PwC Role under the Radar in Carillion Crisis

PwC has been given the role of special manager to the Government's Official Receiver in the wake of the Carillion crisis. However, PwC is also an adviser to the Cabinet Office on outsourcing, and an adviser to the Carillion pension scheme. (The Cabinet Office is a ministerial department that supports the Prime Minister). Philip Green, CBE, is Chairman of Carillion.

BP pays out $3bn compensation in 2017 instead of $2bn for Deepwater Horizon

The increase was due to a court ruling tying compensation to revenues. The revelation led to a 2.65% dent in the share price of the British oil giant. The total compensation bill stands at $65bn.

PWC Banned from Audit Activities in India

SEBI, the Indian markets regulator, will enforce the ban from 31 March 2018. The ban comes about due to PWC's involvement in auditing Ramalinga Raju's Satyam Computers. 40% of PWC's India business is auditing.

UK's Colman's Leaving Norwich Base for Burton-on-Trent in the West Midlands and Germany

The move was triggered by Britvic moving production out of the city of Norwich. Colman's (owned by Unilever) shares the same site as Britvic.

Expensive Patches Needed to Combat Microprocessor Security Flaws

Speculative execution, where chips do computations before they may even be needed, has been blamed for the latest publicised flaws (January 2018). Intel, AMD and ARM chips are all affected. Spectre and Meltdown are the names given to the most recent flaws.

OPEC Limits and Impact on Oil Prices

Oil prices are on the rise. One driver is the OPEC limits agreed in 2016 to kick in at the start of 2017. The OPEC basket of 14 crudes is trading at $60.49 (22/11/2017). Note that the OPEC basket excludes US and UK crudes (WTI and Brent) and includes Middle Eastern, North African, Southern African and South American crudes (example: Merey, Venezuela). Angolan Girassol (extracted by BP, ExxonMobil and other partners) is part of the basket. The OPEC basket is also known as the ORB (OPEC reference basket).

The Carry Trade Concretised - Uridashi Bonds

Uridashi bonds are bonds sold to Japanese household investors, giving returns in a high-yielding currency such as NZD or AUD, which offers a premium over the historically low domestic interest rates in Japan.

This has the follow risks
- credit risk of the issuer
- FX risk, as the foreign currency coupon payments have to exchanged into JPY

They became popular in the 2000s.

2015- market size was USD 33bn.

23/11/2017 - Bank of Japan benchmark rate, -0.1%
23/11/2017 - Reserve Bank of New Zealand benchmark rate 1.75%
23/11/2017 - Reserve Bank of Australia benchmark rate 1.5%
23/11/2017 - Swiss National Bank benchmark rate -0.75%  (Banque Nationale Suisse)

The official benchmark rate in Switzerland is the "3m LIBOR CHF".