Saturday, August 23, 2014

One door closes, another one slams in your face

Welcome new readers, also welcome old readers.  Up until now this has mainly been a politics and economics blog.  From now on in, it will also be a travel blog.  There may even be pictures!  But perhaps not.  In the meantime, the fact that I am no longer conflicted out because of my day job means I can do a few more things about newsworthy issues of the day and specific things to do with banking.

For example, our Felix's latest article on Silicon Valley deals and how they prove that banks are redundant and so on and so on. On the one hand, I agree with a lot of it, because I've always thought that M&A advisory was a really hinky part of the industry (occasional reader - not you! you were great mate! those other guys!). But on the other hand, I would read from the welter of Silicon Valley deals that have been consummated without Wall Street help, a simpler underlying truth - that there are a lot of very good companies which simply have no business being part of the public quoted capital market and that for the first time in about twenty years, a lot of these companies are not being part of the public quoted capital market. This seems like the system working, for anyone whose career started earlier than about 1997; it would be better if Wall Street had explicitly said that WhatsApp at $10bn was not a suitable investment for anyone's retirement savings, but if they Just Don't Get It and therefore Miss The Deal, then that works too. In my view, a decent next step would be to recognise that companies like Facebook (and even possibly Google) probably shouldn't be troubling the stock market either.

This isn't a slam on tech, far from it.  There are lots of really great industries that should never be quoted companies and should not have investment banking advisors talking them into and out of deals.  For example, investment banks.

6 comments:

  1. I never knew you blogged, didn't realise what I've been missing all these years.

    Who will now write "The Week In Official Documents"? Virtually the only thing worth paying for at your former employer. And worth paying for wherever it emanates from. Or is too soul-destroying to write?

    And now I read in the FT that StanChart's top economist, Stephen Green has also moved on.

    James

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  2. Thanks for opening up your blog mate. I suggest you link to your crookedtimber posts here? loved the 1st one on Switzerland

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  3. Could you please explain to a finance ignoramus* why 'companies like Facebook (and even possibly Google) probably shouldn't be troubling the stock market either'?


    *Thanks for the reading list, btw, and I really will get round to it.

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  4. @dan

    equity is at the very bottom of the pile when it comes to seniority of claims to the assets of a corporation, companies like Facebook and so on simply don't have anything resembling a reasonable enough proposition to offer equity holders in terms of useful pattern of returns and so on for it to be held in a public and dispersed way in the public markets.

    the core instrument of the modern capitalist economy is debt, not equity, and the market capitalization of companies like Google distort this fact.

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  5. Thanks, Anonymous- very helpful.

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