Equity Trust International

03/02/2016

13/08/2015

London, as we have all heard, has been taken over by foreign oligarchs who hardly ever visit their dwellings, pricing out regular hard-working intellectuals and dulling the city's vibrancy.

But if that's the case, Janan Ganesh writes in the Financial Times, why is it that London's population -- after decades of decline back when the city was so "captivatingly earthy" -- has just passed its all-time peak of 8.6 million?

Why indeed? The same goes for New York, also known for glassy new luxury condominium towers that stand empty most of the time while the owners earn their money in Moscow or Shenzhen and spend it in the Swiss Alps or on the French Riviera. After declining through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the city's population is at an all-time high that's almost identical to London's: 8.5 million. On the island at the city's core, Manhattan, the population of 1.6 million may still be a long ways from the peak of 2.3 million set in 1910 -- families of 10 in one-bedroom tenement apartments are a bit less common these days -- but it too has been growing during the past decade.

Then there's San Francisco, where tech billionaires get more blame than foreigners for sending real estate prices skyrocketing. Despite those crazy prices and a generally development-unfriendly political environment, the city's population hit an all-time high of 852,469 in 2014.

The story is similar in the other U.S.cities that number among the top five investment targets for members of the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate.

12/08/2015

The parent bank of New Zealand's ASB, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has posted the biggest annual profit in Australian banking history.
CBA's cash profit rose 5 per cent to A$9.14 billion (NZ$10.2 billion) in the 12 months to June 30.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that it was Australia's largest-ever bank profit.
CBA also announced that it would carry out a A$5 billion rights issue aimed at boosting capital in order to meet regulatory requirements.
But despite the bumper profit figure, Australian analysts have expressed concern about a slowdown in the second-half of CBA's financial year.
Meanwhile, ASB reported a 7 per cent rise in annual net profit to a record $859 million.
Cash profit, which excludes volatile or one-off items, rose 9 per cent to $846 million in the year to June 30.

11/08/2015

The New Zealand dollar dropped sharply after China's central bank devalued the yuan following recent poor economic data, which will help exporters in Asia's largest economy.

The kiwi dropped as low as 65.50 US cents, from 66.27 cents at 1pm, and was recently trading at 65.60 cents.

The kiwi rose against the yuan following the statement. It was recently trading at 4.1341 yuan from 4.1150 yuan at 1pm.

The yuan fell to its lowest point in almost three years after the People's Bank of China said it had changed the way it calculated the currency's daily midpoint against the US dollar.

06/08/2015

The New Zealand dollar gained against the pound after minutes of the last Bank of England meeting showed its board is more dovish than expected and sees a tamer track for inflation.

The kiwi rose to 42.22 British pence as at 8am in Wellington, from 41.84 late yesterday ahead of the Bank of England's policy review on Thursday in London. It rose to 65.52 US cents from 65.38 cents.

03/08/2015

It's time to call Beijing's stock-market intervention what it really is: quantitative easing, Chinese style.

With deflation pressures mounting, China's central bank would seem to have plenty of incentive to follow counterparts in Japan, the United States and Europe down to zero rates and beyond.

Governor Zhou Xiaochuan has held off because of two overriding fears. First, an unknown number of companies might default on dollar debts if a full-fledged QE programme depressed the value of the yuan. Second, that kind of stealth devaluation might scuttle Beijing's hopes of adding the renminbi to the ranks of the world's reserve currencies.

Instead of intervening in debt markets as the Fed, Bank of Japan and ECB have, China has thus targeted stocks directly. The goal - to commandeer assets as a transmission mechanism to gin up growth and confidence - is the same. Indeed, in some ways the Chinese strategy is even more direct about its aims.

31/07/2015

Picture this. The call has come in that one of your staff has been seriously injured. While you have done everything possible to avoid anyone being hurt at work, an accident has still happened. You're devastated.

While your immediate focus would be on the wellbeing of your staff member, you now find legal papers are being served on you, as a director of the company, suggesting you failed to protect your employee from harm.

Confidence that you have insurance to defend the claim quickly vanishes when you realise the policy could be held invalid.

Why? Because you don't have a company constitution. In New Zealand, without this, a company is prohibited from indemnifying you or taking out insurance to protect you.

28/07/2015

NZX prepares for dip after China rout:

Fund managers expect the New Zealand share market to open lower this morning but for the reaction to yesterday's rout on Chinese stock markets to be muted.

World share markets weakened overnight in response to an 8.5 per cent decline on the Shanghai composite index - its sharpest one-day fall since 2007.

In the United States, worries about China helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial index down by 128 points, or 0.7 per cent to 17,440 - its fifth drop in a row.

27/07/2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2dOlVHLibE

Corporations and individuals are suspected of hiding $21 trillion in taxable income. How do they do it? We'll tell you. Subscribe for more videos: http://www...

24/07/2015

Crime expert on $1m airport cash loss: Laundering stolen money easy in Hong Kong.

The cash was being transported to the Bank of China in bags labelled G4S International Logistics in a luggage box through a cargo transfer service provided by a Cathay subsidiary, Hong Kong Airport Services.

The easiest way would be to launder the money, as it would be unsafe to change it through a bank, he said.

"They won't be able to change it legally. No one will be able to go into a Hong Kong bank... the bank, highly likely, would notify the authorities, you would be taking a risk. Unless you had some corrupt official inside the bank. Then that could happen.

"There are high levels of corruption in Hong Kong so it depends on whether you are dealing with a corrupt official or a dedicated official. I think if you've got $1 million anyone can be corrupt if you pay them."

The best bet for a person with a large amount of cash would be to launder it through purchasing drugs, or even real estate, Mr Newbold said.

10/07/2015

A Chinese woman Zhou Tsyunfey became a self-made billionaire : at the age of 15 years she began working on the assembly line of the provincial glass factory, and now she is 45, she runs the company, without which the production of Apple and Samsung can not exist. She has a fortune of $ 7.7 billion - greater than the income of Sir Richard Branson, or the founder of Uber - Travis Kalanika, about whom people speak much more.

08/07/2015

Extreme volatility is continuing to plague China's sharemarkets, with the Shanghai Composite Index plunging 8.2 per cent in the first three minutes of trading today in the biggest sell-off since 2007.

The Shenzhen Composite fell 8.2 per cent, while the CSI 300, an index of small companies across the two exchanges, fell 8 per cent.