Global ETF News Older than One Year
Bitcoin Roundtable Announcement Thwarts Bitcoin Classic Launch
February 13, 2016--Bitcoin Classic, the Bitcoin implementation set to double Bitcoin's 1 megabyte block size limit by a hard fork, suffered a significant setback shortly after itsofficial release this week.
A group of prominent exchanges, mining pools and other industry players organized under the "Bitcoin Roundtable" collective, stated publicly they will not switch to Bitcoin Classic for the present.
Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
IMF Working paper-What's In a Name? That Which We Call Capital Controls
February 12, 2016-- Summary: This paper investigates why controls on capital inflows have a bad name, and evoke such visceral opposition, by tracing how capital controls have been used and perceived, since the late nineteenth century.
While advanced countries often employed capital controls to tame speculative inflows during the last century, we conjecture that several factors undermined their subsequent use as prudential tools. First, it appears that inflow controls became inextricably linked with outflow controls. The latter have typically been more pervasive, more stringent, and more linked to autocratic regimes, failed macroeconomic policies, and financial crisis-inflow controls are thus damned by this "guilt by association." Second, capital account restrictions often tend to be associated with current account restrictions. As countries aspired to achieve greater trade integration, capital controls came to be viewed as incompatible with free trade. Third, as policy activism of the 1970s gave way to the free market ideology of the 1980s and 1990s, the use of capital controls, even on inflows and for prudential purposes, fell into disrepute.
view the IMF Working paper-What's In a Name? That Which We Call Capital Controls
Source: IMF
Many suspects behind murderous markets
Twelve guilty parties had a hand in the current market turmoil
February 12, 2016--In the midst of the worst global market sell-off since the great financial crisis of 2008, at least 12 suspects are being named.
The most worrying thing of all is that they all had a hand in the sell-off.
Source: FT.com
WGC-Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2015
February 11, 2016--Gold demand in the fourth quarter increased 4% year-on-year to a 10-quarter high of 1,117.7t. Full year demand was virtually unchanged, down just a fraction (-14t) to 4,212t.
Weakness in the first half of the year was cancelled out by strength in the second half. Fourth quarter growth was driven by central banks (+33t) and investment (+25t), offset by a marginal contraction in jewellery (-6t) and continued declines in technology (-6t). Supply remained constrained: annual mine production increased by the slowest rate since 2008 (+1%) and recycling dropped to multi-year lows. Total supply declined 4% to 4,258t-the lowest since 2009.
Source: WGC (World Gold Council)
Bitcoin's future threatened by software schism
February 11, 2106--A schism among software developers that threatens the future of bitcoin has broken into the open with Wednesday's release of a rival version of the technology behind the digital currency.
The current version of bitcoin, which is maintained by a fractious group of volunteer developers, is at risk of hitting a wall because of a limit on the number of transactions it can handle.
Source: gata.org
IMF Working paper-Trends in Gender Equality and Women’s Advancement
February 10, 2016--I. Introduction
In the past several decades, the world moved closer to gender equality and saw the advancement of women across a wide range of economic, social, and political indicators, in all regions of the globe.
Nonetheless, throughout the world, women remain at a disadvantage to men in important areas of social, economic, and political life. The Millennium Development Goals explicitly called for gender equality. Its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, sets targets for the international community over the next 15 years.1 Goal 5 of its 17 broad goals explicitly calls for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.
view the IMF Working paper-Trends in Gender Equality and Women’s Advancement
Source: IMF
ETF Securities sees inflows of over $1 billion into Commodity products since January 2016
February 10, 2016--ETF Securities, one of the world's leading, independent providers of Exchange Traded Products (ETPs), has announced record YTD net inflows of over $1 billion since 1 January 2016.
Highlights include $720 million into gold linked ETPs (99% into physically backed ETPs) and over $320 million into oil linked ETPs. Yesterday, Tuesday 9 February, ETF Securities saw its highest ever one day net inflow, of $345 million into its gold linked ETPs.
Source: ETF Securities
IMF Survey-When National Cycles Coincide: Tracking Global Recessions and Recoveries
February 9, 2016--2009 recession the most devastating since 1960, says multimedia book
Understanding global business cycles necessary to mitigate negative effects
Policies need to inspire confidence, not be a source of uncertainty
The world has experienced four global recessions since 1960. In a new multimedia book, two economists track what drives the global economy into and out of a recession.
"The bottom line is that a global recession hits everybody at the same time. That is why in the current fragile growth environment, it is especially critical for policymakers to understand where we are in the global cycle," says co-author Ayhan Kose in an interview with IMF Survey.
Source: IMF
IMF Working paper-Structural Reforms and Productivity Growth in Emerging Market and Developing Economies
February 9, 2016--Summary: This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework.
It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity growth at the aggregate and sectoral levels for some emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) than others. Recognizing the possibility of time lags between reform implementation and reform payoffs, the paper also examines how productivity gains from various reforms evolve over the the short-and medium-term.
Source: IMF
IEA releases Oil Market Report for February
As signs of a demand slowdown surface, higher OPEC output only partly offsets non-OPEC decline
February 9, 2016--Having peaked, at a five-year high of 1.6 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2015, global oil demand growth is forecast to ease back considerably in 2016, to 1.2 mb/d, pulled down by notable slowdowns in Europe, China and the United States, the newly released IEA Oil Market Report (OMR) for February informs subscribers.
Early elements of the projected slowdown surfaced in the last quarter of 2015.
Source: IEA
