Many of the most powerful investors are pensions and endowments that don’t pay capital gains taxes. For those that do pay taxes, Mr. Gale noted, the big and increasingly important private equity funds rarely engage in short-term trading, generally hold their investments for more than five years and would thus be unaffected by the proposed change.
.. Mrs. Clinton’s focus on so-called short-termism is unlikely to alienate most donors from the financial industry. Her policy suggestions pick up on proposals that have recently been made by overhaul-minded executives in the financial industry, including Warren E. Buffett and the chief executive of BlackRock, Laurence D. Fink, who have long bemoaned the fixation on quarterly financial results at the expense of long-term investment and growth.
Consumer Anxiety in China Undermines Government’s Economic Plans
Through censorship orders, Communist Party officials have been trying to blunt the dire news at home. Not only have the main party newspapers refrained from publishing relevant articles on their front pages, but security officials have shown a willingness to go after Chinese reporters whose stories deviate from the official narrative.
.. He noted that WeChat was particularly popular because it was less “polluted” by posts from government-supported Internet users and because people could easily share news articles on the economy from Western news publications, especially stories already translated into Chinese.
.. “Highly paid professional jobs have been scarce for several years now,” he said, “and many young graduates have depended on their parents’ connections to obtain entry positions in the government or state-owned enterprises. The current downturn will hit graduates without strong connections or specialized skills.”
Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall St.
Instead, many of the top minds in finance have come to believe that the software that brought the virtual currency into existence also enables a fundamentally new way of transacting and maintaining records online — allowing people and banks to directly exchange money and assets like stocks and bonds without having to rely on a long chain of expensive middlemen.
.. executives from more than a dozen large banks gathered to confidentially discuss how the technology underlying Bitcoin could be used to change foreign currency trading, the largest financial market in the world, according to people who attended the meeting.
Central banks like the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have their own teams looking at the technology.
.. The Nasdaq software will allow the trading of stocks in private companies, like tech start-ups, on a new kind of blockchain. This will replace the existing system in which private companies issue and trade shares using paper certificates — a process that means that even basic trades can take weeks to complete.
.. at two Barclays offices in London dedicated to the technology — are looking at ways to use the blockchain to speed up and lower the cost of consumer payments, to compete with credit cards and direct money transfers.
But bankers generally say that most of the work is aimed at changing the systems that big Wall Street traders and investors use to buy and sell sophisticated assets like syndicated loans and corporate bonds.
The Man Who Got China Right
Chanos was the first person to figure out, some 15 years ago, that Enron was a house of cards.
.. “I’ll never forget the day in 2009 when my real estate guy was giving me a presentation and he said that China had 5.6 billion square meters of real estate under development, half residential and half commercial,” Chanos told me the other day.
“I said, ‘You must mean 5.6 billion square feet.’ ”
The man replied that he hadn’t misspoken; it really was 5.6 billion square meters, which amounted to over 60 billion square feet.
For Chanos, that is when the light bulb went on. The fast-growing Chinese economy was being sustained not just by its export prowess, but by a property bubble propelled by mountains of debt, and encouraged by the government as part of an infrastructure spending strategy designed to keep the economy humming.