There's a clause in Tesla's debt that if the share price is >$360, they can pay their bond notes with stock shares. If it is <$360, they have to pay their debt payments in cash. This obviously has a massive impact on Tesla's already precarious cash position.
It is not illegal for foreigners to own part of Chinese companies. It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest. Softbank and Yahoo invested into Alibaba relatively early on. It was incorporated in China. Their positions represented the majority of shares in the business, just not individually.
> It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest.
This is also not true. China, like all developing economies that have reached the global stage, allows WFOEs and FICEs [1]. There's significant taxes involved but these taxes are being decreased all the time .
(It's quite remarkable the stuff people believe about doing business in China. Really have to wonder where these ideas come from.)
The A11 chip's CV module is the reason FaceID works as well as it does. And FaceID was their one of their major marketing points of the X and likely the phones being announced this month.
>A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”
Usually means an obsessed superfan but have evolved to mean someone with unwavering support of a person or entity. Came from the Eminem song "Stan" about a crazy fan.
>The name of the eponymous character has given rise to a slang term online which refers to overzealous, maniacal, overly obsessed fans of a celebrity or personality; the term has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary.
>lol...maximizing shareholder value is a cause of sagging productivity?
Here's the longer paper the author wrote a couple years ago that explains his reasoning. You may disagree with his argument, but to dismiss it outright as having no merit says more about you than it does about the author or the NYT.
>Once the problems of strategic control have been addressed, the process of taking back the corporation can turn to
the critical role of organizational integration. Productivity in an advanced economy depends on the extent to which
members of the labor force have the opportunity to engage in collective and cumulative learning over the course of
careers that may span 40 years or more. Under the Old Economy business model, major corporations supported
this social condition through the norm of a career with one company, albeit almost exclusively for white males. It is
unrealistic to assume that in a world of open-systems technologies and intense global competition the norm of a
career with one company could, or should, be restored. That does not, however, lessen the need for collective and
cumulative careers as the employment foundation of a highly productive economy. It is reasonable to believe that
in the provision of lifelong learning through on-the-job experience, government agencies and civil society organizations,
including universities, will have to continue to play important, and perhaps even growing, roles. The business
corporation, however, will have to anchor a national system of career employment through a retain-and-reinvest
resource-allocation regime. Jettison the downsize-and-distribute ideology of MSV, and U.S. business corporations
can focus on becoming learning organizations once again.
>If hundreds of billions of dollars annually stop flowing out of the nation’s major corporations to do buybacks, then
vast amounts of resources will become available to provide the financial commitment that innovation requires.84 Ban
buybacks, and companies will be able to use these funds not only, or even primarily, to finance capital expenditures
but more importantly to attract, train, retain, and motivate their career employees. In high-tech companies a significant
proportion of these employees will be engaged in R&D, but the innovative enterprise needs experienced and
motivated employees in a range of other functions as well. And some of the funds made available by a buyback ban
can flow to the government as tax revenues to enable it to invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge
that can underpin the next generation of innovation.
You mean like, giving the value created by the corporation back to those to whom its original assets belonged before its success, as a reward for prudent thinking? That sounds it will incentivize valuable investments! Does he have a proposed mechanism? /s
> Productivity in an advanced economy depends on the extent to which members of the labor force have the opportunity to engage in collective and cumulative learning over the course of careers that may span 40 years or more [and this is decreasingly the case].
An important trend to consider, but the causes are totally orthogonal to buybacks/dividends. Technology is moving faster, and skills emerge and obsolesce in different ways than in the halcyon Old Economy.
> It is unrealistic to assume that in a world of open-systems technologies and intense global competition the norm of a career with one company could, or should, be restored.
Hey, he said a correct sentence! Good job!
> And some of the funds made available by a buyback ban can flow to the government as tax revenues to enable it to invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge that can underpin the next generation of innovation.
Ooh, ooh, here's an idea...let's pass the money back to the investors who will pass it on not to a company that's saying "we don't know what to do with this much money", but rather one that says something promising like, oh I don't know, "we're gonna invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge that can underpin the next generation of innovation". (And let's tax some agreed-upon amount of economic activity and use it to fund things that are genuinely better undertaken by a government)
> Here's the longer paper the author wrote a couple years ago that explains his reasoning. You may disagree with his argument, but to dismiss it outright as having no merit says more about you than it does about the author or the NYT.
I criticized him for not making an argument in the article. He didn't, nor did he link to this paper.
But sure, let's address this argument:
> >If hundreds of billions of dollars annually stop flowing out of the nation’s major corporations to do buybacks, then vast amounts of resources will become available to provide the financial commitment that innovation requires.84 Ban buybacks, and companies will be able to use these funds not only, or even primarily, to finance capital expenditures but more importantly to attract, train, retain, and motivate their career employees. In high-tech companies a significant proportion of these employees will be engaged in R&D, but the innovative enterprise needs experienced and motivated employees in a range of other functions as well. And some of the funds made available by a buyback ban can flow to the government as tax revenues to enable it to invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge that can underpin the next generation of innovation.
If the problem with buybacks is that they return capital to shareholders then you're going to have to do a lot more than ban buybacks to stop it. If you want to argue against buybacks, you need to argue that they are worse than other methods of returning cash to shareholders. Arguments that they are bad because they return capital to the people who invested the capital are arguments against capitalism itself. And by all means, if you want to make an argument against capitalism, go for it. But don't pretend it's got something to do with buybacks.
>I criticized him for not making an argument in the article. He didn't, nor did he link to this paper.
But he did make that argument in the article. It's a short-oped so he didn't make it in the same amount of detail, but it is in the article. Did you read the entire article?
>A company’s profits are, however, the financial foundation for investments in productive capabilities, first and foremost in employees. Investment in training and retaining employees is the key to productivity growth and innovation, for individual companies and for the economy.
I'm not saying the argument is right or not. I'm saying your outright dismissal of the entire premise as garbage and a meme not worth considering is wrong.
No, he actually didn't. He did not articulate the idea that buybacks cause an increase in overall shareholder remuneration. You read that into what he said, but he didn't actually say it.
> I'm not saying the argument is right or not. I'm saying your outright dismissal of the entire premise as garbage and a meme not worth considering is wrong.
I stand by it. The argument is terrible and financially illiterate, even if you grant him the implied argument you make for him.
The line I quoted was from the article. It's a summary of the argument from the much longer paper. It's not an implied argument. I repeat the quote from the article below.
>A company’s profits are, however, the financial foundation for investments in productive capabilities, first and foremost in employees. Investment in training and retaining employees is the key to productivity growth and innovation, for individual companies and for the economy.
That quote is just an explanation of what you can do with profits. It doesn't say anything about buybacks diminishing investment in R&D. Secondly, net income and profit are not the same thing. If a company is allocating more profit to buybacks, that doesn't funge against R&D or employee salaries. It funges against dividends and retained earnings.
>If you want to argue against buybacks, you need to argue that they are worse than other methods of returning cash to shareholders.
He does make that argument. He argues that buybacks incentives cause a higher % of net income to be spent on buybacks than dividends.
>We found that from 1981 to 1983, these companies spent 4.3 percent of profits on buybacks. In comparison, from 2014 to 2016, these same companies spent 59 percent of their profits buying back their own stock. Dividends absorbed just under half of profits in both periods.
Profit is not necessarily the same thing as net income. Net income is Revenue minus Cost of Goods Sold. Overall profit includes capex. If you use the 'net income' definition, then yes, he makes that point.
Ban buybacks and companies would just issue higher dividends instead. Money is fungible, and buybacks and dividends are more or less equivalent mechanisms for companies to return free cash to shareholders.
One of his arguments is that corporations spend a larger % of their net income on buybacks due to exec compensation incentives and many companies do both dividends (which tends to be continuous and a shock to the stock price when removed) and buybacks which are more isolated events.
Using his own data, which by the way, makes no attempt to control for other factors, that change is from 79% to 84% devoted to shareholder returns. That is hardly a 'save the economy' level of change, even if you grant the incredibly dubious connection.
The press derived a valuation using valuation = price paid X 100/percent equity
Those liquidation preferences mean that investors will pay more for their equity % than they would have without them which inflates the valuation estimates used by the above formula. The basic idea is that not all % equity is the worth the same amount, but it is assumed to when a valuation number is reported.
Unfortunately the piracy users for kodi now far out-strip the non-piracy users and so kodi gets de-facto associated with piracy. Just like mp3 CDs and bit torrent, when the single biggest mass market appeal for your product is piracy then the product gets associated with piracy.
Also I don't believe his intent matter for criminal liability in market manipulation.