The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, is willing to accept more risk and greater volatility in returns as it steps up its push into the poorest countries, IFC chief executive Lars Thunell has told the Financial Times.
In an interview, Mr Thunell said “the risks are higher, volatility is higher and the cost of doing business is higher†in the poorest countries compared with middle income countries where the IFC has traditionally done most of its business.
But he added: â€ÅIf you do it right and take some equity, because nobody else is there it can also be rewarding.â€Â
Last year equity investments made up more than a fifth of the IFC⬙s total financing commitments.
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We are facing the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. More than a million Americans are at risk of losing their homes. Families watch their life savings disappear as housing values plummet in neighborhoods with boarded-up houses headed to auction. Housing starts are down 30 percent since former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said the crisis was largely behind us last fall. Investors are pulling money out of banks — and out of America — fearful of the coming credit crunch. This is a tsunami headed our way.
Denial is rife in Washington and Wall Street. In the debate of Republican candidates for president this past weekend, not one question was directed at the crisis. The president has offered no plan for helping those in trouble. When the House passed a modest bill, creating a $900 million fund to help homeowners refinance each year, the president threatened to veto it. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson worked to create a private fund to help bolster the banks and hedge funds facing billions in losses in mortgage-backed securities, but has offered nothing for homeowners. The banks have started to set aside reserves for losses, but even they have little clue about just how much their securities are worth. Read more
My husband and I don’t yet have children, don’t know if we want any, but I am sure of one thing: college funds for these hypothetical offspring need to be opened immediately.
The College Board said this week that the yearly cost of in-state tuition for a four-year public college jumped 6.6% from the 2006-2007 school year hitting $6,185. This follows a 5.7% increase last year from the 2005-2006 period. Private universities saw the annual tally for tuition and fees rise 5.5% to $16,640. The most affordable education can still be found at public two-year institutions, where costs rose just 4.2% from last year to $2,351 per year.
And that’s just tuition and various fees. For students who live on campus (40% at public schools 64% at private), the cost of room and board jumped 5.9% at public schools to $13,589. To live, eat, and learn on a private-school campus, it will cost $32,307 per year, also a 5.9% increase from last year.Worse news for those counting on a higher education is that financial aid isn’t keeping pace with rising costs. Last year, undergraduates received more than $97 billion in state, Read more
The Big Picture
Mobile-phone manufacturers face pressure to shrink the size of cellphones while building larger screens that can display video. Light Blue Optics Ltd., a start-up in Cambridge, England, may have an answer with technology that could one day project clear and vivid images from a mobile device onto a wall or table.
Light Blue Optics is developing miniature laser-projection systems that project full-color, high-quality video images onto flat or curved surfaces. The technology could be attractive for mobile-phone makers if Light Blue can figure out a way to further reduce the size of its projection systems, which currently are about the size of a deck of cards.
Investment firms Earlybird Venture Capital and Capital-E led a $26 million Series A round of funding for Light Blue this month, to help it finish development and market its technology to the consumer-electronics, advertising and automotive industries. Light Blue signed a deal earlier this Read more
Search for ‘laptop’ in the Google window, and one of the ads says, â¢â€¬ËœInstant ICICI Bank Loan for Dell Laptops with Flexible EMI Options’. Click it and you’d land in http://campaigns.communicate2-personalloans.com. Similarly, typing â¢â€¬ËœReliance Money’ brings up a ‘sponsored link’ that leads to http://campaigns.communicate2-sharetrading.com, for ‘Fast & Easy access to the World of Investments’.
Enter the world of â€ËÅcontextual advertising’, where advertising is relevant to what the user is looking for. “Contextual advertising does not interrupt the user, but takes his permission before giving an advertisement that helps in his decision making, be it about buying a product or taking a loan, at that moment of time,†explains Mr Vivek Bhargava, CEO, Communicate2.
Such advertising can also be based on the identification of the user, based on the gender, socio-economic status, frame of mind, nationality or anything that allows advertising to become more relevant to the user, he adds, during the course of an e-mail interaction with Business Line.
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