Bridgewater Associates’ founder Ray Dalio has overtaken George Soros as the “world’s most successful hedge fund manager” of all-time, claimed a report by the Financial Times on Tuesday, after Dalio’s Bridgewater Pure Alpha fund made over $13.8 billion for his investors last year.
To complete its full transition to a market economy, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick warns that China needs to undergo reforms, especially in its private sector, to achieve its goal of a new economic growth structure.
While Zoellick does not expect a sudden ‘big bang’ reform, he noted that in the history of Chinese economic reform post Deng Xiaopeng, there has been a strong tendency for gradual reform, with tests first carried out on a local scale before they are implemented nationwide.
Greed is NOT good after all, so says Hollywood actor Michael Douglas, who famously portrayed a scrupulous corporate executive in the 1987 film Wall Street, in a new advertisement unveiled by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on Monday.
The advertisement is part of a public service announcement against insider trading and corporate fraud on Wall Street, and sees Douglas speaking against the very mantra of his character, Gordon Gekko, in the movie: “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
Millions of Indian government workers are set to strike today to protest rising prices and proposed sales of stakes in state-run companies, in one of the biggest industrial actions in Indian history, and the 14th general strike since India’s economic reforms in the 1990s.
Banking, postal and other important services are likely to be affected as all 11 of India’s central trade unions, each with at least 400,000 members, take part in the mass strike.
Chinese government officials and departments will only be allowed to buy locally-branded cars in 2012, reported the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, after the government excluded all foreign brands from a preliminary list of acceptable car models.
A quick preview of the key economic events for the upcoming week:
Last week, Greece managed to survive another bailout announcement, though private investors and institutions were forced to accept massive write downs. Despite the breakthrough, the lack of long term visibility on the part of financiers could mean that Greece might eventually face bankruptcy at the end of March.
This week however, Ben Bernanke will address Congress at the semi-annual monetary policy report, an address which will provide insights on the U.S. economic recovery thus far.
The German Finance Ministry has offered to send an envoy of its tax collectors to Greece in order to educate the Greeks on more efficient tax collection methods as well as to modernise the Greek tax administrative system.
Is it possible to work without email? Or has email become such an important tool of communication in this age of globalization?
Last year, Thierry Barton, CEO of Atos, an information technology services giant, declared an internal email ban saying ‘it is not normal that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails.’
Barton, who himself has not sent an email in three years, further said ‘email is not longer the appropriate (communications) tool’.
Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 (G-20) advanced and developing economies have effectively challenged their European counterparts to put up more cash for into its own bailout fund or risk losing international support for the much-needed action against the continent’s crippling debt crisis.
It should come as no surprise that women’s financial affluence has been growing in the last few years. With better education, better job prospects and better wages, the purchasing power of women has also been growing. Today women contribute to nearly $7 trillion in business and consumer spending in the US.
