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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.27-042229/https://www.ft.com/content/864c6f2b-fd6e-448d-b67b-f208eb89d879

A flurry of new exchange traded funds is widening retail access to the fast-growing markets for private credit and equity, sparking concerns that these assets are a poor fit for small-scale investors and could prove tough to sell during a crisis.

A private credit ETF launched last month by State Street will hold up to 35 per cent of its portfolio in private debt deals originated by Apollo Global Management. Fixed-income specialist BondBloxx, meanwhile, has applied for regulatory approval for an ETF that could hold up to 80 per cent of its portfolio in private credit. 

But the US Securities and Exchange Commission last month raised a number of concerns about the State Street launch, enquiring about plans for mitigating liquidity risk and ensuring accurate pricing. 

While the regulator eventually signed off on the fund after State Street provided more information and changed the name, many industry executives remain unconvinced that assets typically bought by investors who can lock up capital for years are suited to daily liquidity fund vehicles that, until now, have mostly held easy-to-sell securities

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Archive: tbc

The richest half of American families owned about 97.5% of national wealth as of the end of 2024, while the bottom half held 2.5%, according to the latest numbers from the Federal Reserve. 

The lower 50% of the distribution saw their wealth share improve marginally during President Joe Biden’s term in office, climbing from 2.2%. The 66.6 million households in that group collectively owned about $4 trillion in net wealth at the end of last year, an increase of $1.25 trillion from four years earlier.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.27-174159/https://www.ft.com/content/1671684c-23a0-45e5-b6cf-16a210a7393c

Imagine this set-up for a new stock market listing. A transformational new technology has sparked an infrastructure spending boom. Entrepreneurs from outside the tech industry have spotted the opportunity to borrow heavily to build a new type of infrastructure company, narrowly focused on feeding the new demand. With Wall Street hungry for pure-play ways to invest in the new technology, the conditions for an IPO would seem opportune.

That could be a description of CoreWeave, the wholesaler of AI computing power. Its shares are set to start trading on Wall Street on Friday in a litmus test for the state of the AI capital spending boom.

But it could also describe Global Crossing, a hot telecom start-up from the late 1990s. At a time when the financial markets were transfixed by the potential of the early internet, Global Crossing amassed undersea fibre optic cables capable of handling a surge in traffic — much as CoreWeave has amassed banks of powerful graphics processing units made by Nvidia.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.25-050957/https://www.ft.com/content/39a6c6c4-a2f5-4ce5-96bb-0c542f6521da

Individual investors have pumped almost $70bn into US stocks this year even as professional money managers are slashing their exposure to the market on fears over Donald Trump’s policies. 

Net inflows from retail investors into US equities and exchange traded funds have registered $67bn in 2025, down only slightly from the $71bn spent in the final quarter of 2024, according to data provider VandaTrack. 

The powerful influx underscores how individual investors remain upbeat on Wall Street equities despite intense turbulence this year, triggered by the president’s erratic tariff plans and the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek.

“Dip-buying has been an essentially foolproof strategy for four of the past five years,” said Steve Sosnick, chief market strategist at Interactive Brokers, a platform widely used by individual investors.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.24-091009/https://www.ft.com/content/d90a401b-d086-44a9-b00a-adf46f00f450

President Prabowo Subianto launched the Danantara fund in February, bringing the country’s state-owned enterprises under one roof in a massive overhaul. The government expects the fund to boost economic growth by investing in strategic projects and industries. 

However, the fund’s direct control by Prabowo and the diversion of the SOE’s dividends from the state budget to the new fund have raised questions over political interference, transparency and lax governance. 

Those concerns have weighed on the Indonesian stock market, adding to mounting worries over an economic slowdown and a weakening fiscal position. Monday’s appointments failed to reassure markets, with Jakarta’s benchmark stock index tumbling as much as 4.7 per cent.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.21-190545/https://www.ft.com/content/5794ed2c-6296-4f04-876e-bbaaa3d1cc30

Turkey’s central bank burnt through almost $12bn defending the lira in a record intervention after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s detention of his political rival triggered a political crisis that scared investors and sent the currency reeling.

The bank spent $11.5bn propping up the currency on Wednesday after the detention of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the most prominent leader in Turkey’s political opposition, said a person with knowledge of the matter and calculations based on official data by Bürümcekçi Research and Consultancy. 

The intervention was nearly four times larger than any previous such move on the bank’s official records. It came after the lira plunged as much as 11 per cent against the US dollar to a record low on Wednesday as Erdoğan’s move against İmamoğlu ignited a stampede out of Turkey’s markets.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.20-092417/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/credit-card-racket/682075/

High costs are weighing down working-class families, while driving big rewards to rich ones. Over the past few decades, the credit-card market has quietly transformed into two credit-card markets: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor, with the latter subsidizing the former. While balances are compounding at the highest average APR in decades, a brutal 21.5 percent, the haves are not just pulling away from the have-nots. The people swiping their cards to pay for food and gas are also paying for wealthy cardholders’ upgrades to business class.

In the credit-card industry, the well-to-do are known as transactors. They pay off their balance in full every month, avoiding late fees and interest charges. They use credit cards as a convenient payment method, and as a way to earn travel points, cash back, airport-lounge vouchers, seat upgrades, and other goodies. Given how valuable these rewards are, transactors make money by spending money. “If you’re spending $100,000 a year, you’re getting maybe $1,500 back in terms of points or cash,” Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution told me. “You’re not paying taxes on that. It’s worth closer to $2,500 or $3,000 a year in taxable income.” (That’s double the average worker’s weekly earnings.)

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.18-224801/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-18/china-banks-cut-consumer-loan-rates-to-record-low-to-spur-demand

Chinese banks are slashing rates on consumer loans to record lows as policymakers ramp up stimulus to stabilize growth and counter US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Lenders across the wealthier areas of Shanghai, the nation’s financial capital, and Hangzhou, a key tech hub, are engaged in a price war, offering annual interest rates as low as 2.58% on loans to fuel restaurant visits and shopping, according to online ads. That compares to rates as high as 10% about two years ago.

Beijing is seeking to ignite consumer spending and stoke local demand to help make the long-struggling economy less reliant on trade and exports. The National Financial Regulatory Administration last week urged banks to expand the issuance of personal consumer loans while ensuring reasonable terms including credit limits and interest rates.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.16-232726/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-16/banks-boom-and-shoppers-scrimp-a-year-after-japan-s-rate-pivot

One year on from Japan’s historic rate hike, profits at its biggest banks are soaring to records, while price rises are forcing consumers to cut back and higher borrowing costs are fueling a political battle over how the government can rein in its outlays. 

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda scrapped the world’s last negative interest rate and its massive stimulus program a year ago, encouraged by record gains in annual wage deals. Those pay increases suggested consumers were in a position to help drive prices and growth, supporting the inflation trend.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.16-053039/https://www.ft.com/content/e2469e65-df7d-42fe-8fa4-9d222bcb48b3

Vanilla” buybacks are no longer enough to placate shareholders of Japan’s biggest companies, with a string of conglomerates sacking chief executives and selling assets as the country’s corporate governance drive gains pace.

Toyota, Japan’s most valuable company, unveiled plans last month to trim its board from 16 members to 10 and make half of them independent, up from 40 per cent previously. It will also create a separate supervisory committee meant to enable stronger audits and monitoring of management.

Seven & i Holdings, owner of the 7-Eleven convenience store chain, has embarked on a radical restructuring and replaced its unpopular chief executive, while consumer electronics group Panasonic is restructuring, cutting costs and exploring the sale of several businesses, including its iconic but struggling TV unit.

Other groups that have replaced their chief executives or are considering sales of non-core assets include Rohm Semiconductor, which is overhauling management as it prepares to report its first annual loss in 12 years, and Kyocera, which in January signalled plans to divest low-profit units responsible for $1.3bn, or 10 per cent, of revenue.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.13-222059/https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-has-held-deal-talks-with-binance-following-crypto-exchanges-guilty-plea-05b029fa

Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would put Trump in business with the firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements. 

At the same time, Binance’s billionaire founder, Changpeng Zhao—who served four months in prison after pleading guilty to a related charge—has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon, people familiar with the matter said. Zhao, widely known as CZ, remains Binance’s largest shareholder. 

The talks began after Binance reached out to allies of Trump last year offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the exiled company to the U.S.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.14-085921/https://www.ft.com/content/b1bf0858-d7d5-489d-8d61-02997d2f4aec

Either way, the key point to understand is that a shift in economic philosophy is emerging that is potentially as profound as the rethinking unleashed by John Maynard Keynes after the second world war or that pushed by neoliberals in the 1980s. As Greg Jensen of the Bridgewater hedge fund recently quipped, paraphrasing Milton Friedman: “We are all mercantilists now.” Don’t expect that to be reversed any time soon.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.13-052055/https://www.ft.com/content/6ee0fcad-9933-4e10-aefc-29f231110d95

Republicans are indulging in budgetary chicanery in order to preserve Trump’s tax cuts

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.12-190106/https://www.ft.com/content/6d938875-d9c8-47b1-9116-eef577d2cb98

Elon Musk’s hyperactive efficiency drive failed to prevent US federal spending rising to a record $603bn last month, new Treasury data has revealed, highlighting the Trump administration’s difficulty in cutting the size of government.

Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiencyclaims to have already made more than $100bn of savings but only a handful of departments registered any decreases in the first full month of the new administration.

Spending rose by $40bn compared with the same month last year on a like-for-like basis, a 7 per cent increase.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.12-110549/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-12/trump-and-musk-spending-cuts-would-rival-thatcher-s-1980s-austerity

If Elon Musk were to get his way, President Donald Trump would preside over an economic overhaul befitting a fellow 1980s icon: Margaret Thatcher.

In his fast-moving attack on the role of government in America, Musk has targeted $1 trillion in cuts in the next year — a figure many economists and budget experts see as highly unlikely. That’s in part because of how difficult it’d be to slash that much spending without gutting entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security that Trump promised to protect.

But the $1 trillion figure shows the scale of their ambition, and a willingness to undertake what effectively amounts to economic shock therapy. In fact, as a share of gross domestic product, the annual pace of cuts Musk envisions would surpass Thatcher’s in the 1980s, when the Iron Lady dramatically cut UK government spending to close budget deficits and fight inflation and ended up triggering a recession for which she was unrepentant.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.09-212008/https://www.ft.com/content/321cd530-477d-45b5-80f6-16404b7201fb

US start-ups are raising more cash than at any point since 2021 thanks to investor bullishness about artificial intelligence, but the venture capital market has tilted sharply towards funding a handful of huge private tech companies.

More than $30bn has been invested into fledgling groups already this quarter, according to PitchBook data. A further $50bn of fundraising is also in train, as venture capitalists work on a series of major deals involving OpenAI, Safe Superintelligence and defence tech start-up Anduril. 

The fervour over AI has led investors to spend at their fastest rate since the market’s peak in 2021, a period in which $358bn flooded into tech groups, saddling many with unrealistic valuations.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.09-211650/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-09/how-natural-gas-became-america-s-most-important-export-under-trump

Ripping up old alliances and turning the post-World War II axis on its head would have been impossible for any previous American president because of the insatiable US thirst for imported energy. But the Trump White House is able to lean on an increasingly critical made-in-America commodity to exert new levels of geopolitical leverage: liquefied natural gas.

The US, which in the span of about seven years transformed itself from an irrelevant supplier of LNG into the world’s largest, is set to expand its production capacity by 60% in the first half of Donald Trump’s second presidency, according to an estimate from BloombergNEF. By the end of the decade, almost 1 in every 3 tankers carrying the superchilled fuel will originate in the US, giving Trump his best chance to attain the energy dominance his campaign promised.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.09-063818/https://www.ft.com/content/66857e1e-a217-4ddd-8332-d9f0f75aa459

Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funnelling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk using an arrangement that shields their identities from public view, according to asset managers and investors involved in the transactions. 

Since Musk was named a key figure in US President Donald Trump’s drive to remake the US government, China-based asset managers have been promoting the pair’s relationship as an enticement to raise capital from rich Chinese. The money is flowing into Musk’s non-public ventures including xAI, Neuralink and SpaceX, the world’s most valuable private company. 

The investments are being placed through opaque structures known as special-purpose vehicles, which have the benefit of concealing the investors’ identities, to avoid the ire of US authorities and companies wary of Chinese capital during a nadir in relations between the two countries.

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.08-121852/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-08/trump-team-is-pivoting-to-no-pain-no-gain-as-economic-message

The administration is still lavishing Americans with visions of a golden age to come. Yet in the course of a madcap week – which saw a flurry of tariffs and reversals, sparking a global trade war and a sharp stock-market decline – the tone changed a bit. 

“There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that,” Trump told Congress on Tuesday, defending his plans to throw up a protectionist barrier around the US with the biggest tariff increases in almost a century. By Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was arguing that the world’s biggest economy needed some “detox” to wean it off dependence on public spending.

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A cryptocurrency whale took a high-stakes bet on Bitcoin and Ethereum just before Trump announced the creation of a strategic crypto reserve.

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Finnish companies could receive loans totalling up to €437m to boost green energy initiatives and support for digitalisation under an agreement where the European Investment Fund (EIF) will provide guarantees to back lending by Helsinki-based financial services provider Nordea.

The loans to Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and small mid-caps would support green and sustainable investments, including solar panels, electric cars, energy efficiency, and the adoption of digital technologies. These loans could range anywhere from €100,000 to €7.5m, depending on the types of investment involved, a Nordea spokesperson told Impact Investor.

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Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17809174

Archived version

One of China’s leading developers is now on the authorities’ radar for default risk. A major Hong Kong builder is asking lenders to extend loans. Another industry peer is selling an iconic but largely empty mall in Beijing.

As China’s property debt crisis enters its fifth year, there is little indication that distressed developers are finding it easier to repay debt as a slump in home sales continues. Their dollar bonds are still trading at deeply distressed levels, their debt issuance has nearly dried up, and the sector is a notable laggard in stock markets.

Alarm bells went off again in recent weeks, when the banking regulator told top insurers to report their financial exposure to China Vanke to assess how much support the country’s fourth-largest developer by sales needs to avoid default.

[...]

"While recent government policies have helped to arrest the speed of decline, it could take another one or two years for the sector to bottom,” said senior credit analyst Leonard Law at Lucror Analytics.

“Against this backdrop, we can’t rule out the possibility of some more defaults next year, albeit the overall default rate should be much lower than before.”

[...]

The [Chinese government's] rescue measures adopted so far have focused on preventing a collapse in property prices, protecting owners of unfinished apartments and using state funds to help absorb excess supply.

At the same time, policymakers chose to look on as former industry behemoths China Evergrande Group and Country Garden Holdings became defaulters.

This is why the banking regulator’s queries over insurance firms’ exposure to Vanke’s bonds and private debt have drawn much attention. The insurers conducted similar checks in March as fears grew over the builder’s repayment risks.

Separately, Vanke executives have visited several insurers in the past few weeks, urging them not to exercise put options on some private debt that will soon become open to them.

“If there is no turnaround in property sales, asset disposals remain slow in a weak property market, and financial institutions become more cautious and require additional collateral, we believe Vanke could see a liquidity shortage sooner than expected,” Jefferies Financial Group analysts, including Ms Shujin Chen, wrote in a note.

[...]

Vanke’s dollar bond due May 2025 dropped about 10 US cents in the past week to around 80 US cents on the dollar, the biggest weekly decline in more than a year. Its 2027 note also slumped to 49 US cents, signalling investor doubts about full redemption.

Vanke’s woes come at a time when capital markets continue to show weak investor confidence in the sector: mainland Chinese and Hong Kong developers have issued US$67.3 billion (S$91.3 billion) of bonds in 2024, putting the market on track for its smallest annual issuance in at least in a decade.

[...]

In another worrying development, distressed Hong Kong builder New World Development is asking banks to postpone the due dates of some bilateral loans, a move that deepens concerns over its ability to service one of the heaviest debt loads of its kind.

Controlled by the family empire of tycoon Henry Cheng, the developer had total liabilities of HK$220 billion (S$38.4 billion) at the end of June and recorded its first annual loss in two decades.

[...]

"Hong Kong developers are facing a double-whammy in the current down cycle,” said Mr Daniel Fan, credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

“China’s property market, where many of them are involved, shows no sign of a strong recovery, while Hong Kong’s market correction is still ongoing.”

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