The Economist - 003 The world this week - Business | Текст песни

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• 003 The world this week - Business

India’s central bank lowered its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 7.5%. It was the second cut this year, but markets were surprised by the timing, coming soon after the legal framework was approved for the Reserve Bank of India to set official inflation targets for the first time. An initial target was set at 6% until January 2016, with 4% the aim after that within a 2-6% range. Inflation has slowed considerably in India over the past two years. It was an annual rate of 5.1% in January.

The road less travelled
The rate cut followed the Indian government’s annual budget, which included plans to rationalise the country’s labyrinthine tax system and to reduce the corporate-tax rate to 25%. Investors were also cheered by the start of the auction for 3G telecoms licences in India, which are expected to raise $13 billion over the coming weeks. See article

Consumer prices in the euro zone fell by 0.3% year on year in February, the third consecutive month of negative inflation in the currency bloc. The unemployment rate dropped to 11.2%, the lowest since April 2012 (though in Greece it was 25.8% and in Spain 23.4%).

Brazil’s central bank raised its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 12.75%, a six-year high. Although other countries are fretting about deflation, Brazil’s inflation rate soared in January to 7.14%.

In a big victory for the City of London, a court in the European Union overturned a decision by the European Central Bank that would have forced clearing houses to relocate their euro-denominated business to within the euro zone. The ECB had argued that it could not help clearing houses that operate outside the currency area if they got into trouble, but the court ruled that the central bank does not have the regulatory power to intervene anyway.

It’s taken a while
The NASDAQ stockmarket index closed above 5,000 on March 2nd for the first time since the height of the dotcom boom in March 2000.

A German court ordered Jürgen Fitschen, one of the two co-chief executives at Deutsche Bank, to stand trial next month in the legal saga related to the collapse of the Kirch media group in 2002. Mr Fitschen will share the defendants’ bench with two former chief executives, Josef Ackermann and Rolf Breuer, and two former board members. The trial is a distraction for the bank, which is undertaking a big rethink of its strategy.

Actavis, a drugs company, issued $21 billion in bonds, making it the second-biggest corporate-debt offering to date (behind Verizon’s $49 billion bond sale in 2013). Actavis issued the bonds to fund its acquisition of Allergan, the maker of Botox. With safer government debt now offering very low, or even negative, yields, the corporate-bond market is attracting hordes of income-hungry investors.

AbbVie, a drugs company that ditched a bid for Britain’s Shire last year after the American Treasury changed the rules on inversion takeovers, agreed to buy Pharmacyclics, which specialises in cancer treatments, in a $21 billion deal.

A changing culture
Toyota took steps to diversify senior management by appointing its first non-Japanese vice-president as well as its first foreign female executive and first African-American executive (the latter two are based in America). Like other Japanese companies Toyota is noted for its lack of foreign staff, even though 74% of its sales come from abroad. The Japanese government is pushing for more corporate diversity, and wants 30% of Japan’s senior executive jobs to be held by women by 2020. See article

The British government sold its 40% stake in Eurostar, which runs trains through the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France, to an Anglo-Canadian consortium. The deal raised £757m ($1.2 billion) for the Treasury, about twice what had been expected. SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, still owns 55% of Eurostar; and SNCB, its Belgian equivalent, the remaining 5%.

Uber, a ride-sharing firm, made its first significant acquisition by agreeing to buy deCarta, a startup specialising in navigation tools for maps. The deal could lessen Uber’s dependence on mapping services provided by Google and Apple, and also boost its research into driverless-car technology.

Annual sales of smartphones exceeded 1 billion for the first time in 2014, according to Gartner, a research firm. Buoyed by demand in China and the release of the iPhone 6, Apple overtook S.amsung in the fourth quarter as the world’s biggest seller of the devices. But the South Korean company retained the top spot for the year as a whole, taking 24.7% of the market compared with Apple’s 15.4%.

http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21645858-business-week

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