What Can We Learn by Disaggregating the Unemployment-Vacancy Relationship?

The Beveridge curve—the empirical relationship between unemployment and job vacancies—is thought to be an indicator of the efficiency of the functioning of the labor market. Normally, when job vacancies rise, unemployment falls, following a curved path that typically remains stable over long periods of time. When vacancies rise and unemployment does not fall (or falls too slowly) this may be an indication of problems of structural mismatch in the labor market leading to an increase in the lowest unemployment rate that can be maintained without increasing inflation (the NAIRU or nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment). Such a change in the vacancy-unemployment relationship occurred once in the 1970s and persisted through the late 1980s, and we have recently observed a similar change.

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Once ideas para gestionar el Patrimonio

¿Qué se debe hacer con el patrimonio? Este artículo ofrece algunas ideas que pueden contribuir a la supervivencia de la riqueza de una familia. El principio fundamental: sentido común. En ocasiones, ante las grandes expectativas, fórmulas magistrales e intuiciones de expertos, sólo el olfato del inversor con sentido común –que es el que tiene más que perder- es capaz de acertar.

Pablo Fernandez

Manual de Gestión de la Tesorería

Una correcta gestión de la tesorería se traduce en un aval en la gestión de una empresa. En una situación donde al margen de la crisis de la liquidez, el conseguir recursos se torna cada vez más complejo, hace que las empresas tengan que apostar por una correcta gestión de la tesorería.
 

Toda empresa necesita liquidez para poder hacer frente a las transacciones diarias y poder atender a nuevas oportunidades de negocio o inversión. En ocasiones los recursos de la empresa no son suficientes y es necesario una aproximación a las entidades financieras buscando una liquidez suplementaria. Para ello es necesario que esta entidad financiera estime que la empresa puede generar liquidez futura para poder devolver estos recursos y los intereses que generen.
 

Por tanto la gestión de la tesorería y generación de beneficios no pueden disociarse, lo mismo que tampoco pueden hacerlo gestión de tesorería y captación de recursos ante los intermediarios financieros.

En este documento tratará de aproximarse a las actividades que debe realizar el tesorero de la empresa:

1. La previsión de los flujos monetarios a corto plazo.
2. La puesta en evidencia de los desequilibrios posibles y probables entre las salidas y entradas de fondos en ese plazo (ciclo de maduración). 
3. La selección de los medios que permiten lograr el equilibrio de la tesorería y la búsqueda de la liquidez ociosa cero a un coste mínimo.

Economic Growth: Great for Everyone but Investors?

¿Es viable la gestión privada de la cultura?

¿Es viable la gestión privada de la cultura? Encontrar respuesta a esta interrogante requiere comenzar por perder el miedo a hablar de cultura desde un ámbito empresarial. Este escrito pretende demostrar que la gestión privada en cultura es tan necesaria e indispensable como eficaz para poder competir con posibilidades de éxito en un mercado cada vez más globalizado donde existen grandes corporaciones empresariales que poseen capacidad financiera, productiva y de influencia mediática para imponer sus productos a escala mundial. Esta situación requiere ser afrontada con las mismas armas ya que, a largo plazo, confiar en políticas públicas de fomento o de intervención del mercado no suele ser muy efectivo.

Ramón Castells Ros

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Emprender en momentos de crisis. Riesgos y factores de éxito.

Afi ha elaborado para la Fundación MAPFRE el estudio “Emprender en momentos de crisis: Riesgos y factores de éxito”, que tiene por objeto analizar los riesgos a los que se enfrenta el emprendedor español desde el inicio de su proyecto, así como estudiar los factores que contribuyen al éxito o fracaso de una iniciativa empresarial.

El informe fue presentado el pasado 11 de octubre por Emilio Ontiveros, Presidente de AFI, junto con Jesús Martínez Castellanos, Consejero Delegado de MAPFRE Seguros de Empresas, que disertó sobre "El papel del seguro en el emprendimiento empresarial" y Ginés Clemente, Consejero Delegado del Grupo aeronáutico Aciturri, quien expuso su experiencia personal como emprendedor.

La amplia repercusión del informe en la prensa especializada lo ha situado como un referente en el análisis reciente de la situación de la actividad emprendedora en España, destacando sus principales condicionantes y oportunidades estratégicas.

Neo-classical economics: A trail of economic destruction since the 1970s

This paper argues that the international financial crisis is just the last in a series of economic calamities produced by a type of theory that converted the economics profession from a study of real world phenomena into what in the end became mathematized ideology. While the crises themselves started by halving real wages in many countries in the economic periphery, in Latin America in the late 1970s, their origins are found in economic theory in the 1950s when empirical reality became academically unfashionable. About half way in the destructive path of this theoretical tsunami – from its origins in the world periphery in the 1970s until today’s financial meltdowns – we find the destruction of the productive capacity of the Second World, the former Soviet Union. Now the chickens are coming home to roost: wealth and welfare destruction is increasingly hitting the First World itself: Europe and the United States. This paper argues that it is necessary to see these developments as one continuous process over more than three decades of applying neoclassical economics and neo-liberal economic policies that destroyed, rather than created, real wages and wealth. A reconstruction of widespread welfare will need to be based on the understanding that what unleashed the juggernaut of welfare destruction was not ‘market failure’; it was ‘theory failure’. Being a résumé of a larger research project, the paper includes references to more detailed studies of these processes of ‘destructive destruction.

Towards stock-flow consistent debt centered monetary statistics

Sources: Eurostat, ECB, De Nederlandsche Bank, Centraal Bureau vor de statistiek

Crisis, desigualdad y pobreza: Aprendizajes desde el mundo en desarrollo ante los recortes sociales en España

Con las medidas de austeridad y la especulación sobre la deuda, España –como otros países sacudidos por la codicia de los mercados financieroscae en una espiral de más crisis, más pobreza y más desigualdad muy peligrosa, similar a la que vivieron América Latina y el Este Asiático en las últimas décadas del siglo XX a consecuencia del ajuste estructural.

Ver informe de Intermón Oxfam

The Coface economic publications: Country risk overview

In Southern Europe, the recession is deepening, particularly in Spain, Italy and Cyprus. Coface is forecasting a recession rate of 2%, 1.8% and 1.3% in these countries respectively in 2012. Another source of concern is the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, which is now affecting growth in emerging countries, where Coface has noted a slowdown in activity.

In this more difficult context for companies, Coface has lowered its country risk assessment for Cyprus, Spain, Guatemala, India, Italy and the Czech Republic. However, it has upgraded its assessment for the Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Nicaragua and Slovakia. This Risk Overview outlines the reasons why Coface has made these adjustments. It gathers the updated risk assessments on these 10 countries, and on 25 other countries too, whose situation has changed without requiring a modification of their risk assessments.

Coface has included two articles in the introduction. The first provides an update of the situation in Spain, a country where companies – all sectors and not just construction – are suffering from excessive debt and difficulties in the banking sector. The article outlines the methods to stem the dangerous deflationary spiral trapping the country. A second article gives an update on Chinese companies and their vulnerability to the choice of economic policy. The authorities have two objectives: support activity with a targeted budget policy and stay on course for a rebalancing of growth towards consumption.

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The iceberg concept of culture

"The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics" by Burton G. Malkiel

Ageneration ago, the efficient market hypothesis was widely accepted by academic financial economists; for example, see Eugene Fama’s (1970) influential survey article, “Efficient Capital Markets.” It was generally believed that securities markets were extremely efficient in reflecting information about individual stocks and about the stock market as a whole. The accepted view was that when information arises, the news spreads very quickly and is incorporated into the prices of securities without delay. Thus, neither technical analysis, which is the study of past stock prices in an attempt to predict future prices, nor even fundamental analysis, which is the analysis of financial information such as company earnings and asset values to help investors select “undervalued” stocks, would enable an investor to achieve returns greater than those that could be obtained by holding a randomly selected portfolio of individual stocks, at least not with comparable risk.

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Benjamin Graham and Risk

In “Benjamin Graham and Risk”, Brandes Institute Advisory Board member Bruce Grantier examines the similarities and differences between the modern portfolio theory concept of risk and the writings of Benjamin Graham and other prominent value investors.

Spain: Financial Sector Reform. First Progress Report

This report has been prepared by IMF staff at the request of Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Bank of Spain, and the European Commission. The report aims to provide independent advice on Spain’s efforts to recapitalize and restructure its financial sector with support from the European Stability Mechanism. Spain and its European partners specified their commitments to support these efforts in their Memorandum of Understanding on Financial Sector Policy Conditionality (MoU) of July 20, 2012. IMF staff is not a party to the MoU, nor responsible for the conditionality or implementation thereof.

Diez años para digerir el stock de pisos

El paro y el desplome de la creación de hogares obstaculizarán la venta de las viviendas de Sareb. El cambio sociológico en España impulsará un mercado potente de alquiler en el futuro.

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La resolución de activos bancarios a través de "Bancos Malos"

Los llamados «bancos malos» constituyen un elemento bastante común en los procesos de saneamiento, reestructuración y recapitalización de entidades financieras en dificultades. Este artículo repasa el papel de estas instituciones y, en particular, los argumentos económicos que justifican su creación y algunos condicionantes y elementos esenciales de su diseño. Asimismo, sin ánimo de exhaustividad, se revisan algunos casos relevantes de bancos malos con especial atención a los desarrollados durante la crisis actual.

Conferencia de Alvaro Guzmán de Bestinver en el Instituto Juan de Mariana

The role of financial panics in early and not so early.

Financial panics appear as the reactions to a fear of capital losses that cause a dumping of assets by investors and the collapse of a financial institution or market. Where social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1995 [1895]) in his theory of crowd psychology argued that a distinct and distinctly irrational collective mind forms through the contagious transformation of the individual into a member of the “herd,” Floyd Allport (1924) suggests that the crowd mind is simply the aggregated feelings of individuals reacting to the same external stimulant. More recently, theories of collective behavior explore the sociality of human cognition. This paper examines the semantic and theoretical roles for “panic” in select treatments of financial crises and the extent to which any underlying collective behavior may be contagious, convergent, or emerging from the social interactions that shape a crowd mind.

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