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Business

Buyers Push Residence Depot and Omnicom to Steer Adverts From Misinformation

Investors Push Home Depot and Omnicom to Steer Ads From Misinformation

Businesses over the past few years have struggled to reach potential customers while making sure their online ads don’t appear in the presence of dubious, suspicious, or potentially harmful content. AARP, mentioned in the NewsGuard report as one of the companies that had served ads on websites that advertised false voting claims, said that despite strict surveillance procedures, some ads had slipped through the cracks.

Capitol Riot Fallout

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Jan. 17, 2021, 10:05 p.m. ET

“We follow strict ad placement protocols, but no system is 100 percent foolproof,” said Martha Boudreau, executive vice president of AARP, in a statement.

An internal AARP review found that “a tiny fraction” of its ads, less than 1/100 of 1 percent, were displayed on NewsGuard-flagged websites, Ms. Boudreau added.

Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, said companies should treat websites that post misinformation the same way they should treat websites that promote behavior that is inconsistent with their corporate values ​​or post content they do not wish to be associated with.

“Many brands have someone whose job it is to ensure that ads don’t appear in what they consider unsafe or unsuitable environments. This includes violence, pornography and gambling,” Skibinski said. “We need the industry to see misinformation in this category – to cause harm in the real world.”

NewsGuard reported that Procter & Gamble ads were running on The Gateway Pundit, one of the websites that published misinformation about elections. In an email, Procter & Gamble announced that the website was not being advertised on purpose. Erica Noble, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, said if the company’s ads are displayed on a website that doesn’t meet standards, they’ll be removed quickly.

“These are all standards that were put in place long before the horrific events of January 6, but we know they are now becoming more important again,” she said.

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Business

With Vaccines Arriving, Worth Traders Strive for a Comeback

With Vaccines Arriving, Value Investors Try for a Comeback

Bill Nygren, vice president of Oakmark Funds, says his firm holds shares in CBRE, an office leasing company that he expects to appreciate in an economic recovery. Office work, he says, will recover. “Any company with a differentiated culture that believes they can remotely keep it alive is wrong,” said Nygren.

At the same time, like some other value investors, Mr. Nygren has bought stocks that, by most definitions, are on the growth side rather than the value side of the stock spectrum. The three largest holdings in the Oakmark mutual fund are Alphabet, Facebook, and Netflix, which make up just over 11 percent of its portfolio.

“People say a growing company can’t be a value stock,” said Nygren. “But to us, a value stock means that the stock sells for less than the deal is worth.” Netflix’s rapidly growing subscriber base is more valuable than conventional metrics such as price-to-book values ​​would suggest.

Comcast is one of the largest holdings in the Dodge and Cox Stock Fund, which highlights high capital value stocks, said Charles Pohl, chairman and chief investment officer of Dodge and Cox. While Comcast’s traditional television business faces stiff competition from online competitors such as Netflix, the company is successful in providing high-speed Internet services to customers and should benefit from a broad economic recovery.

He is also confident that financial stocks will recover with the economy. As of September 30, the fund held shares in Capital One, Charles Schwab, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and financial stocks should lose value as the economy recovers.

Steve Watson, Portfolio Manager at Capital Group, who works for the American Funds Capital Income Builder, among others, said: “If we look at the world again, the market will look across the valley to the other side. “” He pointed to Total, the French oil company, as one of the stocks that would return when the world returned. And he noted that chemical company Dow’s shares rose sharply late in the year “because it is a company with a broad portfolio of chemical products that will help the global economy recover.”

In his view, value stocks were wrongly “knocked down”. “The market has been overwhelmed by growth,” he said.

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Business

Nigeria’s $82 billion health-care hole: Buyers stand by

Nigeria's $82 billion health-care gap: Investors stand by

A security guard administers disinfectant to a visitor to a government hospital in Lagos on February 28, 2020.

PIUS UTOMI EKPEI | AFP via Getty Images

The coronavirus pandemic has sharpened the lens of a significant health spending gap in Africa’s largest economy, and international investors are trying to fill the gap.

When it comes to health care, Nigeria lags behind its comparable African neighbors in terms of spending and access.

For example, Nigeria’s public health spending amounts to just 3.89% of GDP (gross domestic product) of $ 495 billion, compared to 8.25% in South Africa and 5.17% in Kenya, according to the latest available figures from the World Bank.

According to a recent report by real estate consultancy Knight Frank, Nigeria, it would take 386,000 additional beds and $ 82 billion of investment in healthcare real estate to hit the global average of 2.7 beds per thousand people.

According to the United Nations, Nigeria’s 206 million population is expected to nearly double by 2050, which would make Nigeria the third most populous country in the world.

All of this – especially in connection with the coronavirus pandemic – has sparked interest in this sector among foreign investors.

A Knight Frank poll of 140 global investors in June found that 80% are considering investing in African healthcare infrastructure in the face of the coronavirus crisis. This interest has mainly focused on hospital-related real estate and operations businesses in collaboration with domestic experts.

As in much of the African continent, Nigeria has managed to keep the number of coronavirus cases relatively low given the size of the population. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, 90,080 cases and 1,311 deaths were recorded on Monday morning.

International interest is growing

Even before the pandemic, African health goods had aroused broader interest. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, partnered with the Health in Africa-II Investment Fund (IFHA-II) in November 2019 for a US $ 115 million acquisition vehicle for health care companies in the eastern and southern US to form continent.

European development finance organizations such as Swedfund, the Swedish development finance institution, have supported IFHA, along with Pfizer and the Stichting Social Investor Foundation for Africa, whose supporters include Aegon, Heineken, Shell and Unilever.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the Nigerian government has spent 100 billion naira ($ 254.6 million) on government credit facilities for healthcare, from pharmaceutical companies and product manufacturers to service providers, which it seems has piqued the interest of private investors. The Bank of Industry, a Nigerian development finance institution, is providing an additional 50 billion naira.

“There is a very compelling opportunity for the development of world-class healthcare facilities across Africa, particularly in Nigeria,” said Hafeez Giwa, managing partner at HC Capital Properties, which has begun investing in healthcare facilities in Nigeria.

Hafeez Giwa, managing partner at HC Capital Properties, has started investing in Nigeria’s healthcare infrastructure.

New markets media & intelligence

“Most of the public hospitals here were built over 40 years ago and only a handful of investments have been made since then,” Giwa said in a report released Monday by frontier market consultancy New Markets Media & Intelligence.

Tosin Runsewe, CEO of health investment firm AfyACare Nigeria, highlighted another possibility: Compulsory health insurance for federal employees would reduce insurance costs and the percentage of health costs covered could increase to 20% to 30% by 2030.

Currently, around 72% of household health care spending is out of pocket, compared to the sub-Saharan average of 35%, the Knight Frank report points out, and only 5% of health care is insured.

“If we could reach a critical mass of 40 to 60 million Nigerians with health insurance, the cost of this treatment could be covered by health insurance premiums of only about 20,000 naira ($ 50) a year, half the current average cost,” Runsewe said.

“There are a number of opportunities for investors to invest in private primary health clinics that can provide services at affordable costs.”

Commuters wearing a protective face mask walk on the streets of Lagos on March 26, 2020 to take preventive action against the spread of the new coronavirus COVIC-19 in Lagos.

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According to Giwa, HC Capital Properties invested in Nigeria because of both “extreme needs” and government initiatives that have made it easier to develop high quality assets that provide affordable care. He suggested that two types of investors are currently exploring these options.

“On the one hand, there are local institutional investors and local pension funds who, in the case of Nigeria, are naira investors and have no currency risk concerns,” said Giwa.

“On the flip side, there are developmental investors and institutions that are excited about the prospect of providing quality health care to low- and middle-income Nigerians.”

He believes the pandemic has resulted in a “permanent change in thinking” that places greater emphasis on the quality of home health care.

Currently, Nigeria is losing up to $ 1 billion a year to outbound health tourism among wealthier Nigerians due to inadequate access to the interior, according to a recently released PwC report.

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Politics

Trump official Mick Mulvaney’s hedge fund in search of no less than $1 million from buyers

Trump official Mick Mulvaney's hedge fund seeking at least $1 million from investors

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, December 10, 2019.

Al Drago | Reuters

Mick Mulvaney, former acting chief of staff to President Donald Trump, plans to raise at least $ 1 million from outside investors for his newly formed hedge fund.

Mulvaney, now representing the outgoing administration in Northern Ireland, and his business partner Andrew Wessel announced that they are aiming for this minimum amount in a CNBC first-examined filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing gives fresh insight into Mulvaney’s Exegis Capital fund’s plans to operate in the post-Trump era. The SEC form was signed on December 1, weeks after Democrat Joe Biden was appointed president-elect.

Mulvaney, a former Republican Congressman from South Carolina, was also head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within the Trump administration.

Investments appear to be in the direction of the fund limited partnership called Exegis Financial Sector Fund, the document says. The SEC form contains the same North Carolina address for the limited partnership and Exegis Capital. Mulvaney and Wessel’s names are both on the form.

The document also shows that Exegis is fundraising under the SEC’s 506 (b) rule. According to the SEC’s website, this rule allows companies to “raise unlimited funds and sell securities to an unlimited number of accredited investors.”

Mulvaney and Wessel, who have extensive experience as former portfolio managers at Sterling Capital Management in North Carolina, first announced the creation of the fund in an interview with S&P Global in August. They said at the time they wanted to invest in stocks in the small to mid-cap financial sector.

In an interview on Friday, Wessel confirmed that the $ 1 million was just the minimum they were asking investors. The hedge fund, he said, is trying to raise money from both “high net worth” and “very high net worth” individuals who may be worth at least $ 30 million.

Wessel declined to say who invested or who signaled interest in investing.

“The fundraiser is going well,” he said. “We have little interest from a number of high net worth individuals.” Wessel added that the fund had held numerous investor meetings both in person and through Zoom.

Wessel said that so far they have aimed to invest in small and mid-cap financials, with less of an emphasis on banks and interest in lenders and fintech companies.

Mulvaney’s role in the firm includes providing guidance to the best companies to invest in based on Exegis’ expectations for tighter regulation of the financial services industry under the Biden administration.

According to Wessel, Mulvaney’s experience in Washington – as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as a member of the Financial Services Committee during his tenure in Congress – gives the firm a strong insight into the in-depth regulations it could provide for its business potential investments.

“For the Biden administration we are probably aiming for more regulation, not less, and we will choose our places there,” said Wessel of her investment tactics.

Wessel said Mulvaney approved the establishment of the fund with both the White House and the State Department and “he has not been to Ireland in a while”. He referred other questions about possible ethical hurdles Mulvaney may face to the former South Carolina congressman.

A State Department official told CNBC after the release that Mulvaney is considered a government special employee (SGE) and is limited to 130 calendar days of official work per year. He is not prohibited from looking for external employment, said the spokesman.

Mulvaney did not return a request for comment prior to posting.