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Consumption, not investment, now key to growth

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CAI MENG/CHINA DAILY

Scholars and policymakers in China have not yet reached a consensus on whether stimulating consumption is the top priority for the Chinese economy at the moment. Some economists argue more about the need to boost growth by expanding investment, as they believe that stable investment will be the fastest way to encourage economic expansion.

My understanding is that competent policymaking departments and economists need to better realize and identify the importance of boosting consumption. Under China’s 20 years of stabilizing investment through infrastructure construction, it is necessary to completely change such concepts and realize the significance of encouraging consumption. There is still a lot of work to be done on this front. If this year’s policy is still the same as last year’s and the year before, it will affect growth stabilization performance in 2023.

What makes stimulating consumption for growth so important? The main reason behind it is that China’s economic structure has changed. In normal situations, consumption contributes about 65 percent of GDP growth in China. Therefore, as the proportion of fiscal funds spent to stabilize growth conforms to the economic structure, roughly 65 percent of fiscal funds are used to stabilize consumption, and the remaining 35 percent are put toward stabilizing investment. Yet, in practice, most of the fiscal funds are used to stabilize investment. This disrupts the overall growth structure.

With China’s economy developing and upgrading rapidly, consumption has now become the core factor in economic growth. The country has moved beyond the stage of 20 years of rapid urbanization and rapid industrialization, and infrastructure investment has been oversaturated. Therefore, if the method of stabilizing investment is once again applied to stabilize growth, it will seriously distort the driving force of China’s economic growth. However, I think such understanding has not yet been widely recognized by economists and policymakers, and therefore, further study on this matter is needed.

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China’s previous strategy of stabilizing investment has caused distortions in the overall fiscal expenditure structure. Last year, China’s total GDP reached 114 trillion yuan ($16.2 trillion). The total amount of investment in fixed assets was 55 trillion yuan, while fixed-asset investment accounted for 48 percent of GDP. In comparison, in developed countries such as the United States, Australia, Japan and European nations, the annual total investment in fixed assets accounts for only about 20 percent of the country’s GDP.Long-term distorted structure caused by China’s large proportion of fixed asset investment in GDP is unsustainable.

I would argue that if the current economic structure is corrected and adjusted in the next 10 years, investment in fixed assets will drop from 55 trillion yuan to 30-40 trillion yuan and then decline further. Its high growth will undoubtedly crowd out consumption in the economy, and have a negative impact.

Here are some ways to boost consumption:

First, efforts should be made to promote consumption in terms of raising incomes, instead of working from the production standpoint. Since 2020, in Europe and the United States, the key measure to stabilize consumption has been to issue consumption vouchers to residents, and this has generated a notable effect in boosting the economy. If people’s disposable incomes decline, consumption will definitely drop. Therefore, efforts must be made to find a way to increase disposable income of Chinese consumers. However, if we talk about increasing disposable incomes and only work on stabilizing employment, it would not be sustainable over the long term. It is a long-term policy to stabilize employment as well as improve the social security system, medical system and education system, whatever the circumstances are. The core of stabilizing consumption is to increase household incomes. One way to bring this about is to increase current incomes; that is, issue consumption vouchers or money to residents. It is the correct way to stabilize consumption from the income side. Another way of effecting this is to increase investment income, such as making the stock market more prosperous, so that everyone makes money, thus leading to higher consumption.

Second, efforts should be made to increase the public’s marginal propensity to consume by cutting interest rates. The best way to increase the marginal propensity to consume in the short term is, in fact, by reducing interest rates, which frees up credit. The two methods for stabilizing consumption in Europe and the US in 2020 were distribution of money and lowering of interest rates. By raising incomes through distribution of money and lowering of interest rates, it is possible to increase the general public’s marginal propensity to consume. People’s incomes are divided into two parts. One part is used for saving and the other part is used for consumption. When savings increase, consumption decreases. Savings are closely related and very responsive to interest rate changes. When Europe and the US faced economic downturn pressure in 2020 and wanted to stabilize consumption, they once lowered interest rates to zero or even negative. But China seems to be more conservative with regards to cutting interest rates.

There are many reasons for China to be shy about cutting interest rates. These include the need to prevent real estate bubbles, avoid a stock market sell-off, safeguard against rampant inflation, and stabilize the RMB exchange rate. The goal of monetary policy is complicated and has many facets. It needs to work not only to maintain economic growth, but also to stabilize prices, support the capital market, undergird the housing market and stabilize the exchange rate. Currently, in terms of the stock market, the Chinese bourse has a flat performance during the past 10 years, and share prices of many listed companies have fallen to historic lows. A rise in the stock market can increase investment income and benefit consumption. In terms of prices, China’s producer price index has entered negative growth since October. Currently, we do not have serious inflation, so from the perspective of prices, cutting interest rates will also work. In terms of the RMB exchange rate, now that the appreciation of the US dollar has ended and interest rate hikes outside China have slowed, the pressure of RMB appreciation is gradually picking up. Therefore, to increase the public’s marginal propensity to consume and to stabilize consumption, we should cut interest rates.

In addition, it is also very important to boost consumption by creating consumption scenarios with engaging consumption activities, where consumers can truly interact with shops and products. If consumers cannot have such interactions, contact consumption in many scenarios will not be realized. This involves the impact of COVID-19 and how to contain the pandemic in a science-based, accurate way, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.

To sum up, only by realizing the importance of consumption and work on the income front, cutting interest rates and creating more engaging scenarios for consumption can the Chinese economy likely see a rebound in the first quarter of next year.

The views don’t necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

The author is the director of the Wanbo New Economic Research Institute.

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What is Islamic halal investment and why is it on the rise?

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The global Islamic halal economy is set to reach a market value of $7.7 trillion by 2025, more than double the $3.2 trillion it reached in 2015 and significantly higher than the $5.7 trillion it was valued at less than three years ago in 2021, according to industry experts.

A report by the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions revealed last year that the global Islamic funds market has grown by more than 300 percent over the past decade, with nearly $200bn now under management globally.

The statistics depict a rise in both demand for halal – or “sharia compliant” – investments and opportunities.

Investing is permitted under Islam, but certain aspects of investment practice – such as charging or paying interest – are not. This has traditionally meant a lack of opportunities for Muslim savers and investors in the past.

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What is halal investment?

Halal is an Arabic term meaning “permitted” and stipulating that:

  • Transactions cannot involve “riba” (interest).
  • Investments must not be made in “haram” (unlawful) assets or commodities such as pork products, alcohol or military equipment, among others.
  • Investments cannot be made based on “gharar”, which has been described as “highly uncertain transactions or transactions that run contrary to the idea of certainty and transparency in business”.

“Halal investment is basically managing your money and finances in line with your faith,” Omar Shaikh, director of Islamic Finance Council UK (UKIFC), told Al Jazeera. “Muslims believe that earning money in a way which is halal is better than earning money (even if that is more) in a way that is harmful to society and against the morals of the religion.”

Umar Munshi, co-founder and managing director of Islamic finance group Ethis, said sharia compliance is key, but institutions and investors looking for ethical investments need to go even further to ensure a business is completely ethical.

“The actions of a business must not have a negative impact on society or the environment,” Munshi told Al Jazeera. “So it’s not only compliant, but refraining from having a negative impact. Investing in a tobacco company, for example, may be sharia compliant, but it’s not good for society.”

How does halal investment work?

One example of halal investment is Islamic business financing, which works using new models of profit-sharing, sharia-compliant insurance and sukuk, an Islamic financial certificate that represents a share of ownership.

Unlike with conventional bonds – a form of IOU that investors can buy in order to receive interest payments – sukuk investors receive partial ownership of a business and then receive profit payments, which are generated over time. These payments are made instead of interest in order to ensure sharia compliancy.

“Islamic finance as a sector is barely 30 years old, with the past 15 years seeing the most development,” Shaikh from UKIFC said. “It takes time to educate and create awareness and as this has happened, more banks have focused on servicing the demand for halal investing. This in turn helps to create more products, which then creates more demand.”

Stock markets used to be the traditional modes of investment for many [Marcin Nowak/Anadolu via Getty Images]

A Goldman Sachs report published in December 2022 estimated that by 2075, five of the world’s 10 largest economies – India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Egypt – will have Muslim populations amounting to more than 850 million people.

As the population rises, so does its demand for financial products. According to the State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2023, published by research group DinarStandard, some $25.9bn was invested into sharia-compliant investments in the financial year 2022-23, marking a 128 percent year-on-year growth.

“In general, it [halal investment] is on the rise. People are a lot more educated and more aware of how their dollar impacts the socioeconomic landscape globally,” said Siddiq Farid, co-founder of SmartCrowd, a real estate investment platform based in Dubai.

“They are a lot more cautious, too, hence leading to more ethical investing, which halal investing is a big component of. It’s on the rise, particularly around the younger generation. The millennials, they are a lot more aware socially. People realise exactly where their money is going and how it’s being used.”

An increase in opportunities for halal investing and their ease of access are also cited as reasons driving the rise in demand.

Israel’s war on Gaza and its impact

More recently, the rise in demand for halal investments has received an additional boost as consumers boycott brands seen as supporting Israel and its war on Gaza.

The war, which has seen more than 32,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza, has “adjusted” the mindset of these investors, Farid said.

“Halal investment has been increasing steadily and it has accelerated further in the past six months, mostly among millennials and people under 40,” he said.

“But in the past, it’s more of these people just looking for something halal. As long as it’s not haram, it’s fine. Now, there’s more awareness of not only halal, but halal aligned with values and faith. All these boycott movements have got people much more aware that something may be halal, but you might not necessarily want to use it, be associated with it or invest in it.”

bds
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has made many people consider where their money goes before they spend or invest it, say experts [Martin Pope/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

How has technology contributed to the rise of halal investing?

FinTech Magazine reported in December last year that while Muslims make up nearly a quarter of the world’s population, barely one percent of financial assets qualify as sharia compliant. This is set to change, say experts, with the arrival of “fintech” – financial technology that can make investing much more accessible for ordinary consumers and individual investors.

“Muslims are generally not as well educated when it comes to investing, and this is partly due to a lack of available options for them as Muslims. Even basic information pertaining to sharia-compliant investments is often not available to most of the Muslim population,” said Ibrahim Khan, co-founder of the online financial platform Islamic Finance Guru, in an interview with FinTech Magazine.

However, the rise of social media has contributed to an increased awareness and significant growth in sharia-compliant finance. In addition, fintech has made halal investment options, which are often much more convenient and easy to use with a smartphone or laptop, more accessible.

Consultancy group McKinsey & Company published research in January this year showing that “revenues in the fintech industry are expected to grow almost three times faster than those in the traditional banking sector between 2023 and 2028”.

“Your phone is often physically the closest thing to you. Fintechs are able to start from this paradigm and build solutions that are efficient and enhance transparency and choice for retail customers. This is where a lot of the action is at. Many banks are now creating fintech-based solutions or acquiring fintech players,” said UKIFC’s Shaikh.

Munshi added the selling point for fintechs is the age of the target audience.

“The younger generation is more open to investing online,” said Munshi, whose company operates an online platform and community for alternative finance and investment opportunities.

The same research by McKinsey & Company showed that the fintech industry raised record capital in the second half of the 2010s. Venture capital funding grew from $19.4bn in 2015 to $33.3bn in 2020, a 17 percent year-over-year increase.

As of July 2023, publicly traded fintech companies had a combined market capitalisation of $550bn, double that of 2019, the research said.

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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