- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
An agreement among two or more firms in the same industry to co-operate in fixing prices and/or carving up the market and restricting the amount of output they produce. It is particularly common when there is an oligopoly. The aim of such collusion is to increase profit by reducing competition. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy overseen by antitrust watchdogs in most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put agreements to collude on paper. The desire to form cartels is strong. As Adam Smith put it, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. ”
Industry:Economy
The winner, at least for now, of the battle of economic “isms”. Capitalism is a free-market system built on private ownership, in particular, the idea that owners of capital have property rights that entitle them to earn a profit as a reward for putting their capital at risk in some form of economic activity. Opinion (and practice) differs considerably among capitalist countries about what role the state should play in the economy. But everyone agrees that, at the very least, for capitalism to work the state must be strong enough to guarantee property rights. According to Karl Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but so far this has proved a more accurate description of Marx’s progeny, communism.
Industry:Economy
The composition of a company’s mixture of debt and equity financing. A firm’s debt-equity ratio is often referred to as its gearing. Taking on more debt is known as gearing up, or increasing lever age. In the 1960s, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller (1923–2000) published a series of articles arguing that it did not matter whether a company financed its activities by issuing debt, or equity, or a mixture of the two. (For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. ) But, they said, this rule does not apply if one source of financing is treated more favorably by the taxman than another. In the United States, debt has long had tax advantages over equity, so their theory implies that American firms should finance themselves with debt. Companies also finance themselves by using the profit they retain after paying dividends.
Industry:Economy
Markets in securities such as bonds and shares. Governments and companies use them to raise longer-term capital from investors, although few of the millions of capital-market transactions every day involve the issuer of the security. Most trades are in the secondary markets, between investors who have bought the securities and other investors who want to buy them. Contrast with money markets, where short-term capital is raised.
Industry:Economy
A production process that involves comparatively large amounts of capital; the opposite of labor intensive.
Industry:Economy
The profit from the sale of a capital asset, such as a share or a property. Capital gains are subject to taxation in most countries. Some economists argue that capital gains should be taxed lightly (if at all) compared with other sources of income. They argue that the less tax is levied on capital gains, the greater is the incentive to put capital to productive use. Put another way, capital gains tax is effectively a tax on capitalism. However, if capital gains are given too friendly a treatment by the tax authorities, accountants will no doubt invent all sorts of creative ways to disguise other income as capital gains.
Industry:Economy
When capital flows rapidly out of a country, usually because something happens which causes investors suddenly to lose confidence in its economy. (Strictly speaking, the problem is not so much the money leaving, but rather that investors in general suddenly lower their valuation of all the assets of the country. ) This is particularly worrying when the flight capital belongs to the country’s own citizens. This is often associated with a sharp fall in the exchange rate of the abandoned country’s currency.
Industry:Economy
Government-imposed restrictions on the ability of capital to move in or out of a country. Examples include limits on foreign investment in a country’s financial markets, on direct investment by foreigners in businesses or property, and on domestic residents’ investments abroad. Until the 20th century capital controls were uncommon, but many countries then imposed them. Following the end of the Second World War only Switzerland, Canada and the United States adopted open capital regimes. Other rich countries maintained strict controls and many made them tougher during the 1960s and 1970s. This changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, when most developed countries scrapped their capital controls. The pattern was more mixed in developing countries. Latin American countries imposed lots of them during the debt crisis of the 1980s then scrapped most of them from the late 1980s onwards. Asian countries began to loosen their widespread capital controls in the 1980s and did so more rapidly during the 1990s. In developed countries, there were two main reasons why capital controls were lifted: free markets became more fashionable and financiers became adept at finding ways around the controls. Developing countries later discovered that foreign capital could play a part in financing domestic investment, from roads in Thailand to telecoms systems in Mexico, and, furthermore, that financial capital often brought with it valuable human capital. They also found that capital controls did not work and had unwanted side-effects. Latin America’s controls in the 1980s failed to keep much money at home and also deterred foreign investment. The Asian economic crisis and capital flight of the late 1990s revived interest in capital controls, as some Asian governments wondered whether lifting the controls had left them vulnerable to the whims of international speculators, whose money could flow out of a country as fast as it once flowed in. There was also discussion of a “Tobin tax” on short-term capital movements, proposed by James Tobin, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. Even so, they mostly considered only limited controls on short-term capital movements, particularly movements out of a country, and did not reverse the broader 20-year-old process of global financial and economic liberalization.
Industry:Economy
A method of valuing assets and calculating the cost of capital (for an alternative, see arbitrage pricing theory). The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) has come to dominate modern finance. The rationale of the CAPM can be simplified as follows. Investors can eliminate some sorts of risk, known as residual risk or alpha, by holding a diversified portfolio of assets (see modern portfolio theory). These alpha risks are specific to an individual asset, for example, the risk that a company’s managers will turn out to be no good. Some risks, such as that of a global recession, cannot be eliminated through diversification. So even a basket of all of the shares in a stock market will still be risky. People must be rewarded for investing in such a risky basket by earning returns on average above those that they can get on safer assets, such as treasury bills. Assuming investors diversify away alpha risks, how an investor values any particular asset should depend crucially on how much the asset’s price is affected by the risk of the market as a whole. The market’s risk contribution is captured by a measure of relative volatility, beta, which ¬indicates how much an asset’s price is expected to change when the overall market changes. Safe investments have a beta close to zero: economists call these assets risk free. Riskier investments, such as a share, should earn a premium over the risk-free rate. How much is calculated by the average premium for all assets of that type, multiplied by the particular asset’s beta. But does the CAPM work? It all comes down to beta, which some economists have found of dubious use. They think the CAPM may be an elegant theory that is no good in practice. Yet it is probably the best and certainly the most widely used method for calculating the cost of capital.
Industry:Economy
The ratio of a bank’s capital to its total assets, required by regulators to be above a minimum (“adequate”) level so that there is little risk of the bank going bust. How high this minimum level is may vary according to how risky a bank’s activities are.
Industry:Economy
