11 years after one of Europe’s biggest banking scandals, 13 executives have been sentenced and financial penalties of $175 million have been dealt. Bloomberg investigates how Deutsche Bank and Monte Dei Paschi cooked their books to make a half billion dollar loss disappear. Reporting by Elisa Martinuzzi for Bloomberg.
More and more entrepreneurs are thinking beyond their own personal wealth. In what is known as the “Purpose Movement,” company bosses aim to put profits to good use, while rethinking the idea of corporate ownership. This film explores how the movement is rethinking capitalism. The founders and CEOs involved in the global Purpose Movement believe in transforming society: Their ownership model ensures that a company’s shareholders cannot withdraw profits, the company cannot be sold and its purpose cannot be changed. Christian Kroll founded search engine Ecosia in 2009. The profits are used to plant trees to combat climate change. Advertising revenue has so far financed the planting of more than a hundred million trees. Kroll could have sold Ecosia for many millions of euros long ago, but the founder wanted to protect his company from speculators. The trees were more important to him than his bank balance. That’s why he used a foundation model to transfer ownership of Ecosia in 2018, effectively cutting himself out. The model makes it impossible to sell Ecosia for profit, to withdraw company capital, or to change the company’s purpose, which is planting trees. Armin Steuernagel advises entrepreneurs who also want to “give away” their companies. His Purpose Foundation advises start-ups wanting to establish themselves as “purpose companies,” like Hamburg’s Wildplastic, which produces garbage bags from recycled material. Steuernagel wants us to rethink capitalism. As a political lobbyist, he is working to create a legal framework to help facilitate the shift to “purpose companies.” Michael Hetzer ran the German family-owned company Elobau, which manufactures sensors and other parts for agricultural machinery. Instead of deciding to leave the business to one of his sons, he transferred the company to a foundation model. He wanted to take the burden off his sons’ shoulders. And for him, the purpose of his company is important.
The story of Greensill Capital’s rise and fall has everything: investment banks, opaque finance, private jets, trophy mansions and the biggest British lobbying scandal in a generation, involving former prime minister David Cameron. The Financial Times charts the rise of Lex Greensill and Sanjeev Gupta and examines where it all went wrong.
CSIS: The China Economic Risk Matrix, written by the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics’ non-resident senior associate Daniel Rosen, non-resident adjunct fellow Logan Wright, and Associate Director of the China Projects team at Rhodium Group, Lauren Gloudeman. Despite rising inefficiency, China’s financial system has served as the shock absorber that has helped China’s economy recover from the virus outbreak and maintain growth. But the same elements that have driven China’s recovery have also pushed China’s financial system deep into a gauntlet of systemic financial risks. The China Economic Risk Matrix is the combination of indicators of financial vulnerability that threaten to overwhelm Beijing’s policy tools to manage them, along with a novel, China-specific financial stress indicator. Building on the earlier CSIS volume, Credit and Credibility, this report explores the specific conditions and markets in which changes in government credibility can have a significant impact on systemic stability in China.
The U.S. unemployment rate shot up faster than in any other developed country during the pandemic. WSJ explains how differences in government aid and labor-market structures can help predict how and where jobs might recover.
The covid-19 pandemic is set to increase public debt to levels last seen after the second world war. But is rising public debt a cause for concern? New economic thinking suggests perhaps not, at least for now.
The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the first quarter, the government reported Friday, offering a preliminary glance at how last year’s sweeping package of tax cuts is affecting consumers and businesses this year.
During the first three months of 2018, the economy was whacked around like a pinball. The stock market took investors on a giddy ride. President Trump imposed tariffs on allies and rivals alike, stoking fears of a trade war. And the revamped tax code shifted business incentives and started to put more money in workers’ paychecks.
Still, the economy ended up puttering along just a bit above the average yearly growth rate that it had registered since the recession ended nearly nine years ago.