Category: Economics, Business, & Work

The freshman House representative Ro Khanna wants to see a broad rethinking of how the government evaluates mergers like Amazon-Whole Foods.

Source: The Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna Takes On the Amazon-Whole Foods Merger – The Atlantic

the FTC and DOJ need to consider all of these factors and make a holistic determination: Is a merger on balance helping wages, jobs, investment for innovation, and prices? Or is it, on balance, not?

And the problem of the current antitrust legislation is that it’s just a litmus test on prices and doesn’t consider all these other equally important factors. And that’s really the philosophical debate between Brandeis and the consensus all the way from Theodore Roosevelt versus the shift to free-market absolutism that Robert Bork enabled.

Source: Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.

like AWS, the key to profitability is having a first-and-best customer able to utilize the massive investment necessary to build the service out in the first place

Source: Why I Dissented – Neel Kashkari – Medium (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis)

In summary, I dissented because the key data I look at to assess how close we are to meeting our dual mandate goals haven’t changed much at all since our prior meeting. We are still coming up short on our inflation target, and the job market continues to strengthen, suggesting that slack remains. Once the data do support a tightening of monetary policy, I would prefer the next policy move by the FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] to be publishing a detailed plan that explains how and when we will begin to normalize our balance sheet. Once we put that plan in place, and we see the market reaction to it, we can return to using the federal funds rate to remove monetary accommodation when the data call for it.
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Monetary policy is currently somewhat accommodative. There don’t appear to be urgent financial stability risks at the moment. There is great uncertainty about the fiscal outlook. The global environment seems to have a fairly typical level of risk. From a risk management perspective, we have stronger tools to deal with high inflation than low inflation. Looking at all this together led me to vote against a rate increase.

I know—for over 20 years, I helped craft some extremely generous executive-compensation packages.

Source: How Companies Actually Decide What to Pay CEOs – The Atlantic, by Steven Clifford, author of The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It

In 2014, 500 of the highest-paid senior executives at U.S. companies made nearly 1,000 times as much money as the average American worker, after taking into account salary, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. … Through the 1970s—when the ratio of CEOs’ pay to that of the average worker was much lower, at somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1—the lodestar was “internal equity,” or how an executive’s pay compared with that of other employees in the company. A nascent industry, executive-compensation consulting, changed this. Consultants recommended switching to “external equity,” meaning compensation would be based on what other CEOs were paid.

every board I have ever sat on or researched benchmarked itself at the 50th, 75th, or 90th percentile, therefore targeting CEO pay at similarly exalted levels. Benchmarking below the 50th percentile says, We are a lousy company and don’t even aspire to be better. So in this sense all CEOs are above average: To be benchmarked at or above the 50th percentile, they need not do anything other than report to a board that considers its own company exceptional.

Around the world, a generational divide is worsening.

Source: The Old Are Eating the Young – Bloomberg, by Satyajit Das

Central to the issue is that the rapid rise in living standards and prosperity of the past 50 years has been largely based on rising debt levels, ignoring the costs of environmental damage and misallocation of scarce resources.

A 2010 study from the International Monetary Fund found that in the U.S. the lifetime tax burden was positive (tax paid was less than benefits received) for all age cohorts above 18 years, with the largest benefit accruing to those over age 50. But the figure for future generations is negative (benefits received will be less than taxes paid), meaning they’ll have to meet the obligations of their elders.