Sad to say goodbye to this, but I’m not blogging here anymore. The good news is that I am doing a free substack newsletter called The Social Factor here.Read more…
Airline turnout
Wizz Air had its AGM this week. Once again very low turnout, due to disenfranchisement of non-EU shareholders in order to meet ownership & control requirements. This is of course an issue across the sector (and TUI had other issues this year), so I…Read more…
Immortal engines
I liked this from David Runciman’s book How Democracy Ends:“Many of the things that we fret about when we imagine a future world of Als are the same worries that have been harboured about corporations for centuries.“Corporations are man-made monsters. …Read more…
You can’t take politics out of ESG
Over recent months I’ve seen various pieces about what ESG / RI ‘really’ is. One of the principal areas of quite profound disagreement is whether it is about values or value. Some contend that it is simply about good risk management in the pursuit of f…Read more…
Takeovers versus turnout
At the back end of 2020 I wrote something about the impact of the merger arbitrage trade and some of the stewardship issues related to it. Looking back, one rather fundamental stewardship issue that I hadn’t considered was the impact on voting tur…Read more…
All or nothing
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the tendency to try and force issues or ideas into either/or boxes. I don’t why I’m more aware of it lately, but I seem to see it everywhere. Most often it appears in assessments of events – either This Will…Read more…
Markets without consumers
Last week the FCA confirmed that it will ban the so-called ‘loyalty penalty’, where existing customers end up paying more than new ones, in relation to house and motor insurance. This feels like quite a significant intervention to me.
It’s interesting …Read more…
I am (financial) legend
They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man. Abruptly that realization joined wit…Read more…
Corporate control on the cheap revisited
A few months back I blogged about the role of hedge funds and banks during takeovers and the potential for the combination to have a significant impact on the outcome. Here I just want to add a little sprinkle of detail from the current situation facin…Read more…
Getting Blackrock to do things…
Just a quick post. I increasingly find myself thinking that the focus amongst campaigners on trying to move the giant asset managers, and Blackrock in particular, represents a failure to think things through.
There are a number of overlapping aspects t…Read more…
The costs of loyalty
I’ve blogged a couple of times previously about the peculiar messaging around consumer ‘loyalty’. The repeated used of the phrase ‘loyalty penalty’, and the message that ‘loyalty doesn’t pay’ from both consumer groups and regulators feels very odd to m…Read more…
Corporate control on the cheap?
A couple of years ago, I got into the guts of the Melrose Industries hostile takeover of GKN. This deal squeaked through, despite it being opposed by GKN employees.
The bit of it that particularly interested me was the role of hedge funds doing the mer…Read more…
Meat is murder
One of the things we’ve doing at work since the pandemic hit is looking at the spread of Covid in the workplace, in particular in food processing. My colleague Alice Martin wrote a really good research note on the sector which we published back in Sept…Read more…
Working from home, working in fear
[There is a] religious element [in attitudes toward work]: the idea that dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another’s authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person.
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[T]he morality of “you’re on my time” …Read more…
Post-democratic ESG
A theme I keep returning to is the lack or decline of democracy in the small corner of world I inhabit. A long time ago, unions in the UK ran an initiative called the Campaign for Pension Fund Democracy which sought to give pension scheme members great…Read more…
Boohoo in doo-doo
Online retailer Boohoo is in the news for a lot of bad reasons. Allegations of poor working practices in supplier factories, which in turn are linked to a Covid outbreak in Leicester, come after news its had created a new incentive scheme for directors…Read more…
Politics isn’t static
Just a quick post in response to some claims I’ve seen re-emerge about the wisdom of pitching to the centre in politics. Warning: I’m obviously on the Left, so have strong priors. But I do find the way this is usually put across a bit unthinking.
To r…Read more…
Stakeholder capitalism, not missionary capitalism
This is an unusual book. I struggle to place it politically, since it both strongly advocates both reasserting the voice of the working class in politics and society, alongside quite conservative positions on issues like immigration. According to Wikip…Read more…
Concentration, alignment and pre-distribution
Like most people, I’m not really clear at what stage we are in the Covid-19 outbreak. Confused briefing to the papers (and a new strap line that doesn’t include “Stay Home”) suggests to me that in general the government *is* easing the lockdown de fact…Read more…
Crisis pressure points
Clearly there are areas where the Covid-19 shutdown is going to have a bigger impact than others.
I won’t bother rehashing stories about what’s happening to retailers etc. but there are a few things that I think are worth clocking from the past week. …Read more…