Before his latest piece of self-promotion, Boris Johnson had been in the news for making an interesting remark – “Fuck business” – in a conversation about the attitudes of corporates towards Brexit. Though it’s a few weeks back now, it seems this remar…Read more…
Shareholder primacy and utilities
A theme I think anyone with an interest in corporate governance should keep an eye on is the way that the interests of investors in a firm in relation to others are portrayed in financial media and elsewhere.
Under the 1990s model it was common to see…Read more…
Short stuff
Like everyone does, I spent a bit of my spare time yesterday having a quick trawl through the FCA’s list of disclosed short positions. Quite often these fishing trips end up leaving me empty handed, but this time I stumbled on something interesting.
Investors and labour – gaps, biases, conflicts
I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations this week about how a lot of investors (even those with some ESG credentials) actually view workers. So this is a bit of a splurge of thoughts.
A first over-arching point is that is seems like quite a few…Read more…
Ryanair: just a bit of fun
I dug the stats out of the Ryanair annual reports when it used to disclose the split between direct hire and agency flight crew. The first graph has the real data, the second includes projected numbers for 2012-2017 if the direct hires stayed at the sa…Read more…
Ryanair & employment-related disclosures
As a lot of people in my world know, there are a number of initiatives underway to try to improve disclosure by companies of information related to employment practices. This is in response to blow-ups at a number of companies that have had controversi…Read more…
"Open vs Closed"
If it’s not obvious, let me be clear that I really hate the suggestion that the “real” divide in politics these days is “open” v “closed”. In purely linguistic terms it is such an obviously loaded division – doors that are “closed” are bad, a business …Read more…
Politico commentary
This (from this) is pretty good on the commentariat:
“[J]ournalists weren’t consciously deciding the equilibrium. The journalists were writing ‘serious’ articles, i.e. articles about Alice and Bob rather than Carol. The equilibrium consisted of the jou…Read more…
Just one more thing about hedge funds…
In the middle of the Melrose bid for GKN there was a point when the merger arb activity seemed to be falling back. Specifically, the total shorts in Melrose in the FCA’s list started dropping (having been building up steadily up till that point). And o…Read more…
NEX Group takeover & derivatives
Another takeover, another example of hedge funds piling in using derivatives. In this case its NEX Group, which is being taken over by US-listed CME Group. It’s not hostile so it went to a vote and got a strong thumbs up.
I find this one interesting a…Read more…
Ownership and control
Here’s something I wrote for work…
Ownership and control
If you’re a delivery driver whose movements are monitored remotely, or doing gig work through a platform like Uber or Deliveroo, you’re already seeing the impact of technology on work. Million…Read more…
More hedge fund shenanigans
1. I had a quick Google to see if there are any more funds that use the generic blurb I’ve found in dozens of cases to avoid compliance with the Stewardship Code. And… yes there are.
Curam Capital Management:
Curam Capital Management LLP (the “Firm…Read more…
Politicised investment decisions
If you’ve spent any time trying to get pension funds to take account of labour issues, or any other social or environmental issue for that matter, at some stage you will have been on the receiving end of the need not to politicise investment decisions….Read more…
Chantal Mouffe again
I don’t agree with everything she says, but a lot of it is on the money:
Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. The frontier between the social and the political is essentially unstable and requires constant d…Read more…
A defence of capital strategies as a tactic for unions
There have been a few bits and pieces recently that I have read that critique capital strategies from a labour movement perspective. I think these are generally helpful, and having worked in this field for a long time, I share some of the critical view…Read more…
Votes on Persimmon remuneration report
I’m not sure anyone has looked at individual investor voting decisions on the remuneration report at Persimmon’s AGM back in April, so I thought I’d take a look. As people may remember, there was a large vote against the rem report, and abstentions and…Read more…
Chantal Mouffe on centrism and right-wing populism
This is from On The Political, published in 2005:In a context where the dominant discourse proclaims there is no alternative to the current neo-liberal form of globalisation and that we should accept its dictats, it is not surprising that a growing num…Read more…
Unions and public policy
Just a few links to some recent bits and pieces related to rebuilding unions. I am hopeful that the public policy discussion is moving on from simply observing that the decline in union density is correlated with rising inequality (and related issues),…Read more…
Another snippet on Inmarsat takeover and hedge funds
Just to keep this updated, there are a lot of regulatory disclosures being fired out by Inmarsat now. So I’m just keeping track of the hedge fund related ones.
Marshall Wace, which is very active on the short side in the UK, now has a 2.38% long posit…Read more…
Inmarsat: in come the hedge funds
At the back end of last week the UK-listed telecoms business Inmarsat revealed that it has been approached by US-listed Echostar Corporation about a potential takeover, which it knocked back.
As a result of the offer, a different regulatory disclosure…Read more…