Finance

Fuel, food, finance: Brace for impact from Russia’s Ukraine war

By Dorothea 1 month ago
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Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day, more than a century apart, America lost two of its most distinctive creative voices. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the writer better known as Mark Twain, died in 1910. And Prince Rogers Nelson, the iconic musician best known by his first name, died in 2016. 

U.N. Development Program warns of massive shocks from Ukraine conflict

Russia’s war with Ukraine threatens scores of countries and over 1 billion people with a triple shock — soaring fuel prices, surging food costs and financial turmoil — that can spark political upheaval. And no nation is perfectly secure, no matter how rich or distant from the battlefield.

Brace for impact, in other words. That’s the sobering message United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Administrator Achim Steiner delivered in a telephone interview with The Daily 202 on

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We just found out how Elon Musk may finance his $43B Twitter bid

By Dorothea 1 month ago

In an SEC filing today, Elon Musk indicated that Twitter has yet to respond to his offer to buy the company, and that he is “exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares.” Recall that Twitter has itself adopted a poison-pill defense of its equity in light of Musk’s unsolicited bid.

The filing also details how Musk intends to pay for Twitter. Recall that his offer is worth $54.20 per share in cash, valuing the company at around $43.4 billion. The serial entrepreneur’s bid represents a premium to Twitter’ value today, but lands far beneath the company’s 52-week stock market high of $73.34 per share; shares of Twitter traded even higher in early 2021, leaving some room for Musk’s bid to be considered modest, despite its present-day premium.

So where will all that money come from? Three major buckets, it turns

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Top REITs for May 2022

By Dorothea 1 month ago

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) are publicly traded companies that allow individual investors to buy shares in real estate portfolios that receive income from a variety of properties. They allow investors to invest easily in the real estate sector, which includes companies that own, develop, and manage residential, commercial, and industrial properties.

Among other requirements, REITs are required to pay out at least 90% of their taxable income as dividends. A key REIT metric is funds from operations (FFO), a measure of earnings particular to the industry. Some big names within the sector include American Tower Corp., Crown Castle International Corp., and Prologis Inc.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the commercial real estate industry, as workers around the world have adapted to working from home and various lockdown measures have been enacted. Despite the economy’s recovery, the industry’s recovery has been uneven: the corporate office sector generally has performed

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Development finance system needs urgent reforms, more money, to stave off disaster

By Dorothea 1 month ago

By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The global development finance system needs urgent reforms and far more private capital to address the multiple, overlapping crises that are pushing 250 million people back into extreme poverty, major public and private groups said in a statement.

The statement, signed by Woochong Um, head of the Asian Development Bank, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Andrew Steer, president of the Bezos Earth Fund, calls for major changes to help developing countries deal with massive debt burdens, climate change, COVID-19 and myriad other crises.

“The standard models are not working,” they said in a joint statement issued after convening 60 senior government officials and development finance experts in Washington for a three-hour dialogue on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

“We call on governments and the private

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