Tag Archives: Investing

Online sales juggernaut Amazon has a toe in the Internet finance business, processing payments and offering loans to the site’s merchants. What about its Chinese counterpart, Alibaba? It does those things, too. It also facilitates peer-to-peer lending, sells mutual funds and insurance policies, and has formed a private bank to lend to consumers. Who’s leading the Internet revolution now?   From a modest start in processing online payments, Alibaba, online media and entertainment firm...

Need a loan? You can always go to a bank. Or you can try to borrow from your peers. Increasingly popular “peer-to-peer lending portals” allow borrowers and lenders to connect directly through online marketplaces, threatening to disintermediate traditional financial institutions in the process. But how do peer-to-peer sites assess the risk involved in the loans they make? What role will regulation play in their future? Will institutional investors get on board? Industry experts discussed these...

With profitability at U.S. corporations touching historic highs, and corporate cash piles as large as they’ve ever been, one of the top tasks of executives these days is simply deciding how best to spend the money. Companies in the S&P 500 had an aggregate cash balance of $1.43 trillion in the second quarter of 2015, which tied a record set in the fourth quarter of 2014.   So what should companies be doing with all that money? In a recent white paper, Credit Suisse Corporate...

The third quarter wasn’t kind to U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 fell 6.4 percent, with stocks battered by everything from fears over China’s growth slowdown and financial market collapse to uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In June, the consensus view on third-quarter earnings was a 1 percent decline. Heading into earnings season, that figure has been revised downward to a 5 percent decrease. With the fourth quarter underway, none of the issues that...

A selloff as violent as the one global equities markets experienced this past Monday can have effects that mirror a real-life earthquake. Once the earth stops moving, shell-shocked investors have to figure out what caused all the shaking and whether aftershocks are coming. They also have to determine whether anything valuable is hiding in the debris.   To the first point, it’s quite clear that trouble in China was the catalyst for the rout. It all started on Friday, August 21, when...