Today the Chinese flash purchasing managers index number came in below the 50% level which marks positive growth, at 48.3%. This sound worrying but the period for which data came in included the long hiatus for the lunar New Year of the Horse.
Sell-offs in China give us a chance to exercise our good judgment and find niche investment ideas not dependent on the overall growth of the Chinese
I donated to Harvard at my last round-number reunion which I then couldn’t attend because my husband fractured his spine. I couldn’t leave him or take him to Cambridge. According to Bloomberg today, I should never have given: Harvard has $2 mn of endowment for every enrolled student.
So Harvard and other Ivy League universities have too much money which leads to misallocation of resources, in Harvard’s case a plot to take over Allston across the Charles River. The Harvard endowment was boosted by over $1 bn in 2013 alone.
The other negative is that all that endowment loot isn’t providing education to low-income students. Most Pell Grant students come from families with below-average incomes. Among the Ivy colleges, Bloomberg notes, only 16% of students have Pell grants. In the least endowed colleges, 59% of students get Pells.
Moreover, the Harvard Endowment as a non-profit doesn’t pay income taxes on its investment gains, another $1 bn last year. And of course a Harvard degree is an instant entry to the bourgeoisie and tends to ensure high income to people whose parents already had high incme. “Cut off Harvard to save America,” writes Richard K. Vedder on Bloomberg.
More for paid subscribers follows from Sweden, The Netherlands, Britain, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Israel, and Finland. Two companies reported and are written up with investment advice below.
*As we reported yesterday, a group of state-sector China companies (Bank of China, investment group Hopu, and an insurer) is taking a 34% stake in the China portfolio of Singapore’s Global Logistics Properties for $2.35 bn. This confirms that the Beijing authories want to boost local consumption, which requires warehouse and logistics sites. (GBTZF) also is doubling its acreage in Brazil but faces far more competition there from Australian and US as well as local logistics firms.
*Your editor still has not managed to snatch shares of Naibu Global, because the price has been pushed up despite the sour news from China, probably by others reacting to Vivian Ng’s article yesterday tipping it. NBU trades on the London AIM market. It is of course a likely beneficiary from new support for shopping therapy from Beijing.(NBU)
