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Who to Sue When a Robot Loses Your Fortune
May 5, 2019--The first known case of humans going to court over investment losses triggered by autonomous machines will test the limits of liability.
Robots are getting more humanoid every day, but they still can't be sued.
So a Hong Kong tycoon is doing the next best thing. He's going after the salesman who persuaded him to entrust a chunk of his fortune to the supercomputer whose trades cost him more than $20 million.
The case pits Samathur Li Kin-kan, whose father is a major investor in Shaftesbury Plc, which owns much of London's Chinatown, Covent Garden and Carnaby Street, against Raffaele Costa, who has spent much of his career selling investment funds for the likes of Man Group Plc and GLG Partners Inc. It's the first-known instance of humans going to court over investment losses triggered by autonomous machines and throws the spotlight on the "black box" problem: If people don't know how the computer is making decisions, who's responsible when things go wrong?
Accounting body proposes temporary relief during Libor phase out
May 3, 2019--A global accounting standard setter has proposed a fast-track temporary fix to help banks and businesses manage Libor-based contracts worth $400 trillion during the transition to alternative interest rate benchmarks.
Regulators have set a December 2021 deadline for effectively ending the use of the London Interbank Offered Rate after banks were fined billions of dollars for trying to rig the benchmark.
ULTUMUS Announces Partnership With Velox To Develop Next Generation of Delta One Desktop Products
May 2, 2019--ULTUMUS, the leading global provider of data services for Index and ETF products, today announces a partnership with Velox Financial Technology (Velox), a provider of customized real-time trading technology solutions to provide portfolio management, trading & analytics solutions to investment banks and the asset management community.
Due to the rapid expansion of synthetic products such as ETFs and Indices, our clients find themselves significantly under invested in technology that will allow their businesses to scale while providing efficiency and lower operational risk.
IMF Working Paper-Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates
May 2, 2019--Summary:
This paper updates estimates of fossil fuel subsidies, defined as fuel consumption times the gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations), for 191 countries.
Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion). About three quarters of global subsidies are due to domestic factors—energy pricing reform thus remains largely in countries' own national interest—while coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies. Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP.
Millennials And Sophisticated Investors Driving ETF Adoption
May 2, 2019--New Vanguard research examines demographic and behavioral trends of ETF usage
New Vanguard research identified distinctive behavioral trends amongst exchange-traded fund (ETF) investors, concluding that age and investment experience are the foremost drivers of ETF usage.
Early ETF adoption among self-directed investors, published by Vanguard Center for Investor Research, examined the behavior of more than five million retail investor households and revealed that older, more established investors with relatively complex portfolios tend to use ETFs to supplement other investments.
At the other end of the spectrum, ETFs serve as the primary investment vehicle for millennials and new investors.
view moreview the Early ETF adoption among self-directed investors report
World Gold Council-Gold Demand Trends Q1 2019-Central bank buying and ETF inflows lifted global gold demand
May 2, 2019--Highlights
This was the highest Q1 since 2013.
Robust Indian gold jewellery demand drove global gains.
Healthy wedding-related buying lifted Indian demand to 125.4t (+5% y-o-y).
ETFs and similar products added 40.3t in Q1.
Products listed in Western markets grew by a combined 46t.
Bars and coin investment diverged: bars lost 5% while coins grew 12%.
Japanese net disinvestment was a key driver of the fall in gold bar demand.
Gold used in technology contracted 3% to 79.3t.
Demand for consumer electronics faced headwinds from economic challenges.
New OCC Study: Listed Index and ETF Option Overlays May Improve Endowment Performance
May 1, 2019-- OCC, the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization, today shared the results of a new study, Endowment Risk Management and Return Enhancement with Listed Index and ETF Options, that found that both buy-write and put spread collar overlays improved risk-adjusted performance within the study sample for small, mid-sized and very large endowments, with the small endowment portfolio seeing the largest benefits.
The research study, commissioned by The Options Industry Council (OIC), was conducted by Dr. Edward Szado, Associate Professor of Finance at Providence College School of Business.
Moody's Research Warns Corporations That Private Blockchains Contain New Risks
April 30, 2019--United States credit rating agency Moody's Investor Service warned about the dangers of private versus public blockchains in new research issued on April 25.
Part of an investigation into the potential impact of blockchain technology on structured finance, the report highlights key differences between current market trends.
Specifically, corporations should be aware of the pluses and minuses involved in using private blockchains, which can run without a decentralized consensus or governance mechanism and thus become open to manipulation.
Introducing the FTSE Chinese Green Bond Index Series-FTSE Chinese Green Bond Index Series
April 30, 2019--The issuance of "green" bonds (conventional bonds with proceeds that are used to finance climate or environmental projects) has been growing at a rapid pace globally, and this progress is particularly evident in China.
Since it began in 2015, China's domestic green bond market has quickly evolved to become the second largest in the world.
In January 2019, FTSE Russell announced the launch of the FTSE Chinese (Onshore CNY) Green Bond Index Series, which includes a range of benchmarks designed to measure this quickly-growing market segment.
IMF Working Paper-Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide
April 29, 2019--Summary:
The experience of the Great Recession and its aftermath revealed that a lower bound on interest rates can be a serious obstacle for fighting recessions. However, the zero lower bound is not a law of nature; it is a policy choice.
The central message of this paper is that with readily available tools a central bank can enable deep negative rates whenever needed-thus maintaining the power of monetary policy in the future to end recessions within a short time. This paper demonstrates that a subset of these tools can have a big effect in enabling deep negative rates with administratively small actions on the part of the central bank.
To that end, we (i) survey approaches to enable deep negative rates discussed in the literature and present new approaches; (ii) establish how a subset of these approaches allows enabling negative rates while remaining at a minimum distance from the current paper currency policy and minimizing the political costs; (iii) discuss why standard transmission mechanisms from interest rates to aggregate demand are likely to remain unchanged in deep negative rate territory; and (iv) present communication tools that central banks can use both now and in the event to facilitate broader political acceptance of negative interest rate policy at the onset of the next serious recession.
view the IMF Working Paper-Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions: A Guide
