Don't! Put! It! In! Email! The basic issue is, you are building a complicated thing, and there are lots of decisions to make, and you have lots of people involved in making those decisions, and sometimes they will disagree. One person will argue for using the size 5 widget, for safety, while another will argue for using the size 4 widget, for ease of use. Really you hope that they will frequently disagree, particularly about the hard decisions that involve real tradeoffs; if they always agree then that is a sign of bigger problems. (A lack of courage or creativity or commitment or intellectual diversity, etc.) If you hire good people who care deeply about their work, their disagreements will be passionate, and they will bring evidence and argument and rhetoric and sarcasm and hyperbole to bear to try to convince their colleagues that they are right. Using the size 5 widget would be the greatest crime against good design and common sense ever perpetrated by mankind, someone will say, if they care enough about widgets. The tone of their disagreements will probably say something about the culture of your organization. If the disagreements are passionate but respectful, if everyone acknowledges that their colleagues are brilliant and well-intentioned while disagreeing deeply on the right answer, if they can shout at each other all day while remaining friends, then that's probably a good sign about your process. If the disagreements are hopeless and cynical, if they take the form "I know no one here cares about safety but I'll just point out again that if you use the size 4 widget everyone will die," then that's bad. If you have a large corpus of these disagreements—if you save everything everyone said about every decision in some searchable format—then reviewing it will be revealing. But there is another sort of meta-question of culture that has a huge practical importance, and that question is: Are you having those disagreements in a format that is easily preserved and searched? Are you creating a corpus? Are you writing this stuff down? Because if you are, and a decision turns out to be wrong or debatable—if something goes wrong with the complicated thing that you built—then, guess what, those disagreements are going to come out, and they are going to look bad for you. Even the good ones will look bad for you; even if your culture is one of passionate but respectful disagreement among talented people searching for the right answer, the passion, taken out of context, will look bad. And if your culture is bad, that will look even worse: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded. In another set of messages, employees questioned the design of the Max and even denigrated their own colleagues. "This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys," an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017. That's from a corpus of "over a hundred pages of internal messages delivered Thursday to congressional investigators" by Boeing Co. yesterday, in the aftermath of the Boeing 737 Max's grounding after two fatal crashes. One thing to say about these messages is that the internal critics—the people who thought that the design was flawed—seem to have been correct, while the people who thought it was fine seem to have been wrong. Another thing to say about them is that the tone of the internal critics—"clowns," "monkeys"—does not seem like one of passionate but respectful disagreement; the messages do not fill you with a sense of confidence about Boeing's robust decision-making process. I mean this is pretty explicit: "We put ourselves in this position by picking the lowest cost supplier and signing up to impossible schedules. Why did the lowest ranking and most unproven supplier receive the contract? Solely based on bottom dollar. Not just MAX but also the 777X!" Added the employee: "I don't know how to fix these things... it's systematic. It's culture. It's the fact that we have a senior leadership team that understand very little about the business and yet are driving us to certain objectives. Its lots of individual groups that aren't working closely and being accountable. It exemplifies the 'lazy B'" -- the nickname the person used for Boeing. "This is a joke. This airplane is ridiculous," said another. And: "I'll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd." Many messages are even more cynical, not criticisms of the design process but celebrations of putting one past regulators. But one more thing to say about these messages is: Boy, they are in writing! After the fact—after the crashes—these messages are evidence; they are bad. "We regret the content of these communications, and apologize to the FAA, Congress, our airline customers, and to the flying public for them," says Boeing. But before the crashes, they were objections; they were, in some sense, good. (Some of them, anyway.) They had some ex ante chance of fixing things. You want people to go around saying things like "We put ourselves in this position by picking the lowest cost supplier and signing up to impossible schedules," because then maybe the person they say it to will think "huh you are right, let's choose a better supplier," and the problem will be fixed. If you think that the airplane you are working on was "designed by clowns," it is much better to say that, to the other people you work with, than to just mutter it to yourself. You should even say it in a rhetorically compelling way—"designed by clowns" rather than "slide 17 of the attached summarizes several key considerations for effective operationalization"—and in a format that they can forward to their bosses. Maybe they will. Maybe the bosses will care. In other words, if you are trying to build a good engineering culture, you might want to encourage your employees to send hyperbolic, overstated, highly quotable emails to a broad internal distribution list when they object to a decision. On the other hand your lawyers, and your public relations people, will obviously and correctly tell you that that is insane: If anything goes wrong, those emails will come out, and the headlines will say "Designed by Clowns," and how are you going to defend that? But arguably the bad thing at Boeing was not that people sometimes sent these angry critical messages, but that they didn't send enough of them: They did their angry sarcastic grumbling to their buddies, not to their bosses; they spoke out in unproductive ways that didn't go anywhere. Perhaps the lesson is, "encourage open and passionate disagreement but use disappearing messaging platforms"? I don't know. The traditional lesson is, "encourage open and passionate disagreement but only in person." "LTL"—"let's talk live"—is how potentially contentious written conversations in the financial industry often end, before they actually get contentious. My favorite example of this was when David Viniar, the former chief financial officer at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., testified in Congress about some complicated things that Goldman built that also blew up: At one point Mr. Viniar prompted a collective gasp when Mr. Levin asked him how he felt when he learned that Goldman employees had used vulgar terms to describe the poor quality of certain Goldman deals. Mr. Viniar replied, "I think that's very unfortunate to have on e-mail." But he was kind of right! You do want your employees who think that a deal is bad to feel free to say that it's bad, and even to use colorful language in expressing that view! Just, not on email. By the way, famously the weirdest decision-making culture in the financial industry is the one at Bridgewater Associates LP, the world's largest hedge fund firm, where employees are (1) encouraged to disagree openly and examine every decision from first principles and (2) constantly videotaped for later review. Compared to most other organizations, disagreement is both more encouraged and better archived, although in a format that is not easy to search for embarrassing words. (Perhaps a Bridgewater employee once said "this investment algorithm was designed by clowns," but even if you had the tapes how would you find out?) It seems to basically work? Like, Bridgewater is an extremely successful business—though its recent performance is disappointing—and its founder is widely viewed as a management guru. But if you're going to do that, you have to have a very high degree of confidence that your archive is never going to be used as public evidence against you in a congressional hearing. Making the archive non-text and hard to search helps with that, but the main thing is that you have to either (1) get every decision right or (2) only make things that don't affect lots of people in crucial ways. Bridgewater is not designing planes; no one will die if its flagship fund is down 0.5% in a year; if there was a record of a Bridgewater employee saying "this algorithm was designed by clowns and will surely lead to a 0.5% annual loss," it just wouldn't matter that much. (I sometimes cynically think that the reason this works is that Bridgewater never decides anything at all, and that all the meetings they record are just about each other rather than about their investments.) But there is kind of a loss there. You want to apply the best decision process to the most important decisions! If it's a matter of life or death, it's extra important to have radical transparency and thoughtful disagreement and so forth. But it's harder to achieve. Global insider trading network I don't know. "Swiss Trader Spills Secrets of Global Insider Network." I keep reading about this global insider trading network and wishing that it featured, like, investment bank CEOs, and high government officials, and the Pope. I want it to be a secret Illuminati of the powerful, all leaking each other inside information. And it's not … quite that? It's fine, it's good, it's big, it just leaves you wanting a bit more: On Wednesday, Marc Demane Debih, a failed Swiss entrepreneur, revealed to a New York jury the secret methods he used to earn $70 million in illegal profit from a global insider-trading network. Testifying for U.S. prosecutors, he is the government's star witness in the trial of Telemaque Lavidas, the first to face a U.S. jury after a multiyear government probe of a wider alleged conspiracy. "We agree (with) each other to share inside information and rumors," Demane Debih said about his relationship with one member of the network. "If he got inside information, he would give it to me. I would trade it for him." Demane Debih has been jailed since his 2018 arrest in Serbia and pleaded guilty in October to 38 insider-trading charges. Prosecutors say he was a key player in a sprawling network of contacts on three continents that shared information about pending corporate takeovers and paid off tipsters -- from executives to bankers to an art collector. But if you went to watch the trial looking for tips on how to run your own insider trading ring, there was some useful stuff there. For instance: He told jurors he learned early on to disguise illegal trades by using other people to make share purchases, buying other stocks in the same sector as the target stock and selling off part of a profitable position before an expected share move. I should caveat that advice by saying that it didn't end up working, since Demane Debih is, after all, in jail. Still it strikes me as clever (illegal) advice. The classic way that insider traders are caught is by making large clean leveraged bets on a single tip: If you know that one company is going to buy another, the economically rational thing is to put all your money on out-of-the-money call options on the target, wait until the merger announcement, and make a large profit. The authorities know this, though, and the easiest way to get caught insider trading is by doing that. On the other hand if you buy shares of the target and five other stocks in the same sector, and then sell some of your target shares the day before the merger announcement, and the authorities do come and ask you questions, you can say "I just liked the sector, you can tell I had no inside information because I made the boneheaded move of selling some of the target stock just before it went up." It sounds so plausible. Or here's this, about Demane Debih's former girlfriend Zeynep Yenel, an investment banker: Demane Debih told jurors that in 2010 or 2011 he got information from Yenel on London Mining Plc, Breakwater Resources Ltd. and Copper Mountain Mining Corp. He testified that he traded on the Copper Mountain information and passed a Breakwater tip to his friend Nikas. He said he doesn't remember whether he traded on London Mining. Yenel wasn't aware that he was able to determine the identity of her clients, Demane Debih said. "How did you figure that out?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Tracer asked. "From asking her different questions, and I was looking at the market, and figured out which company she was working for," Demane Debih responded. It's not even an insider tip. It's subtler than that, something I have sometimes called "insider guessing": You take some inside information that is itself not enough to trade on, you combine it with public information or clever sleuthing or good intuition, and you end up with a good trade where the insider doesn't even know that she tipped you. Sardines I assume that the reason you'd buy a cryptocurrency backed by sardines is that it's funny. The idea is a little funny, the white paper is a little funny, there is a sort of sly monetary reference to the use of mackerel as currency in U.S. federal prisons, sure, fine, good one: On Wednesday, MY Sardines, a Luxembourg-based company, announced its intention to launch a cryptocurrency backed by – are you sitting? – vintage sardines. Word of the unconventional initial coin offering (ICO) prompted piscine puns, stimulated discussions about fractional reserve banking and "flummoxed one hack," according to Decrypt Media. Between the novel collateral, a white paper thin on details (who is the unnamed external auditor for the stock of sardines?) and an April 1 (April Fools' Day) end date for the sale, crypto commentators suspected SardineCoin was an elaborate prank. … Those looking to acquire the sardine cans can either go to Luxembourg and visit MY Sardine's secure fish facilities (giving "cold storage" a whole new meaning) or pay for shipping (and insurance, should they want it). But why back the stablecoin with sardines? "It's fun and the regulator was not afraid of sardines," said co-founder Jérôme Grandidier. It is true that if you back a stablecoin even with something as boring and straightforward as U.S. dollars, people will go around complaining that your coin should be registered as a security, or that you should have to get a banking license. But if you back it with sardines people will be like, "heh, sardines, whatever." Also, though, there's a charming collapse-of-society appeal to cryptosardines. If the global monetary system does collapse along with civilized society as we know it, dollars may not be worth much. Perhaps Bitcoin or gold will hold their value, perhaps they won't. But if we are reduced to a Mad Max world, having nonperishable things to eat will surely be valuable. Having blockchain-enabled entitlements to sardines stored in a Luxembourg vault surely won't be—how are you getting to Luxembourg, who will check off your entitlement and give you your fish, etc.—but as a joke about the black-swan-insurance value of cryptocurrency, it is a good one. Long-termism One popular theory is that U.S. public stock markets are laser-focused on short-term profitability and do not reward long-term visions, and that this problem is getting worse, and that if you want to build a business for the long term you have to do it in private markets where you are not subject to the short-term whims of Wall Street analysts and short sellers and high-frequency traders and blah blah blah it is just not particularly true: The combination of forces has pushed the percentage of listed companies in the U.S. losing money over 12 months to close to 40%, its highest level since the late 1990s outside of postrecession periods. … Tesla is the biggest of the loss makers investors like; although it posted a rare profit in the most-recent quarter, it has lost money over 12 months. With a market value of $89 billion, it is worth more than Ford and General Motors put together despite only four prior quarters of profit in its 12-year life. Investors who back Tesla are right not to care too much about near-term profit. They think Tesla's success in building an electric-car brand will translate into far higher sales, and that takes spending. … Tesla is part of a broader pattern. The proportion of U.S.-listed companies losing money for three years reached its highest last year in data stretching back to the late 1990s, according to calculations by Andrew Lapthorne, global head of quantitative research at Société Générale. … The shares of three-quarters of the 100 biggest companies that reported losses rose over the past 12 months, because big loss-making companies tend to be growth stories where investors don't much mind the losses. Of course one of the biggest proponents of the public-markets-don't-care-about-the-long-term thesis is Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., who went so far as to pretend he was going to take Tesla private to get away from the short-termist public shareholders who gave his money-losing future-focused company the highest valuation of any American car maker ever. The problem with public markets is not that they can't stomach short-term losses in pursuit of higher long-term value. The problem with public markets is that they have a diversity of opinion. Some people will think that the short-term losses are acceptable in the pursuit of long-term vision, and they'll buy the stock. Other people will think that the short-term losses demonstrate a long-term problem, and they'll short the stock. In private markets, the only investors you deal with are the believers. Some people won't believe in your long-term vision, but you'll never hear from them. In public markets you will, and you might not like it. Things happen How private equity can write the paycheck of a public-company CEO and not have to disclose it. Life on the Run Is Proving Expensive for Carlos Ghosn. Traders across Europe face up to the cost of failure. Venture Firms' Dry Powder Reaches Record Level. Analysis: Three Decades of IPO Deals (1990-2019). Lille's player-trading business model attracts hedge fund Elliott. Travelex Ransomware Outage Hits Foreign-Currency Transactions at Retail Banks. Japanese Billionaire Fires Up Twitter With Free Money Pledge. A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel. If you'd like to get Money Stuff in handy email form, right in your inbox, please subscribe at this link. Or you can subscribe to Money Stuff and other great Bloomberg newsletters here. Thanks! | 
♯⊗⋮ 2020 Noticias del Gran Mundo PelÃcula Completa En LÃnea released 2020. story: Cinco años después del fin de la Guerra Civil estadounid...
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