In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is the new Big Brother. Even if you never mention them explicitly, your sexual orientation, drug use, and religion are an open book thanks to your public profile, which can be analyzed to suss out “highly sensitive personal attributes” with a startling degree of accuracy, according to a new study.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics just announced that, in readjusting the basket of goods used to compute inflation, it chucked out champagne, since it’s ”an over-covered area of the basket and expenditure is dropping.”
When does “unexpectedly bad” start being “expected”? Italy’s revision to its fourth-quarter GDP put that question to the test once again, as the economy contracted 2.8% year-on-year, compared to the 2.7% that was “expected.” Markit Economics attributed the slide, which marked a 0.9% quarter-on-quarter contraction, to “weak domestic demand.” Here’s a look at the year-on-year trend:
Car sales in India tanked last month, falling 26%—the most in 12 years. That’s a grim reading on the health of the country’s consumer demand and crystallizes the reversal of fortunes for what was once one of India’s most promising industries.
The data out of Japan today were confusing not just because they reflected economic performance in three separate time periods—GDP from the fourth quarter of 2012, current account data from January, and bank lending from February—but because they also offered a cloudy read on how well Abenomics is working.
The euro crisis has widened the gap between rich and poor countries in Europe, and one reason is the borrowing costs for small businesses. For years, these lending rates moved in lockstep across the euro area. Since the crisis, they’ve been diverging. More worrying still, the divergence is now wider than it was last July, when European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi vowed to do “whatever it takes to save the euro.”
When most people think “ramen” they think Japan, but that association has landed Master Kong, the world’s biggest instant noodle maker, in a lot of hot water. The company, which is based in Taiwan and listed in Hong Kong, has lost some $2.4 billion in market capitalization after false rumors about its ownership circulated during Japan and China’s showdown over islands in the East China Sea.
China just became the world’s biggest net oil importer. And the death of Hugo Chavez, the president of one of China’s seventh-biggest oil supplier, potentially jeopardizes some $40 billion that the Chinese state policy bank has loaned to Venezuela in exchange for oil since 2008. The Venezuelan opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, has said that, if he were elected, he would review the legality of these deals.
Premier Wen Jiabao set some new policy priorities in the government work report that he gave today. But he neglected to shake things up on at least one major issue: the one-child policy. “We should adhere to the basic state policy on family planning,” said Wen, in his lone allusion to the matter (pdf, p. 24). There had been promising talk of scrapping the policy, but Wen evidently won’t be the bearer of those tidings.
Outgoing Chinese premier Wen Jiabao spoke today at the National People’s Congress, and the big news was that China’s keeping the 7.5% growth target it set for the GDP in 2012. If China meets this target, it would be the slowest growth since 1990 (paywall), reports the Financial Times, and a big break from recent years, when China obsessively targeted 8% growth.
Does Google have too much control over China’s smartphone market? China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) thinks so. In a white paper its research arm released Friday (pdf in Chinese), it bemoaned the “heavy reliance” on Google’s Android software among Chinese smartphone developers.
The wait is over, folks. The Forbes Billionaire list is out! But…hasn’t it been out, in the form of Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires? Why, yes—it has. With the tagline “See who’s winning & losing the most money right now,” the site keeps you current with 15-minute updates of its data.
The world’s biggest pension fund—Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF)—just reported a blowout last quarter of 2012. According to GPIF’s fiscal year 2012 report, it raked in ¥5.14 trillion ($55.5 billion) from October to December of 2012—a tidy 4.8% return (pdf). Not bad compared to July-September’s ¥528.7 billion.
Yesterday, 100 Chinese parents called for their government to legalize same-sex marriage when it meets next week.
In China, infant formula is something you just don’t scrimp on. That’s partially because of a widespread reluctance to breastfeed. It’s also due to China’s remarkably toxic track record with infant formula production, most notorious of which is the 2008 melamine contamination scandal that killed six babies. Whatever the cause, it’s helped make infant formula a massive money-spinner for multinational companies.
In news that will shock no-one, earning a Crimson pedigree may be the surest-fire way to amassing greenbacks. Almost 3,000 graduates of Harvard University are worth more than $30 million (each), according to rankings compiled by market research firm Wealth-X seen by Quartz, and most of them earned the money themselves. That’s more than twice the number of what Wealth-X calls ”ultra-high-net-worth individuals” (UHNWIs) produced by any other institution in the world. (The report, by the way, counts both undergraduate and graduate degrees.)
Japan government bonds (JGBs) have long been known as a “safe haven” in times of economic uncertainty. And that flight-to-safety demand is helping keep Japanese yields very low.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) just released two reports (pdfs here and here) on who exactly is taking the GMAT, the make-or-break exam for admission into business schools worldwide—and its findings should relieve business school administrators. While the last few years have seen around the same number of test-takers 28,000 more people took the GMAT in test-year 2012 than the previous year—an almost 11% increase.
Shinzo Abe’s big talk about stimulus may finally be paying off. Honda just announced that it’s opening a car factory … in Japan. As Bloomberg notes, it hasn’t done that in 49 years.
Sweden’s Ikea must have been relieved to be able to announce that, unlike consumers in some 21 other countries, Chinese Ikea-goers have been spared the possibility of horse meat turning up in their meatballs.
They also live in a country where 70% of the men have never operated an oven, as the UK’s The Telegraph reports—and 95% have never unloaded a washing machine. Taking that into account, the resurgent popularity of Silvio Berlusconi, one of the world’s virtuoso chauvinists, is somewhat less surprising.
It’s no wonder Italians piled into the clown car. Their economy has been contracting for a year and a half, the longest recession in two decades. Sure, they don’t want to keep austerity in place. But a return to the Berlusconi years of 2001-06 and 2008-2011 isn’t that inviting either. The country has seen feeble growth in the last 10 years, compared with the euro area:
WeChat, the mobile messaging service from China-based Tencent, is quickly stealing market share from its chief competitor, Sina’s Weibo microblog. But Sina is not the only company that should be worried. Facebook ought to take note, as well, because WeChat is headed its way.
On Feb. 15, with little fanfare, a group of US-based investors filed a lawsuit against the directors of one of the many Chinese companies forced to delist from US boards in the last few years. They also are suing the US and Chinese affiliates of the company’s accountant, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.
