Here’s @andrewrsorkin on Friedman and stakeholder capitalism. His choice of words here — “making” stedda “growing” — is an important sleight of hand that often undergirds my debates with @Three_Guineas on this subject. nytimes.com/2020/09/11/bus…
Hotels are some of the longest-running businesses in the world. So let’s consider a hotel that has been run by the same family for 250 years. Its owners need to *make* money, sure. They’re rich capitalists. But they don’t need to *increase* their profits every year.
Since 1972, the idea of “shareholder capitalism” has morphed from “companies need to make enough money to be able to pay their dividend every quarter” into “companies need profit *growth* that will cause their share price to rise indefinitely.”
So when shareholder capitalists start telling you that a company needs to *make* profits, watch closely: They’re very likely to start moving the goalposts. It won’t be long before they start talking about increasing or maximizing profits. Which is much less defensible.
(And before you start talking about inflation, consider “profits” here to mean real profits, after inflation.)
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“@matt_levine goes deep on crypto” is self-recommending but in case you want another recommendation I have read every word of this and it is just as wonderful as you would expect. bloomberg.com/features/2022-…
A short 🧵 just to whet your appetite…
One thing that shines through in this piece is that although it’s a very nerdy dive into financial technology, it’s also a moral essay.
A core insight: “Crypto is in a way about rejecting the institutions of society, about being trustless and censorship-resistant. But it quietly free-rides on people’s deep reservoir of trust.”
I wrote this morning about specific performance, and why Elon Musk can't just walk away from the Twitter deal while paying a $1 billion termination fee. A 🧵: axios.com/2022/05/14/the…
First, yes, the termination fee is a real thing. If Elon walks away, it applies. But there's *also* an explicit section on specific performance, which means, Elon can't just walk away; a judge can force him to go through with the agreed acquisition.
Aha! Says the WSJ. But if he fails to buy the company, the damages are just... the termination fee! It's the same either way! wsj.com/articles/musks…
I'm super happy that @artdetective has written this story about BOGO ("buy one, give one") and its discontents. It's a great little corner of the contemporary art world to delve into. So let's delve! news.artnet.com/news-pro/bogo-…
The way it works is simple: If you're a collector wanting to buy a primary work by a hot artist, the way you get to the front of the queue is by promising to simultaneously buy a second work to gift to a museum.
There's a lot to like here. All galleries want to get their artists' work into museums, after all, and this is a way they can do so while still being paid full price. When demand exceeds supply, BOGO is a simple way for a gallery to pick who gets the privilege of buying.
I think people have misunderstood something important about blockchain and money laundering in the wake of the Dutch/Razzlekhan arrests. Which is that it was mostly normal TradFi AML that made it hard for them to launder their BTC, rather than inherent blockchain transparency.
They could *own* BTC no problem. They could create new wallets and transfer the BTC from wallet to wallet no problem. They could even tumble the BTC and get new BTC that weren't easily traceable back to the original heist. They just couldn't convert that BTC to USD.
Their problem was pretty much the same as the problem of someone with $100 million in cash who wants to be able to spend normally, out of a bank account, with some kind of plastic card. That's hard! If the cash is ill-gotten. You can't just deposit it at your local Chase.
@mfriedenberg@aagalloni@Justin_B_Smith@benyt The value exchange could be enormous on both sides. The Smiths need a plan for what they're going to do when they're sued in any one of dozens of jurisdictions; Reuters can be very helpful there.
Meanwhile, Reuters needs to be able to have a compelling consumer-facing product by the time the Refinitiv money runs out in 2048. They can't count on building it internally; they've tried and failed many times. The Smiths' product could be exactly what they're looking for.