talk about “cash on the balance sheets.” U.S. nonfinancial corporations overall are now deeply in debt, to the tune of USD7.3 trillion. That’s a record level, and up 24% in the past five years. And when you throw in household debts, government debt and the debts of the financial sector, the debt level reaches at least as high as USD50 trillion. More leverage means more risk. It’s Econ 101.
10. The real economy remains in the tank. The second round of quantitative easing hasn’t done anything noticeable except lower the exchange rate. Unemployment is far, far higher than the official numbers will tell you (for example, even the Labor Department’s fine print admits that one middle-aged man in four lacks a full-time job — astonishing). Our current-account deficit is running at USD120 billion a year (and hasn’t been in surplus since 1990). House prices are falling, not recovering. Real wages are stagnant. Yes, productivity is rising. But that, ironically, also helps keep down jobs.
You know what George Santayana said about people who forget the past. But we’re even dumber than that. We are doomed to repeat the past not because we have forgotten it but because we never learned the lessons to begin with.
Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Cáo buộc tham nhũng trong vụ in tiền Polymer: Hợp tác quốc tế để điều tra
Thông tin này trên Diễn Đàn Doanh Nghiệp hôm nay: Vừa qua (1/7), sau khi cảnh sát Liên bang Úc bắt giữ 6 cựu viên chức thuộc hai công ty in tiền vì cáo buộc đưa hối lộ cho các quan chức châu Á, trong đó có Việt Nam, để giành hợp đồng in tiền polymer, Bộ Công an Việt Nam đã vào cuộc để nắm bắt thông tin.
Báo The Age tiết lộ ngân hàng Úc đã chi trả chi phí du học ở Anh của Lê Đức Minh - con trai ông Lê Đức Thúy (là thống đốc Ngân hàng Nhà nước VN trong thời điểm vụ bê bối xảy ra). Khoản tiền hối lộ trong vụ việc liên quan tới Việt Nam ước tính là 10 triệu đô la Úc, được chuyển vào nhiều tài khoản ở ngân hàng Thụy Sĩ.
Nhà chức trách Malaysia cũng đã phối hợp với cảnh sát Úc bắt giữ hai người có liên quan đến vụ scandal ở Malaysia sau cuộc điều tra của Ủy ban chống tham nhũng Malaysia.
Cảnh sát Úc chưa tiết lộ danh tính của những người bị bắt. 6 người bị bắt phải ra trước tòa án Melbourne, đối mặt với án 10 năm tù và phạt tiền lên đến 1,2 triệu USD nếu bị kết tội.
Trả lời về những cáo buộc của nước ngoài, thiếu tướng Triệu Văn Đạt - phó tổng cục trưởng Tổng cục Cảnh sát phòng chống tội phạm (Bộ Công an) cho biết tại cuộc họp thông báo tình hình đấu tranh phòng chống tội phạm sáu tháng đầu năm: Vào giai đoạn đầu khi có thông tin, lãnh đạo Bộ Công an giao Cục Cảnh sát điều tra tội phạm về tham nhũng nắm tình hình, tiến hành xác minh. Sau đó, vụ việc này được bàn giao cho Cục An ninh tài chính tiền tệ thực hiện.
Theo ông Triệu Văn Đạt, từ thông tin trên báo chí nước ngoài, cơ quan chức năng VN thông qua con đường hỗ trợ tư pháp đề nghị cơ quan tư pháp nước ngoài cung cấp tài liệu nhưng chưa có căn cứ để khẳng định có hay không việc quan chức nào ở VN nhận hối lộ. Hiện Chính phủ giao Bộ Công an tiếp tục nắm vụ việc, hợp tác với cơ quan nước ngoài để thu thập thông tin. Nếu có đủ căn cứ pháp lý sẽ xử lý tương tự như vụ PCI.
* Nguồn: http://dddn.com.vn/2011761160390cat111/cao-buoc-tham-nhung-trong-vu-in-tien-polymer-hop-tac-quoc-te-de-dieu-tra.htm
Vụ việc bắt đầu sau khi báo chí Úc đưa tin tại bang Victoria, cảnh sát Liên bang Úc đã bắt giữ 6 cựu viên chức đưa hối lộ cho các quan chức châu Á, trong đó có Việt Nam, để giành hợp đồng in tiền polymer.
Theo tài liệu điều tra, 6 cựu giám đốc của hai công ty Securency International, Note Printing Australia (trực thuộc Ngân hàng Dự trữ Úc) đã đút lót các quan chức Việt Nam, Indonesia, và Malaysia từ năm 1999 - 2005. Cảnh sát Úc đã xếp vụ này là vụ tham nhũng hối lộ quy mô lớn nhất của Úc ở nước ngoài từ trước tới nay.
Theo tài liệu điều tra, 6 cựu giám đốc của hai công ty Securency International, Note Printing Australia (trực thuộc Ngân hàng Dự trữ Úc) đã đút lót các quan chức Việt Nam, Indonesia, và Malaysia từ năm 1999 - 2005. Cảnh sát Úc đã xếp vụ này là vụ tham nhũng hối lộ quy mô lớn nhất của Úc ở nước ngoài từ trước tới nay.
Báo The Age tiết lộ ngân hàng Úc đã chi trả chi phí du học ở Anh của Lê Đức Minh - con trai ông Lê Đức Thúy (là thống đốc Ngân hàng Nhà nước VN trong thời điểm vụ bê bối xảy ra). Khoản tiền hối lộ trong vụ việc liên quan tới Việt Nam ước tính là 10 triệu đô la Úc, được chuyển vào nhiều tài khoản ở ngân hàng Thụy Sĩ.
Nhà chức trách Malaysia cũng đã phối hợp với cảnh sát Úc bắt giữ hai người có liên quan đến vụ scandal ở Malaysia sau cuộc điều tra của Ủy ban chống tham nhũng Malaysia.
Cảnh sát Úc chưa tiết lộ danh tính của những người bị bắt. 6 người bị bắt phải ra trước tòa án Melbourne, đối mặt với án 10 năm tù và phạt tiền lên đến 1,2 triệu USD nếu bị kết tội.
Trả lời về những cáo buộc của nước ngoài, thiếu tướng Triệu Văn Đạt - phó tổng cục trưởng Tổng cục Cảnh sát phòng chống tội phạm (Bộ Công an) cho biết tại cuộc họp thông báo tình hình đấu tranh phòng chống tội phạm sáu tháng đầu năm: Vào giai đoạn đầu khi có thông tin, lãnh đạo Bộ Công an giao Cục Cảnh sát điều tra tội phạm về tham nhũng nắm tình hình, tiến hành xác minh. Sau đó, vụ việc này được bàn giao cho Cục An ninh tài chính tiền tệ thực hiện.
Theo ông Triệu Văn Đạt, từ thông tin trên báo chí nước ngoài, cơ quan chức năng VN thông qua con đường hỗ trợ tư pháp đề nghị cơ quan tư pháp nước ngoài cung cấp tài liệu nhưng chưa có căn cứ để khẳng định có hay không việc quan chức nào ở VN nhận hối lộ. Hiện Chính phủ giao Bộ Công an tiếp tục nắm vụ việc, hợp tác với cơ quan nước ngoài để thu thập thông tin. Nếu có đủ căn cứ pháp lý sẽ xử lý tương tự như vụ PCI.
* Nguồn: http://dddn.com.vn/2011761160390cat111/cao-buoc-tham-nhung-trong-vu-in-tien-polymer-hop-tac-quoc-te-de-dieu-tra.htm
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