Similarly, Munster used the vast resources of the multinational investment bank that employs him to determine that Apple releases new iMacs around every 168 days, and that the current generation has been on the market for 257 days.

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Israel and Egypt are the biggest recipients of U.S. aid in the package, which provides funds for multinational organizations like the World Bank and a raft of overseas policy initiatives from nuclear nonproliferation to family planning.

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Standard Chartered Bank is a UK-based multinational, with operations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

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Investors, says the bank, should buy shares in multinational firms with big emerging-market businesses instead of emerging-market shares and funds.

ECONOMIST: Investment banking

The cellphones, bank branches, and supermarkets that multinational firms are increasingly exporting to Africa and Asia have done more to uplift the poor than many would like to admit.

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Under the Basel system, regulators ordained - for example - that banks could lend more relative to their capital if they were providing mortgages to house buyers than they could if they were lending to a giant multinational company: regulators deemed it was less risky for a bank to provide you with a mortgage than to lend to Tesco.

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Still, such regulations can stop neither multinational companies, which may repatriate profits, nor determined wealthy individuals, who travel frequently, hold foreign bank accounts and run their own cross-border businesses.

ECONOMIST: The balance of payments