Neymar Challenges Nike Over
Soccer superstar Neymar lashed out at Nike Inc. on Friday, questioning how the company handled a Nike employee’s allegation of a sexual assault and disputing its reason for why he and the sportswear giant parted ways.
In a post on Instagram, Neymar challenged his former sponsor, saying Nike was lying about the reasons for the split and that it knew about the employee’s allegation against him long before it took any action. “A matter of such seriousness and they did nothing. Who is truly responsible?” he wrote.
after he refused to cooperate with a company investigation into a female employee’s allegation that he had sexually assaulted her during a 2016 publicity tour in New York.
“Nike ended its relationship with the athlete because he refused to cooperate in a good faith investigation of credible allegations of wrongdoing by an employee,” said Hilary Krane, Nike’s general counsel, in response to questions from the Journal.
Neymar, whose full name is Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., denied the sexual-assault allegation. On Friday, he said Nike’s general counsel had “improperly and irresponsibly” discussed the reason for the termination of the endorsement deal. Neymar said the agreement ended for commercial reasons.
For professional investors such as pension funds, an idea known as “liability-driven investment” has been fashionable for some years now. It’s essentially a complicated way of expressing a very simple idea – that the investments you hold should reflect the reason you make them. So, for example, a retirement fund with large numbers of pensioners who must be paid pensions might choose to hold investments that will generate the income required to service these payments.
It’s really just common sense – if you’re investing for a particular reason, it’s logical to choose the assets you hold on the basis of whether they’re appropriate for this need. All of us should at least be applying the underlying principles of this approach to our own financial planning.
That’s not to say there’s no room for investment decisions based on your views about markets, fund managers and other factors likely to have an impact on performance; but these should be secondary considerations.
Think of it in this way: your financial needs, the duration of your investments and your attitude to risk will provide you with a basic framework for your portfolio – how much you should hold in equities, say, versus fixed income securities or other types of asset. You can then start to fill in the framework by making choices about how you achieve this asset allocation.
In fact, while we all get hung up on whether one particular fund is doing better than another, the final choice of portfolio holdings is much less important than getting the asset allocation right. Academic research suggests that as much as 50 per cent of the performance of your portfolio will depend on asset allocation, a much more significant factor than individual security selection or market timing.
Similarly, if you’re 35 now and putting money into funds that you plan to use to generate a retirement income in 30 years’ time, it’s seems daft to worry about, say, a six-month run of negative returns.
Successful investment, in other words, is not an absolute discipline – when you choose savings and investment products, you’re not looking for the largest possible profit, counter-intuitive though this might seem, but the perfect return profile for your individual needs. Just like the professional investors, you need assets that are well-matched to your liabilities.
Over time, of course, your needs may change, or you may find that your initial choices aren’t delivering what you hoped for. Keep your investments under review on that basis.
How, then, to save and invest according to these ideas in practice. Well, the investment companies sector has much to offer, with a range of different funds offering very different profiles. The industry has a good story to tell on income, because investment companies are allowed to keep some dividends back in good years to pay out in leaner times. Its growth record is impressive too, outperforming, on average, comparable open-ended funds over longer periods.
This is the USA’s most important bilateral relationship in Latin America. It matters for Mexico, with almost 30% of its GDP generated from exports to its northern neighbour. But it’s also vital for the US economy, which relies on integrated north American supply chains to compete with low-cost Asian manufacturing. The tens of millions of Mexican Americans that now live in the US, make the relationship politically important, while the illicit drugs trade causes social and justice problems on both sides of the border.
Without doubt, Biden’s tone will be less confrontational than Donald Trump’s. And of course work will stop on the, largely symbolic, wall between the two countries. Biden will be keen to co-operate on security, migration and social issues. He was responsible for a Central American aid and migration programme during the Obama administration and has already pledged $4billion for a similar scheme in his presidency. That should find support in Mexico, which is keen to reduce the flow of Central American immigrants northwards. The new mood of cooperation may also mean the US has a more active ally in resolving regional disputes, such as the human rights abuses of left-wing regimes in Nicaragua and El Salvador.