All posts by Gordon Pearson

Banking, Economics, Management Practice, Merger & Acquisition, Shareholder Value

The Cure for Monopolistic Exploitation

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After the Libor rate fixing scandal, and the PPI mis-selling fiasco, we now have hysteria over gas and electricity companies fixing market prices to their advantage at the expense of the general customer. Well of course they’ve been doing that, it’s what they do. They aren’t charities. They charge whatever the market will bear. That’s how markets work. If the markets were competitive it would be a different story and the customer would reap the benefit. But with the fixable, non-competitive markets which have been allowed to proliferate over the past thirty years, the customer loses out to the supplier. And since the suppliers are driven by the Friedmanite rule that they exist to make as much money as possible for shareholders, it’s the shareholders who really gain at the expense of customers. But since shareholdings are largely controlled by financial intermediaries, investment banks, hedge funds and the like, it is they who are the ultimately winners at the consumer’s expense.

But it’s worse even than that.
Continue reading The Cure for Monopolistic Exploitation →

Accounting profession, Audit profession, Competition, Globalisation, Political Decision, Regulation, Shareholder Value, Taxation

The Real Costs of Globalisation

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Globalisation reduces the cost of goods and services as their production migrates to the lowest cost parts of the world. The lower prices are a benefit for everyone and the low cost parts of the world, which are only now beginning to industrialise, gain tremendously in terms of economic growth and employment. So globalisation is a good thing, But there are some downsides. Jobs disappear in the advanced economies as production moves to the developing world. Up to now, the advanced economies have grown, bar a few booms and busts, more or less continuously, for the past 250 years in UK’s case. But the migration of jobs now seems likely in the advanced economies to be permanent and to be bringing the growth phase of their economic development to an end.

Permanent changes like this are difficult to forecast, and even appear difficult to recognise when they have happened. The initial response is to identify the change as a blip. Commentators today are identifying this quarter’s UK GDP data as indicating the end to the ‘double dip recession’. If miniscule GDP growth is recorded two quarters on the trot, commentators will surely be referring to ‘green shoots’. But it is equally likely that the slightly encouraging data this quarter is a blip and from now on, the lack of economic growth will be the steady state in advanced economies, which might more aptly be described as post-industrial.
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Banking, Competition, Corporate Governance, Economics, Management Practice, Regulation

Our future and effective innovation

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Will Hutton is courageously idiosyncratic about innovation, proposing a simple combination of general purpose technologies (GPTs) and good capitalism as the explanation for the rapid rise in living standards in the west over the last 250 years. For Hutton, the source of growth is ‘the combination of science’s capacity to transform how we live and a capitalism constantly pushed and prodded by democratic governments towards exploiting those opportunities.’ [See ‘Britain’s future lies in a culture of open and vigorous innovation’, Will Hutton, The Observer, 14 Oct 2012].

However, the massive empirical and theoretical literature on innovation presents quite a different story. Hutton suggests one exemplar GPT was the steam engine. First identified as a possibility in ancient times, drawn up in some detail in late 15th century by Leonardo da Vinci, it wasn’t till late 18th century that the first working engines were built by Thomas Newcomen for pumping water out of Cornish tin mines. Newcomen’s engine was taken several stages further by James Watt, with among other refinements, an external condenser and rotary drive which made it feasible to run the new cotton mill machinery invented by Arkwright, Crompton and the rest which had previously been driven by water power, the whole made more efficient by the greater precision of machining developed at Watt & Boulton’s Soho foundry and powered by coal made economic by the new transport infrastructure provided by canals. The steam engine wasn’t a GPT. It was an important component of a technological revolution, comprising a whole collection of fundamental innovations which, while not all strictly interdependent, tended to feed into and reinforce each other.
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Accounting profession, Economics, Political Decision, Regulation

Labour’s Balls on Taxation and Spending

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Ed Balls is talking about Labour’s ‘big strategy’ decisions on taxation and spending. He wants to be seen as ‘ruthless and disciplined’ about ‘every penny’ of public spending. Hence his ‘zero-based budgeting review’, which is really a bit of motherhood flim-flam, totally devoid of specifics, dreamed up for the benefit of credulous voters.

The real problem with the economy is lack of demand. The mass of people don’t have the money, or the confidence, to spend unless they have to. So sales are slow and businesses are similarly reluctant to invest till better times return. But the politicians, including Balls, are locked into their simplistic undergraduate understanding of the economy. That was the situation when FDR made his inaugural call that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. It’s that fear that prevents Balls suggesting anything remotely like a new New Deal. In his fear, he’d rather be seen to be ‘ruthless and disciplined’ considering chopping ‘every penny’ of public spending, rather than proposing selective increases to the public spend to create jobs, financed by some higher rates of tax.
Continue reading Labour’s Balls on Taxation and Spending →

Bank Bonuses, Banking, Company Law, Corruption, Financial Trading

The Culture of Irresponsibility

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Just over a year after his arrest, Kweku Adoboli’s case has finally reached court. He is in the dock nominally for fraud and false accounting, but actually for losing his employer, Swiss bank UBS, around $2.3bn. Now at last, Adoboli’s defence lawyers have the opportunity to make his case. Which is: that the bank had turned a blind eye to Adoboli and fellow traders exceeding their risk limits so long as they continued to make money. That was the custom and practice at UBS, as it was at Société Générale when Jérôme Kerviel lost them over $6.5bn, and earlier at Barings when Nick Leeson lost them $1.3bn and their independent existence.

Trading in deliberately opaque securities is not based on detailed analysis of fundamental values for which the banks, having acquired special expertise, might be responsible. Decisions are made fast, on the basis of the trader’s personal conviction. If they get it right they are rewarded for their “talent”, if they get it wrong often enough, as Adoboli did, they are designated “rogues” and risk getting locked up. In an unregulated market, there’s no time for hierarchical control or responsibility to be exercised. If a trader had to get formal approval from on high before closing deals, they would quickly cease to compete. So the banks delegate responsibility to the front line, where the culture of irresponsibility rules. Much as it has among the Libor traders which Barclays and others enjoyed. The only reason there aren’t many more ‘rogue traders’ is because the vast majority of trades are now fully automated, and three quarters of them of the ultra-fast variety. Even if Adoboli isn’t locked up, he and many of his former colleagues are certainly redundant.

Investment banks (and many other intermediaries) have made massive profits out of the deliberately opaque swaps and derivative ‘products’, inevitably and deliberately creating speculative bubbles. While those bubbles are inflating, money is sucked out of the real economy of manufacturing and non-financial services, from which returns are relatively mundane and long term. The economy thus becomes unbalanced while the bubbles inflate, with the real being preyed on by the synthetic. And when the bubbles burst, the real economy suffers massive destruction. Under the current UK regime, it’s the banks which are bailed out at huge cost to the taxpayer, not the manufacturers. So real jobs are laid waste.

The Americans who share the ideology are, for all their wild Tea Party excesses, less naïvely committed to it in practice. Lehman Brothers was allowed to go to the wall, while General Motors was bailed out. Successive UK governments allowed its motor industry, among many others, to go to the wall, while bailing out its dodgy banks.

Investment banking’s culture of irresponsibility has gone viral, far beyond the financial sector. Neoclassical free market ideology dominates important parts of the academic, political and industrial nexus. Conservative Party treasurer, Lord Fink, is apparently not embarrassed to argue that Britain should aim to compete with tax havens so as to create more jobs in the City of London. Nor is he widely regarded as a total buffoon for making such a suggestion that would obviously speed up our race to the bottom, with ever more of UK manufacturing laid waste and the City accommodating ever more of the world’s financial parasites.

It really is time for a change of direction. The first necessary steps to rebalancing the economy are fairly obvious, though as noted a few weeks back, the madmen in authority may be reluctant. See http://www.gordonpearson.co.uk/06/our-madmen-in-authority-the-bullingdon-intellectuals/

Accounting profession, Banking, Competition, Corporate Governance, Corruption, Economics, Political Decision, Ratings Agencies, Shareholder Value

The Glencores, Xstratas and Blairs

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Almost 18 months ago Glencore first featured on this blog – Glencore and others are screwing the world – a posting which highlighted the predatory nature of financial monsters like Glencore. The Financial Times had reported Glencore’s ability and willingness to fix commodity prices for their own profit and everyone else’s loss and how they were expected to increase their monopolistic stranglehold in key markets. Glencore was in the news at that time because of its imminent initial public offering of shares to the London Stock Exchange which was expected to value the company at between £60 billion and £73 billion and facilitate its further expansion through mergers and acquisitions. The FT also reported how the world’s largest commodity trader had paid “almost no corporate taxes on its trading business for years in spite of bumper profits.”

The FT’s report described how Glencore had exercised their monopolistic power to raise prices in the Russian wheat market for a quick profit, at the expense of those millions already struggling on the breadline. That was revealing of the sort of business Glencore is, and the sort of business practices it was prepared to embrace in order to make its money.
Continue reading The Glencores, Xstratas and Blairs →

Accounting profession, Audit profession, Banking, Company Law, Competition, Economics, Management Practice, Political Decision, Ratings Agencies

Our Madmen in Authority: the Bullingdon intellectuals

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When J M Keynes used the term ‘madmen in authority’ he was referring to his contemporary equivalents of David Cameron and George Osborne. At the end of last year, though he talked about it incessantly, it was clear that Cameron had limited understanding of the need to rebalance the economy – see http://www.gordonpearson.co.uk/09/mr-cameron-doesn%e2%80%99t-understand/. The real business of making and distributing things for people to use and consume creates real jobs. But Cameron didn’t seem to understand the difference between that real economy and the speculative, bonus driven financial sector. He said he understood, but then always succoured up to his friends in the City.
His lack of understanding, or his duplicity, seems only surpassed by fellow Bullingdon intellectual and purveyor of the greatest budget shambles in living memory, Chancellor George Osborne.

The financial columns have recently suggested full state ownership of RBS was being discussed by senior ministers and treasury officials. It would cost around £5bn. But Osborne was against it. A rational objection was that it would mean taxpayers taking on full responsibility for the bank’s toxic debts, as opposed to the 82% responsibility they already have. But Osborne’s real reason was his dogmatic focus on cleaning RBS ready for sale back to the private sector, even though that won’t happen any time soon. Only Vince Cable has come out publicly in favour of nationalisation so as to boost lending to industry, especially innovative SMEs, in order to get the real economy moving again.
Continue reading Our Madmen in Authority: the Bullingdon intellectuals →

Banking, Corporate Governance, Corporate Ownership, Economics, Management Practice, Management Theory, Merger & Acquisition

What good are Stock Markets?

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An article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review notes that there has been a ‘multi-trillion dollar transfer of cash from US corporations to their shareholders over the past 10 years’ [‘What good are shareholders?’, Fox & Lorsch]. The City of London achieved similar disinvestment. But that’s not what stock markets are supposed to be for. The money was supposed to flow the other way, from myriads of investors into new industrial, technological and business developments.

But public companies clearly no longer need to issue shares for sale on the stock market. Their funding is largely through retained profit and more and more of them are actually being taken private where disclosure and transparency requirements are less invasive. At the same time, the fast growing small and medium sized innovators on which a sustainable future depends, and which do need to acquire additional funds for future investment, don’t find stock markets a satisfactory means of raising the necessary. The fund managers and traders who control investment in stocks and shares want fast, low risk returns. But returns from SME innovators, even though they may be exciting and sustainable, are unacceptably long term.
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Banking, Company Law, Competition, Corporate Governance, Economics, Management Practice, Merger & Acquisition

What will replace the public company?

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The public company, the corporate form that Chandler once described as the most powerful institution in the economy and which made industrialisation possible, is rapidly becoming an endangered species. Over the past decade the number of public companies in the UK has almost halved and declined by 38% in the United States. Similarly, the number of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) has declined by over two thirds, and in the case of SMEs by more than 80%.

These statistics are quoted in a recent article in The Economist which puts the rapid decline down to the over regulation of public companies. This is the only explanation available that fits The Economist’s free market dogma. The article cites the case of Boots the Chemist as an exemplar of how ‘now it is perfectly respectable to choose to “go private”’. This is a distortion of what happened to Boots. Under the leadership of asset stripping accountant, Sir Nigel Rudd, Boots merged with Alliance Unichem which was preliminary to the opportunistic takeover by an American private equity firm, which saddled the company with the debt raised for its acquisition and moved its registration to a tax avoiding canton in Switzerland. What part of that sad story is ‘perfectly respectable’ is open to debate. The result is that a great British company was raped and pillaged for the benefit of a small number of individuals, mainly in an American private equity limited liability partnership.
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Corporate Governance, Economic History, Economics, Free Market Capitalism, Management Practice, Shareholder Value

The Defunct Professor Friedman?

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‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Practical men, say, like Bob Diamond. You can’t get much more practical than a man of limited intellect who takes from his place of work £17m a year, less a bit for having led a banking operation now officially recognized for its lack of ‘skill, care and diligence’, not to mention its criminal fixing of international money markets. Bob, himself, admitted his favourite economist is none other than Milton Friedman of the Austro-Chicago school of laissez faire, free marketeers.

Friedman’s influence still dominates government, finance and business, not just billionaire bankers. When he first came to the fore it was as a monetarist. The way to a small government and light touch regulation was to grant maximum freedom within a tightly controlled framework: the quantity of money in circulation. According to Friedman ‘too much money chasing too few goods’ would inevitably cause inflation. With Thatcher and Reagan, that simple aphorism replaced the Keynesian economics that had ruled since the second world war. But it didn’t work. There were too many unknowns about the quantity of money and the velocity of its circulation, and that rendered monetarist policy ineffective. Friedman himself expressed his disappointment at the ineffectiveness of monetarist policy.
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