Natterings From Nepantla

I haven't quoted from Money Stuff in over a month, so I can give you part of Matt Levine's reaction to the news that Elon Musk wants to hire a new CEO for Twitter but also keep control of the hardware and software engineering teams:

Also if Musk does a bad job as head of software and servers, can the new CEO fire him? To be clear I would never, ever, ever want to be CEO of Twitter — even before Musk took it over, and certainly not after — but wouldn’t it be a little tempting to be CEO just so you could fire Musk? Like obviously he would then fire you, more or less immediately; you are both his boss (you’re the CEO and he is the head of a division) and his employee (you’re a manager and he’s the majority shareholder). But you’d have, like, 15 minutes. You could order security to escort him out of the building; you could put out a press release; you could tweet from the official account “Elon has been fired for not being hardcore enough, let that sink out.” Oh then he’d fire you and deny you severance and call you a sex criminal; your life would be horrible forever. But for a minute it would be very funny.

The same column also speculates how a normal human being would react if someone they thought was dead kept sending them a check every month. This is in regard to an enforcement action against Wells Fargo, whose computer systems were poorly integrated enough not to notice that some people who were marked dead in its records were still paying of their mortgages, but it seems like a great fantasy or horror story hook.

One of the things I love about Money Stuff is that it doesn't just provide an endless stream of bizarre financial news, it will stop and explain the underlying workings at a level that even finance naïfs like me can understand. Thursday's issue leads off with a great example, explaining how a clever idea to leverage accounting rules results in lots of natural gas wells not being capped despite laws saying they need to be capped.

Item #2 in that newsletter is much less technical and explains how the naked pursuit of more money is leading large investors to demand that Fox spin off its news division into a public-benefit corporation which would be required to focus on reporting true and accurate news.

Meanwhile, over at Politico today, there is a fascinating article which, being a book excerpt, buries its lede:

As money-launderers and illicit financiers hide their money in the American Midwest, they’ve become part of the story of the decline of small-town, blue-collar America.

1. Dork Tower examines the tradeoffs of Thanksgiving meals this year. I was looking to support a local restaurant, but couldn't find one offering a take-home turkey meal that didn't include a green bean casserole.

2. FiveThirtyEight on regional variations in Thanksgiving dinners. The Thanksgiving dinners of my childhood were definitely shaped by the previous two generations of my family all being from New England. My mom loves squash, my dad always made apple pies, and the cranberry sauce was always homemade.

3. Bloomberg on where the major Thanksgiving ingredients are grown. Oregon is not an intensively farmed state, so I was surprised to see it come up so much.

Buzzfeed reports on a little-known Grubhub tactic, where it gets hold of Yelp and Google listings for restaurants and then replaces the phone number listed there with one of its own. The result is that customers trying to help the restaurant by ordering directly are still causing the restaurant to have to pay Grubhub.

TL;DR: Don't use a phone number from anywhere but the restaurant's own official site to call it.

I found that Buzzfeed article via this far more entertaining one at The Margins, describing a slightly less awful tactic from Doordash. Sometimes, Doordash sets itself up so that people can order delivery from places that don't have Doordash contracts. The fun starts when the columnist learns that not only has it done this to a pizzeria owned by a friend of his, it's listing prices significantly lower than the pizzeria charges, opening up an arbitrage opportunity.

I should explain the term "Softbank-triggered" which appears in that article. Softbank is a highly successful Japanese bank whose "Vision Fund" has become the latest and biggest source of Silicon Valley venture capital, i.e. money which gets shoveled into money-losing companies in the hope that they can eventually stop losing money. Softbank's general investment strategy is that when Son Masayoshi, its CEO and founder, sees a company he likes, he invests an insane amount of Vision Fund money in it. And then he invests even more insane amounts of money in its competitors, causing a race to the bottom that guarantees a ton of money is essentially set on fire, plus deleterious effects on the market itself that The Margins examines later in the article.

Softbank's best-known monetary inferno is WeWork. Currently the two of them are trading lawsuits over a bailout that was planned a few months ago before the economy fell apart. The lawsuits themselves are highly technical, but the tech and finance worlds are stocking up on popcorn in the hope of juicy disclosures about what the hell any of the principals in the whole WeWork saga were thinking.

Anyway, I found the Margins article via this Matt Levine column at Bloomberg. Levine rounds out the story by suggesting how the arbitrage can be taken to the next level, if you have two businesses and a Doordash driver willing to collude, and picking up the theme of market dysfunction:

In the old economy of price signals, you tried to build a product that people would want, and the way you knew it worked is that people would pay you more than it cost. You were adding value to the world, and you could tell because you made money. In the new economy of user growth, you don’t have to worry about making a product that people want because you can just pay them to use it, so you might end up with companies losing money to give people things that they don’t want and driving out the things they do want.

The UK has unveiled a new, improved, this-time-for-real Brexit commemorative coin (after having to melt down a million of them last fall after minting them with the wrong date). But there are many other monetary ways for people to observe the occasion.

For instance, The Register has a look at a package of goodies being offered by the Conservative Party, or rather at the official description of them, because:

Sadly, you cannot do the drying up with delight on the big day itself. Deliveries of the collection (which also includes a lapel pin, a mug and a magnet that presumably repels an entire political and economic union) won't start until the week commencing 10 February.

If you can't wait that long, there's also a competition which has somehow formed between Remainers and Leavers to get their favorite music to the top of the Apple and Amazon UK download charts by the 31st.

In a Brexit thought experiment, Bloomberg looks at what British people would eat if the UK was unable to import food. Also handy for writers of apocalyptic novels.

There would be some notable gaps, but an overall nutritious diet seems like it would still be within reach.