Quote(s)

"Only the impotent are pure." - Gough

In Attendance

• Wibbly
• McCool
• Gob
• The Colonel
• Tholf the Redeemer

Alternative Titles

• The Ruggle is Streal
• Immiserating

RIP

• Human Decency

F.U.

Boeing and their programmers

Lower interest rates, lower taxes, and still the Australian economy is cooked.

Democracy Sausage

New GG. David Hurley. Another military man. But why?

Things

Morals and Ethics https://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals

Fish vs Phish https://www.diffen.com/difference/Fish_vs_Phish

Stock Buybacks

"most fraud is legal"

FU on "more money than they know what to do with"

https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-jackson-061118

"Basic corporate-finance theory tells us that, when a company announces a stock buyback, it is announcing to the world that it thinks the stock is cheap. That announcement, and the firm's open-market purchasing activity, often causes the company's stock price to jump, so the SEC has adopted special rules to govern buybacks. Those rules, first adopted in 1982, provide companies with a safe harbor from securities-fraud liability if the pricing and timing of buyback-related repurchases meet certain conditions..."

Continuing on the basic corporate-finance theory theme - not just announcing that stock is cheap, but also telling the market that it has not better/higher return use for its cash. Eg if Google does a stock buy-back, it's saying "Sorry, guys, we couldn't find anything with a high enough rate of return to do with this cash. So you can have it back, OK?". The benchmark rate of return that you'd use would likely be the inferred require rate of return on equity, ie r(equity) = Rf + Beta(Rm-Rf), where Rf is the risk free rate (treasury bond or bill rate for a similar hold period), Beta is the correlation of stock price to the general market, Rm is the expected return on the general market.

Maximising Shareholder Value

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV5XaRco7ag

Practically unheard of at the end of the 1970s - and yet completely embedded into corporate boardrooms, and business schools, and general discourse in the United States by the end of the 1980s - was the concept of "maximising shareholder value"

Immiserating

John Hempton https://www.afr.com/markets/aussie-john-hempton-beat-wall-street-royalty-on-valeant-20170315-guy6g8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_lFecMjLaM

"What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves, instead, with stories - in these stories it doesn't matter who the heroes are - all we want to know is who is to blame..." https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2015/10/26/valeant-to-double-its-rd-to-do-what/#7ebe22a1bc60

"Valeant invests on average less than 3% of its total revenue on R&D. PhRMA member companies on average invest 20% of total revenue on R&D... PhRMA members invested more than $51 billion in R&D in 2014." In contrast, in that same year Valeant proudly invested only $246 million...

Misc

Insurance companies (and autonomous vehicles)

Risk is all about Yakutsk https://tass.com/non-political/740013

Weather

This Fox https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/fantastic-arctic-fox-animal-walks-3500km-from-norway-to-canada

Freak summer hailstorm buries cars in Mexico's Guadalajara https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/freak-summer-hailstorm-buries-cars-in-mexicos-guadalajara

'Precipitous' fall in Antarctic sea ice since 2014 revealed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/precipitous-fall-in-antarctic-sea-ice-revealed

Games (specifically excluding Chess)

Barty arrives at Wimbledon as #1

Criquette

In conclusion

A couple of weeks out of action as Wibbly will be travelling.

fin