Mark Zuckerberg attended hearings in Congress to defend Facebook, after the revelation that information on 87m users had been obtained by a political-analytics firm linked to the Trump campaign. Mr Zuckerberg said he could accept regulation of the social network, provided it was under the “right framework”, which he suggested might be something akin to impending data-protection rules in Europe. Mr Zuckerberg’s assured performance helped lift Facebook’s share price by 5.7% over his two days on the Hill. See article.
Get ready Russia!
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America’s latest round of sanctions against Russia hit hard, causing Russian stockmarkets to dive and the rouble to plunge. Chief among the sanctions’ targets were seven oligarchs and 12 companies they own or control, but investor disquiet was more widely felt, spreading to Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, among others. The list included Oleg Deripaska and his companies, such as Rusal, a producer of aluminium. Underlining the sanctions’ potency, Ivan Glasenberg, the chief executive of Glencore, resigned from Rusal’s board, which he had joined in 2007. See article.
Stockmarkets in general had another volatile week, in part because sentiment fluctuated about the prospects of a trade war between America and China. Heightened geopolitical tensions over Syria pushed oil prices higher (some good news at least for the Russian economy). Brent crude climbed above $72 a barrel, its highest level since 2014.
Deutsche Bank ousted John Cryan as chief executive, three years into his five-year contract. The German lender has suffered three consecutive annual losses and Paul Achleitner, the chairman, was said to be unhappy with the slow pace of the bank’s turnaround. Still, several investors complained about the manner of Mr Cryan’s defenestration, which could make for a turbulent annual shareholders’ meeting next month. The new CEO is Christian Sewing, who headed Deutsche’s retail bank. See article.
A new driver
Deutsche Bank wasn’t the only illustrious German company shaking up its management. Volkswagen was reportedly ready to replace Matthias Müller as chief executive with Herbert Diess, who heads its core passenger-car brand. Mr Müller got the CEO’s job in September 2015, when Martin Winterkorn resigned in the wake of the carmaker’s emissions-cheating scandal. See article.
The Turkish lira fell to another low against the dollar in part because of concerns about Turkey’s push for growth at any cost. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president, unveiled an investment package this week and again called for interest rates to remain subdued. That spooked investors already worried that Mr Erdogan’s pronouncements on monetary policy are hampering the central bank’s freedom to raise rates. Inflation remains stubbornly high at 10% and the current-account deficit has risen on an annual basis.
Investors were taken by surprise when Saudi Arabia sold $11bn-worth of bonds without the customary roadshow. It is thought that the kingdom may have been trying to get a jump on Qatar, which it has been feuding with since last June and which is in the process of drumming up support for its own sale of government debt.
Novartis added to its expanding gene-therapy business by agreeing to pay $8.7bn for AveXis, which specialises in treatments for spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic condition that causes progressive muscle wasting.
The prancing unicorn
Jack Ma was reportedly preparing to raise up to $10bn in a round of private funding for Ant Financial, a mobile-payments group that he controls. Mr Ma created Ant in 2011 to house the Alipay network, which he spun out from his Alibaba empire. With 520m users, Alipay is the world’s biggest mobile-payments platform, though most of its business is in China. Mr Ma’s latest round of fund-raising could value Ant at $150bn, which would make it the most valuable startup in the world, way ahead of the likes of Uber and Didi Chuxing, two ride-hailing firms.
The European Banking Authority reported that 77% of the top earners among European bankers (those with remuneration packages of at least €1m, or $1.1m, in 2016) were based in Britain. That was a long way ahead of Germany, the next country in the ranking, where 5% of top earners resided.
A fat-finger mistake by an employee at a South Korean brokerage led to 2.8bn shares worth $100bn being issued to staff in error. The employee typed “shares” instead of “won” when distributing dividends in the Korean currency. It took the brokerage half an hour to spot the slip, during which time 16 members of staff took advantage of their windfall and sold their wrongly allocated stock.