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The article reports on the stockmarkets in Latin America as the Argentine and Brazilian indices have both risen by 70% in dollar terms, and Chile's by 40%. The returns from Mexico are less spectacular, thanks in part to a weakening peso. Delistings have been so common that most of Argentina's representation in the oft-cited MSCI index of emerging stockmarkets is now based on the shares of only three companies, whose prices have soared from a low base. Marcelo Mesquita, head of equity research at UBS in Rio de Janeiro, says that Brazilian shares are still cheap compared with those in other emerging markets. Brazil's market for so-called growth stocks, the novo mercado, does not allow such non-voting shares and sets high standards for corporate governance.

This article reports on investors in Georgia-Pacific, an Atlanta, Georgia-based maker of Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and other paper goods, who will get a 39% premium for their shares, courtesy of Koch Industries, a privately owned conglomerate in Kansas. On November 13, 2005 Koch agreed to buy Georgia-Pacific, listed on the New York stock exchange, for $13.2 billion in cash. It will also take on $7.8 billion of debt. Adding Georgia-Pacific's $20 billion in sales will make it America's biggest privately owned company, surpassing Cargil, a farm-products outfit.

The article focuses on British education and media conglomerate Pearson. Compared with other rumoured candidates for the job, Glen Moreno, who was named Pearson's new chairman, was a surprisingly low-profile choice. Moreno, a 62-year-old American, once ran Fidelity International, a fund manager, and is now on the board of Man Group, a hedge-fund firm. Moreno joins Pearson at a time of lively debate over its strategy. Some analysts are questioning the logic behind its current mix of businesses. One large shareholder in the firm believes that it was inappropriate that Marjorie Scardino, Pearson's chief executive, was on the nomination committee that picked the new chairman. Scardino has been under pressure from her board to deliver higher profits in 2005, after a dismal 2004. Pearson's board is certainly worried about the performance of the "Financial Times"-even though it is now expected to break even this year, thanks to cost cutting and a pick-up in advertising. There are many possible reasons why the paper has lost ground in Britain--job losses in the City, the availability of free news and equity prices on the internet and, some say, too much attention to business readers overseas. To be sure, most British papers are also losing circulation.

The article focuses on finance theorist Robert Merton. Topics discussed include his first paper on the mathematics of time applied to finance titled "Lifetime Portfolio Selection under Uncertainty: The Continuous-Time Case," background on finance theory, and how investors should decide at each moment on their mix of risky and safe assets.

The article focuses on the paper to be published by Chia-Jung Tsay of the University College London (UCL) which evaluates the preference of the recruiters and investors to support the naturals or strivers. Topics discussed include the division of the investors between real-life investment experience, the recurrence of the achievement of goals through determination, and the predisposed bias of the people for naturals.

The article identifies the difference between active and passive stock funds in the U.S. in 2018. It references a paper by Lasse Heje Pedersen who addressed the argument by economist William Sharpe regarding the arithmetic of active management by fund managers. The need of passive investors to trade in order to keep their portfolios in line with the index is explained.

The article explores the prosecution of those involved in insider trading in the U.S. in 2018. According to studies, insiders had profited from the financial crisis. A paper revealed that government officials held private meetings with financial institutions during the crisis. Also discussed are the benefits of knowing the structure and scope of a bailout to investors.

The article discusses the notion of an endowment effect, which is the tendency of human beings to hold onto possessions. The paper "Endowment Effects in the Field: Evidence from India's IPO Lotteries" by Santosh Anagol, Vimal Balasubramaniam, and Tarun Ramodorai is addressed. Psychological effects of initial public offering (IPO) prices on investors are noted.

This article describes concerns by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that some firms in the bond market have been using their power to distort prices and make profits dishonestly. It has been revealed that the SEC opened an investigation into the activities of treasury bond dealers at UBS. The article indicates that with some note and bond issues, it seems banks can "squeeze" the market by getting their hands on much of the paper and then restricting supply.

This article reports on the risks in investing in emerging-market bonds. Just like Victorian vicars preaching temperance, it is always easy for those who warn of the intoxicating perils of investing in emerging markets to find sad victims, shadows of their former selves, who have fallen prey to the temptation of high-yielding paper. The greatest victims today are holders of bonds issued by the Republic of Argentina. But who listens to such admonitions? Anyone lucky enough to have piled into Brazil's dollar debt in October 2002, the month that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president, at a spread of 23 percentage points over American Treasury bonds, would last month have been able to sell it at a spread of about four points. Brazil had its own story to tell. Brazil's bonds are exceptional only by degree, for those of almost every other emerging market have been blessed of late. A wealth of positive news has driven down spreads: higher commodity prices for developing-country exporters, a buoyant world economy pulled along by a recovering America, and less-profligate governments--all against the benign backdrop of low worldwide interest rates. Developing countries are understandably keen to take advantage of this enthusiasm. So the current bond market has been a playground for emerging-market issuers, but what on earth is now in it for investors? What could pop the bubble?

Tired--or scared--of the high prices and wafer-thin yields on Japanese government bonds (JGBs), investors have begun selling. Investors bought ¥3 trillion of foreign bonds in April, and ¥3.7 trillion in May, the most--bar one freak month--on record. Besides investing in Treasury bonds, insurers have been buying the paper of American quasi-governmental agencies. Japan's wretched investment environment is also pushing regional banks to break with tradition and move money into foreign bonds. That will be one reason why the Bank of Japan, which already buys ¥1.2 trillion-worth of bonds each month as a way of pumping money into the economy, will not want to let the market slip too far.

The United States' stockmarket bubble was inflated on the back of a mountain of corporate debt. In 2002, fears about the sustainability of debts sent corporate-bond prices tumbling. In early 2003, however, investors have been bidding up bond prices, to levels that are in danger of becoming as dotty as share prices once reached. The prices of bonds have been rising as fears of deflation have mounted. As yields on government bonds have become thinner, investors have scurried to look for fatter returns elsewhere. In doing so, they have pushed the prices of bonds issued by riskier lenders up a lot faster than the prices of paper issued by rich countries' governments. The fall in borrowing costs may be a boon to a world economy that is still far from robust.

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are a clever way of exploiting anomalies in credit ratings. A number of loans or debt securities payable by various companies are put into a pool, and new securities are issued which pay out according to the pool's collective performance. The new securities are divided into three (or more) levels of risk. The lowest, equity tranche takes the first loss if any companies in the pool default. If enough losses eat that up, the next, mezzanine level suffers. The most-protected level, the senior tranche, should still be safe, unless the collective pool has severe losses. Given the poor performance of companies in America and Europe over the past three years, and some spectacular defaults and frauds at once highly-rated companies, it is hardly surprising that many CDO debt pools have suffered. It takes only a couple of defaults in a pool of 100 companies to destroy the equity tranche. Many insurance companies that invested in CDOs, or sold guarantees to enhance the rating of the senior tranches, have had a rude shock. In America, insurers have for the first time had to mark-to-market paper losses on their CDO portfolios. The investment banks that constructed these CDOs, and the rating agencies that gave them their initial high ratings, are feeling defensive. This is now a huge business. There may be $1 trillion of CDOs outstanding. Securitization of credit is one of the few bits of investment banking that continues to generate big fees--for arranging deals and for managing the pools of assets.

The domination of any industry by three firms ought to set regulators thinking. So it is in the world of credit ratings, where two big agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's (S&P), and one smaller one, Fitch, hold sway. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was asked by Congress last year to review their role. At the end of March the SEC will publish a paper that attempts to deal with concerns not only about competition in the rating business, but also about possible conflicts of interest, and the need for greater transparency and perhaps tighter regulation.

Mentions three studies quantifying the influence of the sun and moon on investment. Details of research by David Hirshleifer of Ohio State University and Tyler Shumway of the University of Michigan on the affect of sunshine on the stock market; Details of the other two papers published by the University of Michigan that studied the affect of the moon on trading.

The article reports that Mexican Treasury bills have this year offered annualized yields of between 15% and 18% for bills with a 28-day maturity. Since Mexico's central bank is committed to depreciating the peso by no more than 6.6% against the dollar in 1993, and has $24 billion of reserves to back its commitment. In March foreigners held 57.2 billion pesos of government paper, more even than Mexicans, who owned 53.5 billion pesos--just half their holdings at the end of 1991. Fidelity Investments, a Boston mutual-fund giant, alone has over $700m invested.

The article offers information on ResearchGate, an online social network for researchers that aims to connect academic communities. Information is provided on how users can denote their areas of interest, connect to other researchers, and upload research papers. It is noted that investors hope the website will become profitable by becoming a marketplace for research materials and job advertising.

The article discusses the effect of momentum on individual stock prices. Details about the habits of investors and the instability in stock markets are provided. Information is also presented about a working paper published by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) which explores the momentum effect and the response of investors to momentum.

The article discusses how China's government raised the stamp tax it levies on share purchases. It is suggested in the article that the raised tax will negatively effect China's economy. The article asserts that China needs fewer regulatory restraints on the investment options available to citizens, and that citizens should be allowed to invest more freely abroad, or in commercial paper and bonds.

The article explores how limited the circumstances are in which the "irrelevance theory" of economics can be used. In two papers, published in 1958 and 1963, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller argued that a firm's financial structure made no difference to its total value. Jean Tirole, in his book "The Theory of Corporate Finance" shows how resource distribution is tied directly to value.

The article comments on the annual symposium of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and attended by central bankers and economists from around the world. The topic of this year's symposium was the future economic impact of ageing populations. One of the most interesting papers was by James Poterba, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explored how demographic change might affect financial markets. As a result of declining birth rates and longer life expectancy, rich countries will have more old people and fewer young. In addition, as the baby-boomers retire, the ranks of the middle-aged will also dwindle. Between 2000 and 2050 the share of America's population over the age of 65 will grow from 12% to 21%, while the share of the population aged 40-64 will fall from a peak of 33% in 2010 to 28% by 2040. The significance of this change is that people tend to save most, and to accumulate financial assets, during middle age. This suggests that changes in the age structure of the population will affect total saving in the economy and thus asset prices. One flaw in this theory, Mr Poterba points out, is that detailed savings data suggest that, while older people stop accumulating further net wealth, they do not run down their assets as fast as the life-cycle theory implies. Because they do not know when they will die, or because they want to leave something for their children, retired people reduce their assets only gradually, in order to ensure they have sufficient capital to live on or to pass on to their heirs. As a result, there may be no sudden rush to sell assets when baby-boomers retire.

The article discusses whether communicative central banks make financial markets lazy. The United States Federal Reserve stands far beyond legislators' political reaches. But these days, the chairman needs little persuasion to talk. Alan Greenspan's Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, as it is still called, delivered on July 20th and 21st of 2004, was his 24th speech of the year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on July 15, 2004, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, one of six members of the executive board of the European Central Bank, argued that central banks now talk too much. Padoa-Schioppa, however, thinks central banks are guilty of oversteering the markets. The same argument is set forth, in equations, by Jeffrey Amato, of the Bank of International Settlements, Stephen Morris, of Yale University, and Hyun Song Shin, of the London School of Economics, in a number of recent papers. Amato, Morris and Shin worry that today's loquacious central banks play this role in the financial markets.

Last year, Zimbabwe became the first country to run out of its own currency. Despite triple-digit inflation, President Robert Mugabe forbade the printing of high-denomination banknotes, as he apparently believed that this would cause inflation. The problem was solved when someone persuaded him that if the central bank issued high-denomination bits of paper called "bearer cheques", with an expiry date, this was somehow different from printing money. Mugabe has appointed as governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank a man who understands both economics and how to handle an aging despot. Since he took over in December, Gideon Gono, a former commercial banker, has brought inflation down from over 600% to a mere 450%. He did this by clamping down on the wholesale looting that emptied the national coffers last year--for example, when politicians took advantage of a loopy official exchange rate to buy hard currency at giveaway prices and spent their windfall profits on mansions in South Africa. Buoyed by this success, Mr Gono has accumulated vast powers, including that of determining who gets credit. Ordinary banks have to deposit half their assets with the central bank, at zero interest, as a statutory reserve. However, they can retrieve this cash and lend it to companies the Reserve Bank deems "productive", at a knock-down 50% interest rate: in other words, super-cheap money for approved borrowers.

In the past year the United States has run up a current-account deficit of more than $500 billion. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve argues that the pool of savings on offer in today's global capital markets is deeper and more liquid than ever as a result of the spread of globalization. The markets continue to furnish America with the money it needs without demanding higher yields in return. In a recent paper, Michael Dooley, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber, of Deutsche Bank, come to the same sanguine conclusion from opposite premises: the deficit is manageable not because today's world is unique but because it replicates the post-war Bretton Woods era. Under Bretton Woods, the Europeans, as they regained their exporting strength, amassed ever greater dollar claims on America. Similarly, under today's "revived" Bretton Woods system, the East Asians hoard their export earnings in low-yielding dollar assets, such as Treasury bills. The inflow of Asian capital keeps American interest rates low and demand high. Most of the discomfort caused by America's deficit will be felt neither in Asia nor in America but in Europe. European investors may be growing less willing to underwrite American borrowing for miserable returns.

According to Thai officials, two "Vayupak" mutual funds, to be set up by the Thai government, will not only provide a good return to investors: they will also mop up excess deposits in Thai banks, improve the management of state-owned firms, speed privatisation and rescue stricken Thai businesses. Suchart Jaovisidha, the finance minister, says that the government devised this scheme to make better use of the 500 billion baht ($12 billion) that it has tied up in wholly and partially state-owned firms. Ammar Siamwalla, a prominent Thai economist, argues that Vayupak is a pseudo-privatisation in which the government manages to borrow against the value of its holdings without relinquishing control, and without adding to the public debt--on paper at any rate. So Vayupak will mark another step in the government's growing involvement in the economy, including a role in corporate restructuring, through the state-owned Thai Asset Management Corporation, and its big stake in many banks thanks to state-led recapitalisation after the 1997-98 financial crisis.

Since the stock market bubble burst more than three years ago, investors have had ample time to ponder where to put the remains of their money. Economists and analysts too have been revisiting old ideas. None has been dearer to them than the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), a formula linking movements in a single share price to those of the market as a whole. The key statistic is "beta": the proportion of a given change in the market that, on average, is reflected in the price of the share. Although it is useful for compiling share portfolios--in particular, for working out their overall correlation with the market--it tells you little about share-price performance in absolute terms. In fact, the CAPM's obituary was already being written more than a decade ago when a paper by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, then both at the University of Chicago, showed that the shares of small companies and "value stocks" (shares with low price-earnings ratios) do much better over time than their betas would predict. Even though shares have recovered some of their losses in recent months, the crash has left investors asking what became of the fabled equity premium, the amount by which they can expect returns on shares to exceed those from government bonds.

On paper, at least, India's commercial-banking market is opening up to foreigners. In February 2003 Jaswant Singh, the finance minister, raised the limit on foreigners' stakes in private Indian banks from 49% to 74%. Foreign banks may now set up subsidiaries in India, not just branches. And in recent years the number of new branch licences issued annually has been more than the 12 India promised the World Trade Organisation. Certain events might suggest--at first blush, at any rate--that foreign banks are eager to use their new freedom to buy Indian private banks. On April 23, 2003, foreign investors led by Sabre Capital, a group of four ex-bankers including Rana Talwar, former head of Standard Chartered, a British bank, said they would pay around $27m for 48% of Centurion, a troubled private bank. Mr Talwar's strike follows last year's move by ING, a Dutch bank, to raise to 44% its stake in Vysya, a bank of which it had owned a small slice since 1996. Despite all these positive signs, there is little enthusiasm among foreigners for buying India's private retail banks.

Addresses the concerns facing electronic-money, as discussed in a paper by economist Benjamin Friedman of Harvard University. Reason provided by Friedman towards Central banks controlling of short-term interests; Argument provided by the economist Charles Goodhart on e-money; Information on real challenges to central bankers in an e-money world

Analyzes the economic model known as the capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM). Discussion of the use of the model to tell a firm how to calculate the return demanded by investors; Information on the five ideas contained in CAPM; Report that investors can eliminate some risks by diversifying across many regions and sectors; Reference to the paper "Rational Capital Budgeting in an Irrational World," by Jeremy Stein that was published in the October 1996 issue of "The Journal of Business."

Comments on the 20% drop in shares experienced by Metallgesellschaft AG (MG), the German metals and services group, on September 26-27, 1994, amid unsubstantiated rumors that banks were withdrawing their support for the firm and charges that they had bungled its rescue. View that MG's managers' and bankers' mishandling of MG Refining and Marketing's oil-marketing venture cost a fortune; Details of two draft papers by Merton Miller, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, which say that MG'S managers and supervisors misinterpreted a well-hedged oil marketing strategy and unwound the hedges with disastrous consequences; Statement by Ronaldo Schmitz, a Deutsche Bank AG executive who heads MG'S supervisory board, that MGRM's long position in oil futures made the company a target of speculation.

Focuses on the growth of money-market funds (MMFS) in Germany. Financial revolutions sparked in the U.S. and France by the introduction of MMFS which invest in short-term instruments such as bank certificates of deposit and commercial paper; Efforts of the Bundesbank to stop the funds growing fast because it does not want businesses to rely too heavily on short-term financing; Boost for foreign firms that are wooing younger and less conservative German investors with promises of superior performance.

The article discusses the entrepreneurial boldness manifested by Sergei Mavrodi, the president of Russia's MMM investment fund. On August 4th MMM closed all of its offices and Mavrodi's flat was reportedly surrounded by police who had a warrant for his arrest. So far the government has handled MMM'S problems sensibly, refusing to compensate those sitting on paper losses even though some angry investors have clashed with police. Government leaders may fear Mavrodi because he claims that he can muster the signatures needed to call for a referendum of confidence in the government.

The article discusses trends in the performance of American bonds. The decade-long bull market in American Treasury bonds, widely expected to be a likely victim of a Democratic election victory on November 3rd, refused to die this week. Investors were happy enough to buy the paper offered in the quarterly bond auction, especially the ten-year bonds sold on November 10th. Outstanding bonds of the same issue had been hit hard by short-selling ahead of the election; those shorts were being covered this week. That summed up the market's mood. For the moment, at least, many see the gentle slide in prices since mid-September as a pre-election blip.