Billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates will pay off $76 million of Nigeria's debt.
It's part of a promise the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made to the African country in an effort to end polio. The payments, which will be made over the course of 20 years, are due to begin this year.
In 2014, Nigeria borrowed the money from Japan to fund its fight against the preventable disease, Quartz reports. The Gates Foundation had agreed to repay the loan if Nigeria met certain conditions, namely "achieving more than 80% vaccination coverage in at least one round each year in very high risk areas across 80% of the country's local government areas," according to an email from the foundation to Quartz.
Nigeria held up its end of the bargain, and no new cases of polio were reported in the country in 2017. That's a drastic change from 2012, when Nigeria had over half of all polio cases worldwide, according to Quartz.
In a recent blog post, Gates acknowledges the significant strides made towards wiping out the disease globally — 30 years ago, there were 350,000 cases of polio per year worldwide, while last year, that number dropped to just 21.
"The heroes who have made this progress possible are the millions of vaccinators who have gone door to door to immunize more than 2.5 billion children. Thanks to their work, 16 million people who would have been paralyzed are walking today," Gates writes.
Polio is "a crippling and potentially deadly infectious disease," which, after invading the nervous system, can cause paralysis. Among those paralyzed, two to 10 percent die.
The Gates Foundation spent $3 billion in 2017 to help stop the spread of the disease, and names polio eradication one of its "top priorities." The foundation says it has supported the Global Polio Eradication Initiative's efforts to wipe out the disease by contributing technical and financial resources to accelerate targeted vaccination campaigns, community mobilization and routine immunizations.
The Gates' donation is not out of character; in 2017, they gave $4.6 billion to their namesake organization. In addition to its work with polio, the foundation has also spent $1 billion in an effort to send over 20,000 kids to college and has committed millions more toward fighting Alzheimer's and providing resources to women in developing countries.
Thanks in part to his massive philanthropic efforts, Gates is no longer the richest person in the world, a title that he had held for much of the last decade. Jeff Bezos is currently the richest person, with a net worth of more than $108 billion, according to Forbes. Gates is currently worth $92 billion.
However, Bloomberg notes that Gates would have a net worth of $150 billion if he had not been so generous. While Bezos is not know for being particularly philanthropic as billionaires go, in January he announced a $33 million donation toward TheDream.Us, an organization that provides scholarships undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, known as "dreamers."
Gates also founded The Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett. Its billionaire signers have promised to give away at least half of their wealth.
"We have been blessed with good fortune beyond our wildest expectations, and we are profoundly grateful," Bill and Melinda wrote in their Giving Pledge letter, CNBC Make It previously reported. "But just as these gifts are great, so we feel a great responsibility to use them well."
Friday, January 19, 2018
Sunday, January 14, 2018
stock returns in the next 10 years
As 2017 dawned, few market experts had high hopes for stocks' returns over the next seven to 10 years; after all, the market had already staged a strong run stretching back to March 2009.
With stocks posting another stellar year last year--and with valuations that could hardly be described as cheap--most serious experts are even more circumspect in their long-range return expectations today.
True, economic fundamentals are fine: The economy is solid, unemployment remains low, and corporate earnings growth has been robust. But much of that good news is arguably already priced into stocks' valuations today.
At first blush, forecasting the market's returns, even on a long-term basis, might seem like folly. It's impossible to predict the future, right? But like it or not, market-return assumptions are an essential input for your financial plan. Without some reasonable expectation of what your portfolio will return, you can't know how much you'll need to save and for how long. You can't know whether saving for retirement should be your sole financial preoccupation or whether you can hit other goals, such as college funding, along the way.
To help you arrive at an educated guess of how much the market will contribute to the success of your plans, I've gathered return expectations from market experts both inside and outside of Morningstar. Note that the specifics of these return estimates vary a bit; some of these return expectations are inflation-adjusted while others are not. In addition, some of the experts cited below forecast returns for the next decade, while others employ slightly shorter time horizons. In any case, these return estimates are more intermediate-term than they are long. As such, they're the most relevant to investors whose time horizons are in that ballpark, or to new retirees who face sequence-of-return risk in the next decade.
John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group
Highlights: 4% returns for stocks, 3% returns for bonds over the next decade (October 2017)
GMO
Highlights: -4.4% real (inflation-adjusted) returns for U.S. large caps over the next seven years; 2% real returns for emerging markets equities (October 2017).
Morningstar Investment Management
Highlights: 1.8% 10-year nominal returns for U.S. stocks; 2.5% 10-year nominal returns for U.S. bonds (Sept. 30, 2017).
Research AffiliatesHighlights: 0.3% real returns for U.S. large caps during the next 10 years; 0.8% real returns for the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index (Dec. 31, 2017).
Charles Schwab Investment AdvisoryHighlights: 6.7% expected nominal return from U.S. large-cap stocks from 2017-2026; 3.1% nominal returns from U.S. investment-grade bonds (August 2017)
Vanguard
Highlights: Nominal U.S. equity-market returns in the 3% to 5% range during the next decade; 5.5% to 7.5% returns for non-U.S. equities; 2% to 3% expected returns for global fixed-income markets (December 2017)
With stocks posting another stellar year last year--and with valuations that could hardly be described as cheap--most serious experts are even more circumspect in their long-range return expectations today.
True, economic fundamentals are fine: The economy is solid, unemployment remains low, and corporate earnings growth has been robust. But much of that good news is arguably already priced into stocks' valuations today.
At first blush, forecasting the market's returns, even on a long-term basis, might seem like folly. It's impossible to predict the future, right? But like it or not, market-return assumptions are an essential input for your financial plan. Without some reasonable expectation of what your portfolio will return, you can't know how much you'll need to save and for how long. You can't know whether saving for retirement should be your sole financial preoccupation or whether you can hit other goals, such as college funding, along the way.
To help you arrive at an educated guess of how much the market will contribute to the success of your plans, I've gathered return expectations from market experts both inside and outside of Morningstar. Note that the specifics of these return estimates vary a bit; some of these return expectations are inflation-adjusted while others are not. In addition, some of the experts cited below forecast returns for the next decade, while others employ slightly shorter time horizons. In any case, these return estimates are more intermediate-term than they are long. As such, they're the most relevant to investors whose time horizons are in that ballpark, or to new retirees who face sequence-of-return risk in the next decade.
John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group
Highlights: 4% returns for stocks, 3% returns for bonds over the next decade (October 2017)
GMO
Highlights: -4.4% real (inflation-adjusted) returns for U.S. large caps over the next seven years; 2% real returns for emerging markets equities (October 2017).
Morningstar Investment Management
Highlights: 1.8% 10-year nominal returns for U.S. stocks; 2.5% 10-year nominal returns for U.S. bonds (Sept. 30, 2017).
Research AffiliatesHighlights: 0.3% real returns for U.S. large caps during the next 10 years; 0.8% real returns for the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index (Dec. 31, 2017).
Charles Schwab Investment AdvisoryHighlights: 6.7% expected nominal return from U.S. large-cap stocks from 2017-2026; 3.1% nominal returns from U.S. investment-grade bonds (August 2017)
Vanguard
Highlights: Nominal U.S. equity-market returns in the 3% to 5% range during the next decade; 5.5% to 7.5% returns for non-U.S. equities; 2% to 3% expected returns for global fixed-income markets (December 2017)