Luca Ventura

In potentially the biggest foreign corporate takeover ever by a German company, Bayer seeks to buy Monsanto for 62 billion. Werner Bauman gets into agribusiness.

The year 2016 is set to break a record for withdrawn global M&A deals, with regulators scotching several high-profile mergers. 

LOCATION TRENDS | Technology allows all sorts of work to be done anywhere. Many companies are taking advantage of this power to "nearshore" European operations from pricey major capitals to lower-cost locales.  

Indonesia | Can the much-admired former Finance Minister of Indonesia, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, bring back the magic in her second tour in the post? 

Europe | Foreign direct investment (FDI) into Europe hit a record high in 2015 with 5,083 new cross-border projects, an increase of 14% from 2014, creating approximately 218,000 new jobs

China
When Alibaba announced in May that it was hiring former Goldman Sachs managing director Douglas Feagin to run the international unit of its finance arm, Ant Financial, many observers had a sense of déjà vu.
 

Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong as Asia’s top financial center and now ranks third globally behind London and New York. This is the key takeaway from the latest Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), a ranking by British commercial think-tank Z/Yen Group.

Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ is learning to speak Arabic.

He’s a kickboxer and a football fanatic, an accomplished pianist and possibly the next president of France—and only 38.

Capital Markets | Banking Reform
More than one hundred million people, 2.5 billion transactions every month—and just 1% of payments made electronically.

Trends | Peru
There is no stopping Peru’s economy.
 

Trends | Movies
China’s richest man goes to Hollywood and buys it.

Management | Shareholder Activism
Activist investors are knocking more loudly at banks’ doors. According to Thomson Reuters data, in 2015, activists launched 97 campaigns aimed at the US financial sector, 22 of them targeting banks.

Capital Markets | Foreign Exchange
Locals as well as visitors to Zimbabwe will soon be able to walk into shops and pay for purchases in renminbi.

A new era kicked off on December 31, 2015, for the 10 countries that are part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: The alliance launched the Asean Economic Community (AEC), a trade bloc aimed at creating a unified, cross-border market where labor, services and capital can flow without restrictions.

Burkina Faso
There’s been big change in the small country of Burkina Faso. On November 29, the West African nation of 17 million held its first free elections in almost three decades.

History was made in Myanmar, the country formerly called Burma, on November 8, when the National League for Democracy (NLD), headed by Noble Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a near-total sweep in the first democratic election in 25 years. 

Big oil companies waited for years to see if anyone could successfully tap into Arctic oil reserves.

“An economic windfall.” That’s how the World Bank’s chief economist for the Middle East and North Africa, Shantayanan Devarajan, characterized the boost to the Iranian economy from the lifting of sanctions in the wake of the nuclear deal struck with the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Tariffs on hundreds of information technology (IT) goods—201, to be precise—will be slashed starting next year as a result of a sweeping agreement in July by member nations of the World Trade Organization.

Milestones | Iceland
Nearly seven years after introducing controls on capital movements, Iceland is planning to ease restrictions it put in place when the collapse of its banking system brought the country to the brink of financial meltdown.

Morocco | In recent years, Morocco has successfully attracted a growing flow of foreign capital, becoming the top foreign direct investment recipient in the Maghreb region (Northwest Africa), and one of the largest in the African continent.

Milestones | Norway
With prices less than half the level of a year ago, Norway has been hit hard by the slump in crude revenues.

US & China | Milestones
“This is a major milestone in the US-China relationship, and it shows what’s possible when we work together on an urgent global challenge.”

Milestones | Myanmar
After five decades of economic isolation, on October 1, Myanmar took its first big step into the global financial system, granting nine foreign lenders preliminary approval to operate in the country.

SOUTH KOREA
Appointed as part of Park’s cabinet reshuffle——Choi had been on the job only a few days when he unleashed a $40 billion stimulus plan to revitalize the country’s faltering economy, a package equivalent to almost 3% of GDP. 

MALAWI
A struggling economy and widespread corruption are but a few of the challenges new Malawian president Peter Mutharika will face during his five-year mandate.

MILESTONES: EUROPE
The ECB grows up as it takes on bank supervisory powers.
 

When, on March 18, longtime Canadian Finance minister Jim Flaherty unexpectedly announced his resignation, few were perhaps more surprised than his soon-to-be successor, Joe Oliver, the 73-year-old minister of Natural Resources.

MILESTONES   By Luca Ventura   The oldest multinational in the world is about to get a substantial makeover. The news came on February 24th, when its CEO, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, also known as pope Francis, issued a Motu Proprio, ...

MILESTONES By Luca Ventura When in early January the US secretary of state John Kerry traveled to the Middle East, newspaper headlines mostly focused on his attempt to push yet another peace deal between Israel and Palestine. His efforts, however, ...

MILESTONES   By Luca Ventura   The announcement came early in November. Expressing the intention to break the monopoly of the Big Three in the financial ratings industry, credit ratings organizations from five countries proclaimed the launch of ARC Ratings, ...

When Apple announced back in October that it had hired Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to lead its retail operations, the initial shock among analysts and investors wore off quickly. Though it was a surprise move, it made perfect sense.

MILESTONES By Luca Ventura With a fifth of the world’s population but only 9% of its land, China in recent years has aggressively upped its agricultural investments abroad, amassing over 2 million hectares of emerging markets farmland in Africa, Southeast ...

NEWSMAKERS   By Luca Ventura   Lazar Krstić has a daunting task ahead: saving Serbia from a debt crisis. A Yale graduate with no party affiliations or political experience, the 30-year-old McKinsey associate is expected to consolidate public finances and ...

MILESTONES   By Luca Ventura   “Implementation has been unsatisfactory in almost all areas; growth and debt sustainability assumptions continue to be over-optimistic.” It is with these incendiary comments about Greece that Paulo Nogueira Batista, the representative of Brazil and ...

NEWSMAKERS: US   By Luca Ventura   When AG Lafley handpicked Robert McDonald as his successor to the top post at Procter & Gamble in 2009, he could not have predicted that just four years later he would be called ...

NEWSMAKERS: SPAIN By Luca Ventura Appointed as chief executive of Santander in 2002, Alfredo Sáenz took less than a decade to turn the Spanish domestic lender into a multinational giant with operations in 40 countries. New CEO Marín kept a ...

NEWSMAKERS: CHINA   By Luca Ventura   As China’s economy faces its slowest growth in more than a decade, the focus turns to the new Finance minister, Lou Jiwei. Lou, 63, has arguably the highest international profile among prime minister ...

MILESTONE: ITALY   By Luca Ventura The oldest bank in the world, Tuscany’s Monte dei Paschi di Siena, came close to ending its 540-year history late in January, when it revealed losses of up to €750 million ($1 billion) caused ...

MILESTONES：GLOBAL   By Luca Ventura   “For the first time in regulatory history, we have a truly global minimum standard for bank liquidity,” announced the head of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Bank of England governor Mervyn King, during a ...

MILESTONES: IMF   By Luca Ventura “Temporary capital controls might prove useful,” Christine Lagarde said to the audience gathered at the Malaysian Economic Association in Kuala Lumpur in November.   Lagarde at the IMF takes a marked departure on cross-border ...

NEWSMAKERS: INDIA   By Luca Ventura   Often labeled arrogant and brusque, India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, is not the most popular politician within his own Congress Party and not much in the public eye.   Chidambaram's new ministerial appointment ...

NEWSMAKERS: UNITED STATES   By Luca Ventura   Sheila Bair is determined to turn up the heat on regulators and accelerate financial reforms.   Bair: protecting the US economy from the next crisis Photo Credit : ALBERT H. TEICH/ Shutterstock.com ...

NEWSMAKERS: FRANCE   By Luca Ventura   French president-elect François Hollande is a flag-bearer for adding growth incentives to a European fiscal agreement, rather than just doling out austerity measures.   Hollande elated at defeating Sarkozy Photo Credit : SKPHOTOGRAPHY / Shutterstock.com ...

NEWSMAKERS: ITALY   By Luca Ventura   When Tuscan bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena appointed the charismatic Alessandro Profumo as its new chairman in late April, the news made headlines around the world.   Profumo is ready for the challenge ...

NEWSMAKERS: CANADA   By Luca Ventura   On March 29, telecoms company Research In Motion posted its first loss in seven years.   Tough road ahead for RIM chief Thorsten Heins Photo Credit : REUTERS/EDUARDO MUNOZ It was not what shareholders had ...

NEWSMAKERS: NORWAY   By Luca Ventura   A former bank teller, Norway’s finance minister Sigbjørn Johnsen is not too concerned about upsetting some of his erstwhile bank employers.     Johnsen takes on Norway’s banks again Photo Credit : REUTERS/SCANPIX “It ...

NEWSMAKERS: ICELAND   By Luca Ventura   As his trial commenced in March in Reykjavik, Geir Haarde, the former prime minister of Iceland, was the first world leader to face criminal charges over the 2008 financial crisis. Haarde, 60, could serve up ...

NEWSMAKERS: GLOBAL   By Luca Ventura   When Robert Zoellick announced in February that he would leave the World Bank in June, at the expiration of his five-year term as president, initial speculation over his possible successor revolved around the usual ...