Ethical Finance

Responding to President Vladimir Putin’s recent comments on artificial intelligence, Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Monday that World War III would likely be triggered by competition for AI.

The business magnate’s prediction came in response to Putin’s comments at a meeting with schoolchildren in Yaroslavl on September 1, in which the Russian president said it was important to prevent monopolies in the field, adding that if Russia became the global leader in artificial intelligence, “it will share its technology with the rest of the world, like we are doing now with atomic and nuclear technology.”

Reinsurance firm Swiss Re has given a preliminary estimate for global economic and insured losses from natural and man-made disasters of just $23 billion for the first-half of 2017, which is down 36% on the prior year and 30% below average. Economic losses are estimated at just $44 billion, down from $117 billion in H1 2016.

It’s another signal that reinsurance pricing is set to remain under pressure, as insured losses from catastrophes, man-made incidents and severe weather events come in well below (30%) the 10-year average of $33 billion meaning reinsurance capital levels will remain abundant.

Tycoon Bill Gates has made his largest gift since the turn of the century, giving away Microsoft Corp shares that accounted for 5 per cent of his fortune, the world’s biggest.

The billionaire donated 64 million of the software maker’s shares valued at US$4.6 billion (S$6.26 billion) on June 6, according to a Securities & Exchange Commission filing released Monday.

It was becoming obvious at about this time in 2007 that something very bad was happening in America’s banks. Air was rushing out of the US housing market bubble and the country’s banks, mortgage providers and brokers were bearing the brunt of the blast.

One of the biggest sub-prime lenders in the US, New Century Financial, had already filed for bankruptcy. Bear Stearns would soon bail out one of its hedge funds that was exposed to the US housing market to the tune of $3.2bn. The bank would be forced to liquidate it a month later. As we now know, what started in the US would spread around the world.

Part of the crisis response has been to rewrite the global bank rulebook. Much of this has been sensible. This has made them safer to the kind of capital flight that did for them in the crisis. Big capital buffers should mean that the largest banks will not need to turn to taxpayers if there is a repeat of the conditions of the financial crisis.

Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, on Monday donated roughly $3.17 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Inc stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, his largest contribution in a more than decade-long plan to give away his fortune.

The billionaire investor’s 12th annual donation to the five charities comprised 18.63 million Class "B" shares of Berkshire, valued at $170.25 each as of Monday’s market close.

The Vatican Bank has reported a more than 100 per cent increase in profits in their latest annual report thanks to what they describe as a “prudent approach” to managing investments.

In the 136 page annual report, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) report that net profits for 2016 were €36 million up from €16.1 million the year before, with these gains then being distributed in aid of the Holy See’s mission.
The statement explains it was achieved through “a prudent approach in managing IOR’s investments in a year characterised by high volatility, global political uncertainty due to unexpected outcomes of major electoral events and low interest rates”.
The statement shows that in 2016 the IOR served nearly 15,000 clients worldwide, who entrusted to the Institute assets worth € 5.7 billion.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Sapienza University, in Rome, Italy, designed a tsunami detection system called VARION, which uses satellite data to recognize unique disturbances in Earth’s ionosphere caused by tsunamis. The approach uses observations from GPS and other satellite “constellations” to detect disturbances in the Earth’s ionosphere, a layer of atmosphere between 50 and 621miles from the surface.

When a tsunami forms and moves across the ocean, the wave compresses and extends the air above, creating motions known as internal gravity waves. As the gravity waves move upwards, they are amplified in the thinning atmosphere and cause detectable changes to electron density at between 186 and 217miles. The changes can then be detected as satellites move through the disturbance.

Lucerne University published its annual report, for the third year in a row, on crowdfunding in Switzerland. The “Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2016 tracks the growth and trends in this sector of finance.

In the introduction, Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich, states: "In previous years, we have usually commented that the market had grown rapidly, but the absolute volumes of funding remained at a low level. This year, though, the market has grown markedly in percentage as well as in absolute terms. For the first time, crowdfunding has been instrumental in raising substantially more than CHF 100 million. This compares to just under CHF 28 million in the previous year. The structure of the market has also changed greatly: as expected, real estate crowdinvesting and the financing of SMEs via crowdfunding (business crowdlending) have made considerable contributions to this growth".