intangible asset

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pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

In this chapter we focus on the priceless – on intangible assets. Intangible assets play a crucial role in all our lives. For most of us, while money is indeed important, it is not an end in itself. We make money for what it can deliver for us. For most people, a good life would be one with a supportive family, great friends, strong skills and knowledge, and good physical and mental health. These are all intangible assets and it is not surprising they are as important as financial assets when it comes to building a productive long life. However, these intangible assets are not independent from tangible ones; rather they play an important reciprocal role in the development of tangible assets.

If you move country you cannot sell one friend and buy another in a new place, and if the knowledge you have mastered is no longer valuable, it cannot simply be sold and new skills bought. The impact of this irreversibility is that care has to be taken when choices are made about investing in intangible assets and there has to be concern about a sudden loss in value. Just as an earthquake can render a house worthless, so external shifts can make intangible assets lose value. Yet just because intangible assets can’t be easily priced or traded doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable.2 Questions about the importance of intangible assets relative to tangible assets is a recurring theme across literature and religions.3 Take, for example, studies in the psychology of what creates a happy purposeful life.

In other words, as a country becomes richer, happiness doesn’t appear to increase and this suggests that other factors dominate in what gives people a sense of well-being.5 Of course, none of this means that money doesn’t matter. While money can’t buy intangible assets outright, you still need money and financial security to invest in your intangible assets; money helps buy gym memberships, family holidays and peace of mind to share leisure with loved ones. And just as money helps support intangible assets, these in turn help support financial success. These are important inter-linkages and getting the balance right is crucial for planning for a 100-year life. Asset-rich Given this definition of intangible assets, the list of possibilities to consider is potentially huge. For instance, there is evidence that beauty is an important asset.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Those characteristics are summed up in four S’s, namely that intangible assets, relative to tangible assets, are more likely to be scalable, their costs are more likely to be sunk, and they are inclined to have spillovers and to exhibit synergies with each other. Investment changes all the time; from warehouses and wharves to mineshafts and mills; from machine tools and dynamos to cooling towers and cash registers, servers, and solar arrays. So why should we care about the move from tangible to intangible assets that we described in chapters 2 and 3? As we will show, intangible assets are different from tangible assets in a number of important ways.

Now, perhaps the contestedness of intangible assets that we discussed in chapter 4 encourages firms to spend money asserting or protecting their claims to them. In recent years, an increasing proportion of lobbying in the United States has been carried out by technology firms; typically, these firms are lobbying in relation to valuable intangible assets they own, such as Google’s right to use its valuable data and software in particular ways, or Uber’s and AirBnB’s rights in respect of their valuable networks of drivers and hosts. The rewards for successful lobbying are very high: all these intangible assets are highly scalable and are intrinsic to their owners’ business models.

But companies that rely on exploiting existing intangible assets may look very different, especially where the intangible assets are organizational structure and processes. These may be much more controlled environments—Amazon’s warehouses rather than its headquarters. Leadership will be increasingly prized, to the extent that it allows firms to coordinate intangible investments in different areas and exploit their synergies. Financial investors who can understand the complexity of intangible-rich firms will also do well. The greater uncertainty of intangible assets and the decreasing usefulness of company accounts put a premium on good equity research and on insight into firm management.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Network orchestrators capitalize on the ability of their networks to grow organically as individuals spread the network among those they influence. Intangible Assets Require New Management Practices The surge of available intangible assets creates both risk and opportunity for companies. Leaders of digital network organizations realize that success now relies on their ability to manage intangible assets as well as, if not better than, their tangible counterparts. Unfortunately, most corporate leaders have thirty or more years of experience in managing physical assets, and five or fewer years in managing intangible assets. Let’s discuss the key differences in modern management, both the good and the bad.

Principle 2, Assets: From Tangible to Intangible The second principle is to move from tangible to intangible assets. On the left side of the spectrum are companies with physical products, very little intellectual capital, and low use of human capital, either internally or through external networks. On the right side of the spectrum are companies based entirely on intangible assets such as intellectual property or relationships. These companies usually rely on digital technology to support the scaling of their intangible assets. Those companies on the far right side of the spectrum are network orchestrators that differentiate themselves by accessing the intangible assets of an external network rather than owning and managing assets.

On average, manufacturing companies, such as the one that made your computer, trade at valuations 2× revenues, whereas companies that generate new intellectual capital such as software trade at valuations 5× revenues. Thus, the market values tangible assets and intangible assets differently than corporations and accountants do. The Sources of Value Are Changing As recently as 1975, 83 percent of the market value of the S&P 500 companies was made up of tangible assets. In those days, leaders had to focus on plants, inventory, and production. By 2015, however, the proportions had reversed. In 2015, some 84 percent of market value was now composed of intangible assets.1 Intangible assets are grounded in people. Things such as our ideas, our relationships, our advocacy, and our experiences are of great value to other people and organizations, and these assets do not diminish with use.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Drechsel (2021), Greenwald (2019), and Lian and Ma (2021) have highlighted the pervasive use of loan covenants related to earnings. And Lim, Macias, and Moeller (2020) show that after an accounting change that booked intangible assets, borrowing rose; importantly, borrowing rose after the accounting change when identified intangibles assets rose, not all intangible assets. (Assets were identified by a record of the purchase price paid for them and consisted of things like trademarks, domain names, and mineral rights.) An unidentified intangible asset was acquisition goodwill. 9. Lian and Ma 2021. 10. Dell’Ariccia et al. 2017. 11. Kaoru, Daisuke, and Miho 2017. 12. Lim, Macias, and Moeller 2020. 13.

Equally severe challenges exist not only in the financial markets and banking systems that provide finance to private-sector businesses but also in the monetary policy regimes that underpin them. Most external finance for businesses takes the form of debt. But intangible-intensive businesses are not well suited to debt finance. Intangible assets are difficult to pledge as collateral, and the winner-takes-all nature of intangible assets makes assessing creditworthiness more difficult. These realities weaken central banks’ ability to manage economic cycles by altering interest rates. The solution is institutional change in how we regulate financial institutions, increasing their ability to invest in intangibles-rich businesses, combined with tax and regulatory rules that favour debt over equity.

Its market capitalisation in 2018 was around $1 trillion. Its tangible assets, mostly buildings, cash, and other savings, were valued at only 9 percent of Apple’s market value.38 A large chunk of the rest of its value resides in intangible assets: things that were costly to acquire, last a long time, and are valuable to the company, but are not physical. Apple’s intangible assets include the knowledge gained from R&D, the design of its products, its widely trusted brands, the valuable and durable relationships with its suppliers (including both its physical supply chain and the developers who support the Apple ecosystem), staffers’ internal firm knowledge and relationships, the software in its operating system, and its vast data resources.


pages: 439 words: 79,447

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

Similarly, where an asset is financed specifically by borrowings then the actual finance cost can be capitalised as part of the cost of the asset rather than expensed. Amortisation Depreciation and amortisation are synonymous concepts. Amortisation is to intangible assets as depreciation is to tangible assets. Tangible means physical in nature whereas intangible assets are non-physical. Examples of intangible assets include patents and licenses (see Chapter 10 Goodwill and other intangibles). Optional detail Indefinite (or infinite) life assets Freehold land is not depreciated. Land is a unique tangible asset that is considered to have an indefinite/infinite life.

Foreign exchange differences arising on translation are recognised in the income statement. (f) Intangible assets The Group’s only intangible assets relate to software and the costs of its implementation which is measured at cost less accumulated amortisation and accumulated impairment losses. Subsequent expenditure is capitalised only when it increases the future economic benefits embodied in the specific asset to which it relates. All other expenditure is recognised in the income statement as incurred. Amortisation is recognised in the income statement on a straight-line basis over the estimated useful lives of intangible assets from the date that they are available for use.

We continue to be encouraged by the results of the programme, which is expected to make an annual net contribution of around £6.0 million once all the key functionality is in place, as well as making us more agile in terms of our ability to adopt further change in the future. Within Greggs intangible assets note are software and assets under development. The note shows that during the last two financial years Greggs has invested £9.8 million in software and assets under development. 10. Intangible assets Group and Parent Company Software £’000 Assets under development £’000 Total £’000 Cost Balance at 29 December 2013 1,715 – 1,715 Additions 817 2,992 3,809 Balance at 3 January 2015 2,532 2,992 5,524 Balance at 4 January 2015 2,532 2,992 5,524 Additions – 5,981 5,981 Balance at 2 January 2016 2,532 8,973 11,505 Amortisation Balance at 29 December 2013 703 – 703 Amortisation charge for the year 100 – 100 Balance at 3 January 2015 803 – 803 Balance at 4 January 2015 803 – 803 Amortisation charge for the year 454 – 454 Balance at 2 January 2016 1,257 – 1,257 Carrying amounts At 29 December 2013 1,012 – 1,012 At 3 January 2015 1,729 2,992 4,721 At 4 January 2015 1,729 2,992 4,721 At 2 January 2016 1,275 8,973 10,248 Assets under development relate to software projects arising from the investment in new systems platforms. 2 Cash versus accruals accounting ‘Remember that credit is money.’


pages: 353 words: 88,376

The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak: The Terms You Need to Know to Talk Like Cramer, Think Like Soros, and Buy Like Buffett by Jack (edited By) Guinan

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, passive investing, performance metric, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, statistical model, time value of money, transaction costs, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In an acquisition, the amount paid for the company over book value usually accounts for the target firm’s intangible assets. Investopedia explains Goodwill Goodwill is seen as an intangible asset on the balance sheet because it is not a physical asset such as buildings and equipment. Goodwill typically reflects the value of intangible assets such as a strong brand name, good customer relations, good employee relations, and patents or proprietary technology. Related Terms: • Balance Sheet • Book Value • Generally Accepted Accounting Principles—GAAP • Intangible Asset • Tangible Asset Gordon Growth Model What Does Gordon Growth Model Mean?

Also, many IPOs are issued by companies going through a transitory growth period and are subject to additional uncertainty about their future values. Related Terms: • Equity • Private Equity • Underwriter • Investment Bank • Stock 140 The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak Intangible Asset What Does Intangible Asset Mean? A company’s nonphysical assets, such as intellectual property (items such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and business methodologies), goodwill, and brand recognition; an intangible asset can be classified as either indefinite or definite. A company’s brand name is considered an indefinite asset, as it stays with the company as long as the company continues operations.

Related Terms: • Asset • Book Value • Intangible Asset • Net Tangible Assets • Price to Tangible Book Value—PTBV Tangible Net Worth What Does Tangible Net Worth Mean? A measure of the physical worth of a company minus any value derived from intangible assets such as copyrights, patents, and intellectual property. Tangible net worth is calculated by taking a firm’s total tangible assets and subtracting the value of all liabilities and intangible assets. Tangible net worth is calculated as shown here: Tangible Net Worth = Total Assets − Liabilities − Intangible Assets Investopedia explains Tangible Net Worth In personal finance, tangible net worth is the sum of all of a person’s tangible assets (cash, home, cars, etc.) minus any liabilities that person may have.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

With 1.49 billion active monthly users, the value of each active account is about $211. 11 “Ocean Tomo Releases 2015 Annual Study of Intangible Asset Market Value,” Ocean Tomo Insights Blog, 05 March 2015, www.oceantomo.com/blog/2015/03-05-ocean-tomo-2015-intangible-asset-market-value/. 12 “Asset,” Merriam-Webster, accessed 09 February 2017, www.merriam-webster.com/ C:\Users\dlaney\Google Drive\InfonomicsBook\Manuscript\Merriam-Webster. http:\www.merriam-webster.com\dictionary\asset. 13 Investopedia Staff, “Asset,” Investopedia, 01 April 2016, www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp. 14 “Statement of Financial Accounting, Concepts No. 6, Elements of Financial Statements, a Replacement of FASB Concepts Statement No. 3 (Incorporating an Amendment of FASB Concepts Statement No. 2),” Financial Accounting Standards Board, December 1985, www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/792/293/CON6.pdf. 15 “The Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting,” IFRS Foundational Staff, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/Conceptual%20Framework.pdf. 16 “IAS 38—Intangible Assets,” IASPlus, Deloitte, www.iasplus.com/en/standards/ias/ias38. 17 Additionally, information meets each of the IFRS criteria for intangible assets. 18 “Technical Summary, IAS 38 Intangible Assets,” IFRS, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/IAS%2038.pdf. 19 IFRS criteria for intangible assets include: a) an intention to complete and use or sell it, b) an ability to use or sell it, c) it will generate probable future economic benefits and/or there is a market for it, d) an ability to measure reliably the expenditure attributable to it during its development. 20 “Technical Summary, IAS 38 Intangible Assets,” IFRS, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/IAS%2038.pdf. 21 It is generally understood that “similar items in substance” includes information assets. 22 “International Financial Reporting Standard 3, Business Combinations,” IFRS, 18 February 2011, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/accounting/docs/consolidated/ifrs3_en.pdf. 23 “Discussion Paper, Initial Accounting for Internally Generated Intangible Assets,” The Office of the Australian Accounting Standards Board, 2008, www.saica.co.za/Portals/0/Trainees/documents/DPInitialAccountingInternallyGeneratedIntangibleAssets.pdf. 24 “FASB Invitation to Comment, Agenda Consultation: Financial Accounting Standards Board,” FASB, 04 August 2016, www.fasb.org/cs/ContentServer?

To further establish the control aspect of an asset, accounting standards require the condition that it is identifiable. This applies specifically to intangible assets wherein there is some question of separability—meaning that they are not inexorably bound to another asset or unable to be quantified. International Accounting Standard 38 (IAS 38) details the requirements for identifying and capitalizing intangible assets. It defines intangible assets as “non-monetary assets which are without physical substance.” The standard further specifies that recognizable intangibles must be “identifiable (either being separable or arising from contractual or other legal rights).”

But we are no longer in the industrial age.4 Elliot suggested that in order for the U.S. to maintain its advantage, it must move to the “next plateau of transparency,” as he called it. Over a decade and a half since this hearing, what has been done to improve transparency or to formally account for information and other intangible assets while the economy has become ever more digital? Not much, according to Tom Linsmeier, retiring board member of Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), who said: “[T]he current accounting model fails to provide much information on most internally developed intangible assets, resulting in an often-increasing market to book ratio for these organizations and leaving users with little financial reporting information to make their valuation assessments.”5 Irrespective of what accountants say or do, Linsmeier told me, “Accounting standards boards should be asking for an increased disclosure of internally-generated assets.”6 Here we are in the midst of the Information Economy, and the eponymous major source of value in that economy is considered valueless by the custodians of what constitutes value!


pages: 892 words: 91,000

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The DTA for tax loss carryforwards ($600 million) shows up as a nonoperating asset and should be valued separately. The deferred-tax liability related to the acquired intangibles ($2,050 million) is treated as an offset to the intangible asset itself, since the asset was grossed up for hypothetical taxes when the asset was created. Why net deferred taxes for intangible assets against acquired intangibles? When a company buys another company, it typically recognizes intangible assets for intangibles that are separable and identifiable (such as patents). These intangible assets are amortized over their estimated life on the GAAP income statement, but since the amortization is not deductible in most countries for tax purposes, a mismatch will occur.

REORGANIZING THE ACCOUNTING STATEMENTS: IN PRACTICE 185 EXHIBIT 9.8 UPS: Deferred-Tax Assets and Liabilities $ million Reported in UPS 10-K, note 12 Reorganized financials 2011 2012 2013 Assets Pension and postretirement benefits Loss and credit carryforwards Insurance reserves Vacation pay accrual Stock compensation Other deferred-tax assets Deferred-tax assets 2,106 259 696 208 211 635 4,115 4,608 258 737 209 159 708 6,679 3,086 279 765 224 70 709 5,133 Valuation allowance Deferred-tax assets, net (205) 3,910 (220) 6,459 (251) 4,882 Liabilities Property, plant, and equipment Intangible assets, capitalized software 1 Intangible assets, acquired 2 Other Deferred-tax liabilities Net deferred-tax assets (liabilities) 2011 2012 2013 259 (205) 54 258 (220) 38 279 (251) 28 Operating deferred taxes Loss and credit carryforwards Valuation allowance Loss and credit carryforwards, net of taxes Insurance reserves Vacation pay accrual Stock compensation Other deferred-tax assets Property, plant, and equipment Intangible assets, capitalized software1 Other deferred-tax liabilities Operating deferred-tax assets (liabilities) 696 737 765 208 209 224 211 159 70 635 708 709 (3,607) (3,624) (3,613) (878) (969) (1,023) (554) (617) (651) (3,235) (3,359) (3,491) Nonoperating deferred taxes Pension and postretirement benefits 2,106 4,608 3,086 Intangible assets, tax gross-up Intangible assets, acquired2 (73) (66) (93) Net deferred-tax assets (liabilities) (1,202) 1,183 (498) (3,607) (3,624) (3,613) (878) (969) (1,023) (73) (66) (93) (554) (617) (651) (5,112) (5,276) (5,380) (1,202) 1,183 (498) 1 Estimated at the marginal tax rate times capitalized software. 2 Estimated at the marginal tax rate times acquired intangibles.

REORGANIZING THE ACCOUNTING STATEMENTS: IN PRACTICE 185 EXHIBIT 9.8 UPS: Deferred-Tax Assets and Liabilities $ million Reported in UPS 10-K, note 12 Reorganized financials 2011 2012 2013 Assets Pension and postretirement benefits Loss and credit carryforwards Insurance reserves Vacation pay accrual Stock compensation Other deferred-tax assets Deferred-tax assets 2,106 259 696 208 211 635 4,115 4,608 258 737 209 159 708 6,679 3,086 279 765 224 70 709 5,133 Valuation allowance Deferred-tax assets, net (205) 3,910 (220) 6,459 (251) 4,882 Liabilities Property, plant, and equipment Intangible assets, capitalized software 1 Intangible assets, acquired 2 Other Deferred-tax liabilities Net deferred-tax assets (liabilities) 2011 2012 2013 259 (205) 54 258 (220) 38 279 (251) 28 Operating deferred taxes Loss and credit carryforwards Valuation allowance Loss and credit carryforwards, net of taxes Insurance reserves Vacation pay accrual Stock compensation Other deferred-tax assets Property, plant, and equipment Intangible assets, capitalized software1 Other deferred-tax liabilities Operating deferred-tax assets (liabilities) 696 737 765 208 209 224 211 159 70 635 708 709 (3,607) (3,624) (3,613) (878) (969) (1,023) (554) (617) (651) (3,235) (3,359) (3,491) Nonoperating deferred taxes Pension and postretirement benefits 2,106 4,608 3,086 Intangible assets, tax gross-up Intangible assets, acquired2 (73) (66) (93) Net deferred-tax assets (liabilities) (1,202) 1,183 (498) (3,607) (3,624) (3,613) (878) (969) (1,023) (73) (66) (93) (554) (617) (651) (5,112) (5,276) (5,380) (1,202) 1,183 (498) 1 Estimated at the marginal tax rate times capitalized software. 2 Estimated at the marginal tax rate times acquired intangibles. pensions), debt (such as implicit interest), or debt equivalents (such as restructuring expenses). 3. Intangible assets, gross-up: As discussed earlier, deferred-tax liabilities related to amortization of acquired intangibles should be netted against acquired intangibles.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

At its peak, it accounted for about two-thirds of Helsinki’s stock exchange market capitalization, almost half of corporate research and development, and about 20 percent of Finnish exports.d We should be careful, then, when comparing consolidated firm revenues (including foreign sales) to domestic GDP. Finally, the Intangible Assets hypothesis contains several ideas. Intangible assets are nonphysical in nature. They include intellectual property, like patents and copyrights, but extend to vague or fuzzy assets, such as brand recognition. Economists Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly (2018) argue that industry leaders are often firms that are very good at producing intangible assets. In fact, they argue that this is how they became leaders in the first place. The attractive feature of a theory of intangible assets is that it can explain concentration both through increasing productivity (superstar firms) and through decreasing domestic competition since intangible assets can create barriers to entry.

A significant share of today’s capital is intangible. It includes patents, software, chemical formulas, databases, artistic value, special employee training, design, processes, and brand recognition. Intangible assets are not just about information technologies, however. Some intangible assets rely on computers—software and databases—but some are embedded in people, organizations, and brands. Intangible assets are also important in classic, “old-fashioned” manufacturing industries. Economists are pretty good at measuring tangible investment. Tangible assets are usually purchased from another firm, as opposed to produced internally.

FIGURE 3.2  Turnover at the top. See text for details. Figures 3.2 and 3.3 are consistent with decreasing domestic competition. They are also consistent with the hypotheses of the rise of superstar firms and the role of intangible assets if we assume that the comparative advantages of leaders have become more persistent. Why that would be the case is unclear, however. I have often heard arguments that intangible assets are subject to higher increasing returns to scale than tangible assets, but I have not seen convincing evidence that this is the case. In fact, I will show later that standard estimates of returns to scale have not changed much over the past twenty years.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

It mandates the immediate expensing of practically all internally generated research and development efforts.4 And not just R&D. Practically all other internal investments in intangible assets—brands, know-how, business systems—are immediately expensed. The folly of this wide-ranging accounting rule is made clear by looking once more at Figure 8.1 (p. 82) portraying the total corporate investment in tangible and intangible assets. Ironically, most of the investments reflected by the fast-rising So, What to Do with Accounting? A Reform Agenda 215 curve—intangible assets—are denied assets status by accountants, whereas those on steep decline—tangible assets—proudly populate corporate balance sheets.

To avoid undue reader suspense, here are, in essence, the three major reasons for accounting’s relevance lost: 1. The inexplicable accounting treatment of intangible assets—the dominant creators of corporate value. Something remarkable happened to the US economy, and to varying degrees of similarity to other developed countries, in the past four decades: While aggregate US investment in tangible assets (things you can touch, like property, 77 78 WHY IS THE RELEVANCE LOST? plant and equipment, inventory, etc.) has decreased by over a third, corporate investment in intangible assets (patents and know-how, brands, information and business systems, and human capital) rose by almost 60 percent, from 9 percent to 14 percent of gross value added.

This creates a widening chasm between firms’ values, as reflected by share prices, and financial data—a chasm that is partially responsible for the declining association between financial information and share prices, which we have documented in Part I. The three usefulness-diminishing factors we just outlined are not conjectures; nor are they speculation. In what follows, we will empirically prove, for the first time, that these three factors or causes— intangible assets, accounting estimates, and unrecorded business events—are primarily responsible for the deterioration in the usefulness of financial information. We will also show that the impact of each of the three factors has increased over time, mirroring the documented decrease in the usefulness of financial information.


Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, stock buybacks, the long tail, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

To be sure, if a company wrote off a billion dollars’ worth of goodwill, its ratio of assets to liabilities declined. Its ratio of tangible assets to liabilities did not change, however. The rating agencies monitored both ratios but had customarily attached greater significance to the version that ignored intangible assets such as goodwill. HOW GOOD IS GOODWILL? By maintaining a skeptical attitude to the value of intangible assets throughout the New Economy excitement of the late nineties, Moody's and Standard & Poor's were bucking the trend. The more stylish view was that balance sheets constructed according to GAAP seriously understated the value of corporations in dynamic industries such as computer software and e-commerce.

On the whole, the rating agencies appear to have shown sound judgment during the 1990s by resisting the New Economy's siren song. While enthusiasm mounted for all sorts of intangible assets, they continued to gear their analysis to tangible-assets-only versions of key balance sheet ratios. By and large, therefore, companies did not alter the way they were perceived by Moody's and Standard & Poor's when they suddenly took an ax to their intangible assets. More generally, asset write-offs do not cause ratings to fall. Occasionally, to be sure, the announcement of a write-off coincides with the disclosure of a previously unrevealed impairment of value, ordinarily arising from operating problems.

If the transaction was structured as the Journal stated, the extra money paid out to Dough-Re-Mi became part of an intangible asset, reacquired franchise rights, which would not amortize. That is, no scheduled, bit-by-bit write-down would reduce future earnings. On the other hand, when the very same dollars came back to Krispy Kreme, they would be recorded as interest income. In essence, according to the Wall Street Journal's story, Krispy Kreme manufactured earnings by taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. The money given to Dough-Re-Mi to cover the closing costs also became an intangible asset, again assuming the Journal's account was accurate.


pages: 141 words: 40,979

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments by Pat Dorsey

Airbus A320, barriers to entry, book value, business process, call centre, carbon tax, creative destruction, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, intangible asset, John Bogle, knowledge worker, late fees, low cost airline, Network effects, pets.com, price anchoring, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Stewart Brand

Great products, great size, great execution, and great management do not create long-term competitive advantages. They’re nice to have, but they’re not enough. 3. The four sources of structural competitive advantage are intangible assets, customer switching costs, the network effect, and cost advantages. If you can find a company with solid returns on capital and one of these characteristics, you’ve likely found a company with a moat. Chapter Three Intangible Assets You Can’t Pull Them Off A Shelf, But They Sure Are Valuable. “INTANGIBLE ASSETS” sounds like a grab-bag category for competitive advantage, and in some ways it is. On the surface, brands, patents, and regulatory licenses have little in common.

As a result, while there are regional variations in gasoline pricing, refiners generally can barely eke out high-single-digit to low-teens returns on capital over a cycle, while aggregate producers and waste haulers enjoy much steadier returns on invested capital in the mid to upper teens over many years. One Moat Down, Three to Go Although intangible assets may be just that—I can’t haul a brand or patent off a shelf and show it to you—they can be extremely valuable as sources of competitive advantage. They key in assessing intangible assets is thinking about how much value they can create for a company, and how long they are likely to last. A well-known brand that doesn’t confer pricing power or promote customer captivity is not a competitive advantage, no matter how familiar people may be with it.

Table of Contents Little Book Big Profits Series Title Page Copyright Page Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One - Economic Moats Moats Matter for Lots of Reasons Chapter Two - Mistaken Moats Moat . . . or Trap? These Moats Are the Real Deal Chapter Three - Intangible Assets Popular Brands Are Profitable Brands, Right? Patent Lawyers Drive Nice Cars A Little Help from the Man One Moat Down, Three to Go Chapter Four - Switching Costs Joined at the Hip Switching Costs Are Everywhere Chapter Five - The Network Effect Networks in Action Chapter Six - Cost Advantages A Better Mousetrap Location, Location, Location It’s Mine, All Mine It’s Cheap, But Does It Last?


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Compare a taxi platform like Uber to a cab company that owns its own vehicles. Uber’s algorithm – its key intangible asset – is highly scalable, whereas the traditional cab company needs to add a new cab each time it wants to grow. Software businesses all follow that same principle. The upfront cost of the first copy of the software is enormous. However, every subsequent copy is essentially produced for free. If the network effect and the platform are the foundations of the exponential company, then intangible assets are the bricks that make it up. The tendency of intangible assets to help companies scale reaches its zenith when a business is drawing on artificial intelligence.

The software that runs Google’s search engine, the data that represents the network of friends in Facebook, the designs and brand identity of Apple, the algorithms that recommend your evening’s viewing on Netflix – this is where their true value lies. Economists call these non-physical assets ‘intangible’.22 The speed of the shift to intangible assets has been remarkable. In 1975, about 83 per cent of the market value of companies on the Standard and Poor 500 stock market index comprised tangible assets. Intangible assets accounted for the remaining 17 per cent. By 2015, those proportions had reversed. Only 16 per cent of the S&P 500’s value could be accounted for by tangible assets, and 84 per cent by intangibles.23 This ratio skews even further when you look at the largest firms in the world: the exponential superstars.

To figure out a firm’s book value you tally up a company’s cash, what it is owed by customers, and its physical assets, and then subtract its liabilities. The stock market valued those firms, at the time, at $3.5 trillion. In other words, traditional assets represented only 6 per cent of what the market thought these companies were worth – their intangible assets were doing the rest of the work.24 The changing relationship between tangible and intangible assets can be seen in the make-up of the goods all around us. Today, the value of a product tends to come from the early stages of its creation (its research and design) and in the later stages (the branding and service). The actual manufacturing process is becoming less and less important.


pages: 261 words: 63,473

Warren Buffett Accounting Book: Reading Financial Statements for Value Investing (Warren Buffett's 3 Favorite Books) by Stig Brodersen, Preston Pysh

accelerated depreciation, book value, discounted cash flows, fixed income, intangible asset, low interest rates, market bubble, money market fund, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, risk tolerance, stock buybacks, time value of money

While cash may be nice to have today, companies may find themselves short-handed if the funds aren’t used to purchase more valuable assets or service expensive debt. Intangible assets—net (8) A corporation might also acquire intangible assets in a given year with the aim of improving its market position; for example, Coca-Cola might patent a new soft drinks recipe. That is often a good thing. Big investments in tangible assets do not always indicate a growing business. For many companies, the growth in tangible and intangible assets goes hand in hand. As in the above case, you will most likely find this line to be negative too. That is what you should be looking for. Sometimes a corporation will sell intangible assets if the assets fail to increase profitability or if they are no longer considered a part of the organization’s core operating activities.

Capitalization is how intangibles like patents and trademarks are entered into the balance sheet. Just as tangible assets get depreciated, intangible assets also lose value if it is deemed that they cannot generate income. When intangible assets are depreciated, it’s called amortization. This is a very important category and one that Warren Buffett pays particular attention to. Since patents and trademarks provide a durable competitive advantage for a company, it is a great source of risk reduction. Additionally, intangible assets are generally unaffected by inflation. This means that as time marches on, the value of patents and trademarks increase in nominal dollars automatically.

In general, I would say that if you cannot see a company’s moat, there are two reasons: the first is because it is not there; the second is that you do not sufficiently understand the company. In either case, you’ll assume a lot of risk if you invest in the company and you don’t understand its competitive advantage. Between all the very specific moats in industries, I would emphasize the following three: 1. Intangible assets such as brands and patents are one type of moat. Disney is an example. It is a strong brand and almost everyone in the world recognizes it. To demonstrate this idea, Warren Buffett uses the example of a mom picking up a movie for her kids on her way home from work. The Disney movie is $1 more expensive than another choice, and she does not know the quality of either of the movies.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Research by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School has found that the increased transparency has helped smaller independent restaurants compete with bigger chains because customers can more quickly find quality food via rating services like Yelp, reducing their reliance on brand names’ expensive marketing campaigns.17 The intangible benefits delivered by the growing sharing economy—better matches, timeliness, customer service, and increased convenience—are exactly the types of benefits identified by the 1996 Boskin Commission as being poorly measured in our official price and GDP statistics.18 This is another way in which our true growth is greater than the standard data suggest. Intangible Assets Just as free goods rather than physical products are an increasingly important share of consumption, intangibles also make up a growing share of the economy’s capital assets. Production in the second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets: intellectual property, organizational capital, user-generated content, and human capital. Intellectual property includes patents and copyrights.

Yet, while the hardware and software spending generally shows up as additions to the nation’s capital stock, the new business processes, which often outlast the hardware, are generally not counted as capital. Our research suggests that a correct accounting for computer-related intangible assets would add over $2 trillion to the official estimates of the capital assets in the United States economy.21 User-generated content is a smaller but rapidly growing third category of intangible assets. Users of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other types of online content not only consume this free content and gain the consumer surplus discussed above but also produce most of the content.

In 1776, he noted, “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding.”25 As we’ll discuss further later in the book, investments in human capital will be increasingly important as routine tasks become automated and the need for human creativity increases. Important as these intangible assets are, the official GDP ignores them. User-generated content, for example, involves unmeasured labor creating an unmeasured asset that is consumed in unmeasured ways to create unmeasured consumer surplus. In recent years, however, there have been some efforts to create experimental ‘satellite accounts.’ They track some of these categories of intangible assets in the U.S. economy. For instance, the new satellite accounts created by the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimate that investment in R&D capital accounted for about 2.9 percent of GDP and has increased economic growth by about 0.2 percent per year between 1995 and 2004.26 It’s hard to say exactly how large the bias is from miscounting all the types of intangible assets, but we are reasonably confident the official data underestimate their contribution.* New Metrics Are Needed for the Second Machine Age It’s a fundamental principle of management: what gets measured gets done.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

In an Accenture/Economist Intelligence Unit survey, for example, “today’s senior executives see managing intangible assets as a major issue. Fully 94 percent consider the comprehensive management of intangible assets important; 50 percent consider it one of the top three management issues facing their company.”8 Someday, perhaps, intangible assets will be reported upon by companies as a part of their regular financial reporting processes, and they may be forced to create and report on analytics involving intangibles. This has also been advocated by Robert Kaplan and David Norton of Balanced Scorecard fame.9 There is no need to wait until such reporting is mandated by regulation, however.

Blosch, Gartner’s 2006 EXP CIO Survey (Stamford, CT: Gartner, Inc., January 2006). 8. Accenture, “Intangible Assets and Future Value: An Accenture Study Conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit,” January 2005, http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/By_Subject/Shareholder_Value/R_ and_I/SurveyAssets.htm. 9. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, “Measuring the Strategic Readiness of Intangible Assets,” Harvard Business Review, February 2004, 52–63. 10. We addressed this issue in Jeanne G. Harris and Thomas H. Davenport, “The Information Environment for Intangible Asset Management,” Accenture Research Note, June 2004, http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Institute_For_High_Performance_Business/By_Publication_Type/Research_Notes/TheAssetManagement_old.htm. 11.

Thus far, most quantitative analyses are about relatively tangible entities: inventory units, dollars, customers, and so forth. Most organizations realize, however, that intangible assets and capabilities are extremely important in their competitive success. For more than a decade, there have been arguments in favor of measuring and managing intangibles, which include such factors as human capital, intellectual capital, brand, R&D capability, and other nonfinancial assets. Numerous articles and books have been written on the subject, and there is a consensus that intangible assets are important to both company success and external perceptions of company value. In an Accenture/Economist Intelligence Unit survey, for example, “today’s senior executives see managing intangible assets as a major issue.


pages: 444 words: 86,565

Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions by Joshua Rosenbaum, Joshua Pearl, Joseph R. Perella

accelerated depreciation, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, impact investing, intangible asset, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, performance metric, risk free rate, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, time value of money, transaction costs, yield curve

Amortization Amortization differs from depreciation in that it reduces the value of definite life intangible assets as opposed to tangible assets. Definite life intangible assets include contractual rights such as non-compete clauses, copyrights, licenses, patents, trademarks, or other intellectual property, as well as information technology and customer lists, among others. These intangible assets are amortized according to a determined or useful life.83 Like depreciation, amortization can be projected as a percentage of sales or by building a detailed schedule based upon a company’s existing intangible assets. However, amortization is often combined with depreciation as a single line item within a company’s financial statements.

A marginal tax rate of 35% to 40% is generally assumed for modeling purposes, but the company’s actual tax rate (effective tax rate) in previous years can also serve as a reference point.79 Depreciation & Amortization Projections Depreciation is a non-cash expense that approximates the reduction of the book value of a company’s long-term fixed assets or property, plant, and equipment (PP&E) over an estimated useful life and reduces reported earnings. Amortization, like depreciation, is a non-cash expense that reduces the value of a company’s definite life intangible assets and also reduces reported earnings.80 Some companies report D&A together as a separate line item on their income statement, but these expenses are more commonly included in COGS (especially for manufacturers of goods) and, to a lesser extent, SG&A. Regardless, D&A is explicitly disclosed in the cash flow statement as well as the notes to a company’s financial statements.

See asset based lending facility accelerated depreciation accountants accounting accounts payable accounts receivable accretion/(dilution) analysis accretive accrued liabilities acquisition currency acquisition-driven growth acquisition financing adjusted income statement adjustments balance sheet capital expenditures capital structure changes management projections mid-year convention non-recurring items purchase price and financing structure recent events synergies year-end discounting administrative agent administrative agent fee advisor affiliate affirmative covenants Alacra all-cash transaction amortization acquisition-related intangible assets, of deferred financing fees, of term loan schedule, for term loans . See also depreciation & amortization (D&A) amortizing term loans. See also term loan A announcement earnings transaction annual report. See Form 10-K antitrust arranger asset base asset based lending (ABL) facility asset sale gains on limitations on losses on term loan prepayment transaction attorneys auction .


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

They need to see that you are overflowing with energy and enthusiasm for your chosen venture. Don't forget that intangible assets can be appreciable, too. We mostly associate intangible assets with business creation. A business in itself is—potentially—an appreciable asset, made up of assets that are tangible (your goods and equipment) and assets that are intangible (your brand, reputation, and knowledge). Intangible assets are all part of your business's value. Some intangible assets can actually be measured on a business's balance sheet—a company's brand, any patents it holds, and its goodwill (the amount another company would pay to acquire the business in excess of its actual net value) can all have value.

Business Creation and Brand Building Does building a business sound like hard work? It is. But it is a highly effective way of creating passive income, as well as building a potentially appreciable asset. Remember that assets can be tangible or intangible. A brand is an intangible asset. Coca-Cola's huge worth is based on its brand, not the actual value of the contents of its products. Knowledge is an intangible asset. People often forget that investing in their own skills and knowledge is a good investment. What stops many people from starting a business is not knowing what business to start. Obviously it is critical to get the decision right.

Some intangible assets can actually be measured on a business's balance sheet—a company's brand, any patents it holds, and its goodwill (the amount another company would pay to acquire the business in excess of its actual net value) can all have value. But your greatest intangible asset is…you! You are actually your most valuable asset. While you live and breathe you have unlimited potential value and an opportunity to become wealthy. And no one has more control over how wealthy you can become than you. You are your own best asset. If your house burnt down, your business went bust, the insurance didn't pay out, and you were left bankrupt, you would still have your own skills and experience. It's so easy for people to forget this after a big catastrophe.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Smart Property The blockchain can be used for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; hard assets (physical property); and intangible assets (votes, ideas, reputation, intention, health data, and information). Using blockchain technology this way opens up multiple classes of application functionality across all segments of businesses involved in money, markets, and financial transactions. Blockchain-encoded property becomes smart property that is transactable via smart contracts. The general concept of smart property is the notion of transacting all property in blockchain-based models. Property could be physical-world hard assets like a home, car, bicycle, or computer, or intangible assets such as stock shares, reservations, or copyrights (e.g., books, music, illustrations, and digital fine art).

Please consult a qualified professional if you require financial advice. 978-1-491-92049-7 [LSI] Preface We should think about the blockchain as another class of thing like the Internet—a comprehensive information technology with tiered technical levels and multiple classes of applications for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; hard assets (physical property, homes, cars); and intangible assets (votes, ideas, reputation, intention, health data, information, etc.). But the blockchain concept is even more; it is a new organizing paradigm for the discovery, valuation, and transfer of all quanta (discrete units) of anything, and potentially for the coordination of all human activity at a much larger scale than has been possible before.

A blockchain is quite literally like a giant spreadsheet for registering all assets, and an accounting system for transacting them on a global scale that can include all forms of assets held by all parties worldwide. Thus, the blockchain can be used for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; hard assets (physical property); and intangible assets (votes, ideas, reputation, intention, health data, etc.). The Connected World and Blockchain: The Fifth Disruptive Computing Paradigm One model of understanding the modern world is through computing paradigms, with a new paradigm arising on the order of one per decade (Figure P-1). First, there were the mainframe and PC (personal computer) paradigms, and then the Internet revolutionized everything.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Remember that when you revalue inventories, you are decreasing future profits. 3. Intangible assets It might seem paradoxical to value intangible assets, since their liquidation value has, for a long time, been considered to be low. It is now widely acknowledged, however, that the value of a company is partly determined by the real value of its intangible assets, be they brand names, a geographical location or other advantages. The sum-of-the-parts approach makes no sense unless it takes into account the company’s intangible assets. Some noteworthy examples: Brands: particularly hard to value but the importance of brands in valuation is growing.

When first consolidated, the identifiable assets of the new subsidiary, joint venture or associate are valued at their fair value and are recorded on the group’s balance sheet in these amounts. Intangible assets in particular are valued even if they weren’t recognised on the acquired company’s balance sheet: brands concerned, patents, software, emissions permits or landing rights, customer lists, etc. Accordingly, the equity capital of the newly consolidated company will be revalued. The difference between the price paid by the parent company for its shares in the acquired company and the parent company’s share in the revalued equity of the acquired company is called goodwill. It appears on the asset side of the new group’s balance sheet as intangible assets. This method is known as the purchase method and it gives rise to the purchase price allocation (PPA for friends and family).

To illustrate the purchase method, let’s analyse now how Holcim accounted for the acquisition of Lafarge in 2015. Prior to the acquisition, Holcim’s balance sheet (in millions of CHF) can be summarised as follows: Intangible assets 6 238 Shareholders’ equity 19 279 Other fixed assets 20 465 Provisions 1 016 Working capital 1 046 Net debt 7 454 While Lafarge’s balance sheet (in millions of EUR) was as follows: Intangible assets 11 412 Shareholders’ equity 17 563 Other fixed assets 15 318 Provisions 674 Working capital 111 Net debt 8 604 Holcim acquired 100% of Lafarge for CHF19 483m paid for in shares (CHF18 590m) and cash (CHF893m).


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

For publicly listed US corporations, this ratio has increased about 20 percent since 1970.5 Since a company’s market value represents the estimated present value of the income stream from its assets, a rise in Tobin’s Q means a rise in the value of intangible assets. Intangible assets can be benign in origin and may include a trusted brand name, intellectual capital that results from research and development (R&D) spending, organizational capital that results from an efficient structuring of production and management, or the human capital of key employees. But another source of intangible assets is government-created barriers to entry or special subsidies. The increase in Tobin’s Q surely reflects the increasing relative importance of intangible productive assets in the post-industrial information economy, but it may also be a warning sign of an increase in rent-seeking.

RegData represents a modest step forward: it analyzes restrictive text strings from the Code of Federal Regulations (words like “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “permitted,” and “required”) to estimate the extent of regulation overall and in specific industries.13 James Bessen of the Boston University School of Law has used RegData to test whether rising corporate profits and Tobin’s Q values simply reflect greater investment in intangible productive assets (as measured by corporate spending on R&D, advertising, and “organizational capital”) or instead are driven by rents. Bessen found that both intangible assets and regulation are strongly associated with the rise in corporate returns and valuations since 1970. But because investments in intangible assets have decreased relative to tangible assets since 2000, Bessen concludes that rents have accounted for much of the increase in profits and Tobin’s Q values during the twenty-first century. Further, his statistical tests reject reverse causality, namely, that rising corporate returns and valuations are leading to increased regulation.14 In sum, recent trends sound a number of alarm bells that warn of a rise in rents across the US economy.

See inequality inequality, 1–6 capitalism and, 7 folk theory of, 5 finance and, 35, 62–63 geographic, 115–23 government as source of, 11 intellectual property and, 81–84 land-use regulations and, 115–23 occupational licensing and, 103, 105–6, 108 post-New Deal, 29 prevention of through competition, 8 inflation, 2, 40, 59, 77, 111 information bias and, 136–40 deliberative politics and, 14 imbalance and, 139–40 “information spillovers” and, 114 innovation, 6 concentration of industry and, 20 copyright/patent law and, 64–65, 71–75, 167, 193n8 efficiency and, 16 financial sector, 42 growth rate and, 24–25, 186n15 profits and, 19 regulatory capture and, 17 scarcity of, 16 total factor productivity and, 78–79 institutional bias, 147–48, 170, 175 institutional weakness, 8–9 intangible assets, 19–20, 23 intellectual capital, 20 intellectual property, 64–89. See also copyright/patent law benefits of protecting, 64–65 concentrated benefits and, 131 costs of expansion of, 75–81 digital era and, 70–71 European views on, 65, 76, 195n32 information imbalance and, 139–40 institutional bias and, 149 market failure and, 68–69, 74 monopolies and, 85 morality of, 84–89, 195n32 policy image and, 141–45 rent-seeking and, 64 interest rates, 40, 51–54, 59 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 60 Internet.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As Amartya Sen put it: “The moral and legal responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace, thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments.”4 This loss of traceability and trust is a serious matter. Apart from their buildings and computers, banks have no physical assets. Their stock market value is entirely an indicator of their intangible assets—which are, more or less, a measure of the extent to which they are trusted. Until the later part of the twentieth century, other companies had a market valuation that mostly reflected the value of physical assets, such as factories and machines, but a growing share of the value of all companies in recent decades has consisted of intangible items, including the important asset described as “goodwill.”

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which has often been at the forefront of practical statistical innovation, announced that it was exploring the feasibility of the experimental compilation of intangibles statistics in a “satellite account,” which would offer a comprehensive framework for assessing this form of value in the economy. This satellite would include human capital, the knowledge captured in computer databases and creative property such as movies and music, brand values and “organizational capital” for example.21 The aim of the work is to measure investment in intangible assets, but the BEA’s report notes that the main barrier is the absence of the underlying measurements—for example, businesses don’t record “investment in organizational capital” in their management accounts, so they can’t answer questions about it in BEA surveys. And as the statisticians observe, the absence of measurements indicates that the concepts currently applied to the idea of intangible investment are fuzzy.

., 127–28 Calculus of Consent, The: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Buchanan and Tullock), 242 call centers, 131, 133, 161 Cameron, David, 288 capitalism: China and, 234; communism and, 96, 182–83, 209–13, 218, 226, 230, 239–40; community and, 27, 51, 65, 117–18, 137, 141, 152–54; cultural effects of, 25–29, 230–38; current crisis of, 6–9; democracy and, 230–38; Engels on, 14; fairness and, 134, 137, 149; growth and, 268, 275, 290, 293, 297; happiness and, 25–29, 33, 45, 53–54; historical perspective on, 3, 6, 14; institutions and, 240; market failure and, 226–30; Marx on, 14; measurement and, 182; mercantile economy and, 27–28; nutrition and, 10; profit–oriented, 18; Protestant work ethic and, 13–14; protests against, 211–13; rethinking meaning of, 9; social effects of, 25–26; values and, 209–13, 218, 226, 230–32, 235–36; well-being and, 137–39 carbon prices, 70–71 celebrities, 33 charitable giving, 33, 141 Checkpoint Charlie, 147 China, 161, 262, 280; capitalism and, 234; carbon emissions and, 63; changed demographic structure of, 90; convergence and, 122; declining population in, 98; energy use in, 63, 65; global manufacturing and, 149; inequality and, 125–26; Mao and, 10; middle class of, 125–26; as next major power, 94; one–child policy and, 95–96; population growth and, 95–96; purchasing power parity (PPP) and, 306n19; rise in wealth of, 81, 122–23, 125, 212; savings and, 87, 94, 100, 108; wage penalties and, 133; World Bank influence and, 163 cities, 308n29; face-to-face contact and, 165–68; size and, 165–66; structural changes in, 165–70; urban clustering and, 166 City of London, 147, 221 Clemens, Michael, 81 climate change, 5–7, 17, 24, 90, 238; carbon prices and, 70–71; Copenhagen summit and, 62, 64–65, 68, 162, 292; domestic dissent and, 66–71; future and, 75–83; geological history and, 69; global warming and, 57, 64, 66, 68; greenhouse gases and, 23, 29, 35, 59, 61–63, 68, 70–71, 83; Himalayan glaciers and, 66–67; incandescent light bulbs and, 59–60; InterAcademy Council and, 66–67; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and, 59, 66–69, 82, 297; Kyoto Protocol and, 62–64; lack of consensus on, 66–71; Montreal Protocol and, 59; policy dilemma of, 58–62; policy recommendations for, 267, 280, 297; politics and, 62–65; social welfare and, 71–75; technology and, 59–60, 198 Coachella Value Music Festival, 197 Cobb, John, 36 Coca Cola, 150 coherence, 49 Cold War, 93, 112, 147, 209, 213, 239, 252 Collier, Paul, 77–78, 80, 82 Commerzbank, 87 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 37–38 communism: Berlin Wall and, 182, 226, 239; capitalism and, 96, 182–83, 209–13, 218, 226, 230, 239–40; Cold War and, 93, 112, 147, 209, 213, 239, 252; fall of, 209–13, 226, 239–40, 252; Iron Curtain and, 183, 239, 252; Leipzig marches and, 239; one-child policy and, 95–96; Velvet Revolution and, 239 community: civic engagement and, 140–41; globalization and, 148–49; intangible assets and, 149–52, 157, 161 (see also trust); public service and, 295; Putnam on, 140–41, 152–54 commuting, 45–47 Company of Strangers, The (Seabright), 148–49, 213–14 comprehensive wealth, 81–82, 202–3, 208, 271–73 consumerism, 22, 34, 45, 138 consumption: conspicuous, 11, 22, 45, 236; consumerism and, 22, 34, 45, 138; cutting, 61; downgrading status of, 11; downshifting and, 11, 55; Easterlin Paradox and, 39–44; global per capita, 72; of goods and services, 7, 10, 24, 35–36, 40, 82, 99, 161, 188, 191, 198, 214, 218, 228–29, 282; green lifestyle and, 55, 61, 76, 289, 293; growth and, 280, 295; happiness and, 22, 29, 40, 45; hedonic treadmill and, 40; increasing affluence and, 12; institutions and, 254, 263; Kyoto Protocol and, 63–64; measurement and, 181–82, 198; missing markets and, 229; natural resources and, 8–12, 58, 60, 79–82, 102, 112, 181–82; nature and, 58–61, 71–76, 79, 82; posterity and, 86, 104–5, 112–13; reduction of, 105; Slow Movement and, 27; trends in, 138; trilemma of, 13–14, 230–36, 275; values and, 229, 236 convergence, 5, 122 Copenhagen summit, 62, 64–65, 68, 162, 292 Crackberry, 205 Crafts, Nicholas, 156–57 credit cards, 2, 21, 136, 138, 283 Csikszentmilhalyi, Mihaly, 45–49 Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, The (Bell), 230, 235–36 Czechoslovakia, 239 Daly, Herman, 36 Damon, William, 48 Dasgupta, Partha, 61, 73, 77–78, 80, 82 David, Paul, 156 Dawkins, Richard, 118 debit cards, 2 decentralization, 7, 159, 218, 246, 255, 275, 291 defense budgets, 93 democracy, 2, 8, 16, 312n19; capitalism and, 230–38; culture and, 230–38; fairness and, 141; growth and, 268–69, 285–89, 296–97; institutions and, 242–43, 251–52, 262; nature and, 61, 66, 68; posterity and, 106; trust and, 175; values and, 230–35 Denmark, 125 Dickens, Charles, 131 Diener, Ed, 48, 49 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (Rousseau), 114 distribution, 29, 306n22; Asian influence and, 123; bifurcation of social norms and, 231–32; consumerism and, 22, 34, 45, 138; Easterlin Paradox and, 39–44; fairness and, 115–16, 123–27, 134, 136; food and, 10, 34; of goods and services, 7, 10, 24, 35–36, 40, 82, 99, 161, 188, 191, 198, 214, 218, 228–29, 282; income, 34, 116, 123–27, 134, 278; inequality and, 123 (see also inequality); institutions and, 253; measurement and, 181, 191–99, 202; paradox of prosperity and, 174; policy recommendations for, 276, 278; posterity and, 87, 94; trust and, 151, 171; unequal countries and, 124–30; values and, 226 Dorling, Danny, 224, 307n58, 308n34 Douglas, Michael, 221 downshifting, 11, 55 downsizing, 175, 246, 255 drugs, 44, 46, 137–38, 168–69, 191, 302n47 Easterlin, Richard, 39 Easterlin Paradox, 39–44 eBay, 198 Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project, The (TEEB), 78–79 economies of scale, 253–58 Economy of Enough, 233; building blocks for, 12–17; first ten steps for, 294–98; growth and, 182; happiness and, 24; institutions and, 250–51, 258, 261–63; living standards and, 13, 65, 78–79, 106, 113, 136, 139, 151, 162, 190, 194, 267; Manifesto of, 18, 267–98; measurement and, 182, 186–88, 201–7; nature and, 59, 84; Ostrom on, 250–51; posterity and, 17, 85–113; values and, 217, 233–34, 238; Western consumers and, 22 (see also consumption) Edinburgh University, 221 efficiency, 2, 7; evidence–based policy and, 233–34; fairness and, 126; Fama hypothesis and, 221–22; happiness and, 9, 29–30, 61; institutions and, 245–46, 254–55, 261; limits to, 13; nature and, 61–62, 69, 82; network effects and, 253, 258; productivity and, 13 (see also productivity); trilemma of, 13–14, 230–36, 275; trust and, 158–59; values and, 210, 215–16, 221–35 Ehrlich, Paul, 70 e-mail, 252, 291 “End of History, The” (Fukuyama), 239 Engels, Friedrich, 14 Enlightenment, 7 Enron, 145 environmentalists.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

Current assets include very liquid items like cash and equivalents, any marketable securities, accounts receivable, inventory, and prepaid expenses. 136 Long-term assets reflect assets owned by the company that are harder to convert into cash—items like illiquid investments; fixed assets like buildings, land, or the widget-making machine example above; as well as accumulated depreciation and intangible assets. Intangible assets include things like software that was developed by the company, patents or certain intellectual property, and goodwill. Let’s unpack a few of these terms. DEPRECIATION Depreciation is an accounting tool that allows companies to devalue assets over their useful life. Let’s take the widget-making machine example above.

Instead, you, as an acquisition entrepreneur, will be looking to acquire a company’s infrastructure only so far as its ability to generate cash flow. GOODWILL Goodwill is an intangible asset that represents the value over and above the value of the hard assets. For example, let’s say a drop-shipping based, eCommerce company with no real estate, inventory, or assets of any kind generates $250,000 in earnings every year for the owner. When the company is bought for $800,000 (3.2 multiple on $250,000), where is the value booked? In goodwill. Goodwill can also be referred to as a “customer list” or any other intangible asset name that was acquired at a premium over asset value. LIABILITIES Liabilities headline the right side of the balance sheet and outline what the company owes.

If your car is worth $35,000 January 1st and $27,000 on December 31st of the same year, you didn’t actually spend the difference, you just lost value. The IRS allows this depreciation to be subtracted as an expense from the net income so that you do not need to pay taxes on those dollars that were invested in the equipment in the first place. Amortization works the same as depreciation but is applied to intangible assets like goodwill. So, you can actually take depreciation and amortization and add it back to net earnings to discover the cash generated in addition to what’s reported on net income. Principal payments paid on debt, however, 142 are not expensed by a company. A business with interest payments will clearly have principal payments as well.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

According to its preface, the purpose of the book is to enable one to read the financial statements of a business “intelligently”52 so that one becomes “better equipped to gauge its future possibilities.”53 For example, when discussing the potentially misleading reporting of a company's intangible assets (i.e., nonphysical resources such as goodwill, intellectual property, etc.), Graham writes that “little if any weight should be given to the figures at which intangible assets appear on the balance sheet.”54 Instead, Graham counseled that “it is the earning power of these intangibles, rather than their balance sheet valuation, that really counts.”55 Similarly, Graham assails corporate reporting of property values (“the same misleading results which were obtained before the war by overstating property values are now sought by the opposite stratagem of understating these assets”56), the “book value” item on the balance sheet, meant to represent the value of all of the assets available for the security in question (“if the company were actually liquidated the value of the assets would most probably be much less than the book value [of the stock]”57), reported earnings figures (“look out for booby traps in the per-share [earnings] figures”58), and more.

According to its preface, the purpose of the book is to enable one to read the financial statements of a business “intelligently” so that one is “better equipped to gauge its future possibilities.”30 The Interpretation of Financial Statements is packed with the discerning analytical wisdom associated with Graham. For example, when discussing the potentially misleading reporting of a company's intangible assets, Graham writes: “In general, it may be said that little if any weight should be given to the figures at which intangible assets appear on the balance sheet…. It is the earning power of these intangibles, rather than their balance sheet valuation, that really counts.”31 He also warns against overly simplistic methods of stock selection and encourages a full analysis of all relevant metrics.

fixed charges: Expenses that recur consistently as part of the regular course of business (e.g., insurance payments, loan payments, etc.). goodwill: Unlike such tangible assets such as cash or inventory, goodwill is a balance-sheet item that represents intangible assets such as brand-name recognition, strength of client (or supplier) relationships, and the like. intangible assets: Nonphysical resources such as goodwill, intellectual property, and so forth. liquidity: The extent to which an asset can be converted, both quickly and wholly (i.e., without a price discount), to its cash equivalent. long-term debt: Loans and financial obligations due in over one year.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The difference between a company’s book value and its market value is accounted for as “intangible assets.” It has grown from around 40 percent of the value of publicly traded companies in the United States in the mid-1980s to three-fourths of their value at the dawn of the new millennium. This is a hefty divergence. These intangible assets are considered to include brand, talent, and strategy—anything that’s not physical and part of the formal financial-accounting system. But increasingly, intangible assets are coming to mean the data that companies hold and use, too. Ultimately, what this shows is that there is currently no obvious way to value data.

Meanwhile, investors will also start to take notice of the option value of data. Share prices may swell for companies that have data or can collect it easily, while others in less fortunate positions may see their market valuations shrink. The data does not have to formally show up on the balance sheets for this to happen. Markets and investors will price these intangible assets into their valuations—albeit with difficulty, as the seesawing of Facebook’s share price in its first few months attests. But as accounting quandaries and liability concerns are alleviated, it is almost certain that the value of data will show up on corporate balance sheets and emerge as a new asset class.

Samek, “Prepared Testimony: Hearing on Adapting a 1930’s Financial Reporting Model to the 21st Century,” U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on Securities, July 19, 2000. Value of intangibles—Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes (Harvard Business Review Press, 2004), pp. 4–5. [>] Tim O’Reilly quotation—Interview with Cukier, February 2011. 7. Implications [>] Info on Decide.com—Cukier email exchange with Etzioni, May 2012. [>] McKinsey report—James Manyika et al., “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011 (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation), p. 10.


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But often the largest investments involve the acquisition of intangible assets. For example, U.S. banks invest about $10 billion annually in new IT projects. Much of this expenditure goes to intangibles such as system design, programming, testing, and training. Think also of the huge expenditure by pharmaceutical companies on research and development (R&D). Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, spent $11 billion on R&D in 2010. The R&D cost of bringing one new prescription drug to market has been estimated at $800 million. Expenditures on intangible assets such as IT and R&D are investments just like expenditures on new plant and equipment.

., accounting) values rather than market values.14 The market value of the company finally determines whether the debtholders get their money back, so you might expect analysts to look at the face amount of the debt as a proportion of the total market value of debt and equity. On the other hand, the market value includes the value of intangible assets generated by research and development, advertising, staff training, and so on. These assets are not readily salable and, if the company falls on hard times, their value may disappear altogether. For some purposes, it may be just as good to follow the accountant and ignore these intangible assets. This is what lenders do when they insist that the borrower should not allow the book debt ratio to exceed a specified limit. Notice also that these measures of leverage ignore short-term debt.

First, the true values of B’s tangible assets—its working capital, plant, and equipment—may be greater than $10 million. We will assume that this is not the reason; that is, we assume that the assets listed on its balance sheet are valued there correctly.18 Second, A Corporation may be paying for an intangible asset that is not listed on B Corporation’s balance sheet. For example, the intangible asset may be a promising product or technology. Or it may be no more than B Corporation’s share of the expected economic gains from the merger. A Corporation is buying an asset worth $18 million. The problem is to show that asset on the left-hand side of AB Corporation’s balance sheet.


pages: 1,042 words: 266,547

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

First, Mohawk had been growing by acquiring some of the smaller players as part of an industrywide consolidation, so it gained economies of scale that allowed the company to reduce capital spending and lower its working capital needs. Even more important, the use of GAAP required Mohawk to take significant charges against its earnings to amortize the intangible assets it had picked up in its buying spree. (The difference between what a company pays for an acquisition and the acquired company’s book value goes on the balance sheet as an intangible asset called “goodwill.”) These charges reduced net income but did not take any cash out of the business. All told, we calculated that Mohawk was selling at less than seven times its free cash flow, an attractive valuation.

Investment initiatives—whether new products, new store openings, or brand launches—are almost always based on detailed business plans. These plans identify the costs of such initiatives with reasonable accuracy and the benefits more fancifully. Investors can use these data to estimate the cost of producing intangible assets. Industry managers with substantial experience will be able to estimate such costs. More importantly, many intangible assets trade just like real property. Cable franchises, clothing brands, new drug discoveries, store chains, and even music labels are bought by sophisticated buyers (usually larger companies) from sophisticated sellers (usually smaller companies).

Then we add back noncash charges such as depreciation and amortization, which are formulaic calculations based on historical costs (depreciation for tangible assets, amortization for intangibles) and may not reflect a reduction in those assets’ true worth. Even so, most assets deteriorate in value over time, and we have to account for that. So we subtract an estimate of the company’s cost of maintaining tangible assets such as the office, plant, inventory, and equipment; and intangible assets like customer traffic and brand identity. Investment at this level, properly deployed, should keep the profits of the business in a steady state. That is only the beginning. For instance, companies often misstate the costs of employees’ pension and postretirement medical benefits. They also overestimate their benefit plans’ future investment returns or underestimate future medical costs, so in a free cash flow analysis, you need to adjust the numbers to reflect those biases.


pages: 301 words: 88,082

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business by Richard Brooks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, financial deregulation, financial engineering, haute couture, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, mega-rich, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, shareholder value, short selling, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, two and twenty

It was tearing itself apart in pursuit of tax avoidance. ‌5 ‌Breaking Up Isn’t Hard to Do The companies that carve themselves up and send the pieces round the world for tax avoidance Multinational enterprises have long understood that the most valuable things they possess are often not the bricks, mortar and machinery of their physical operations but their intangible assets: their know-how, patents, trademarks and brands. The profits to be made from a drug, for example, drop like a stone when a patent expires and ownership of the formula behind it lapses. Well-known breakfast cereals sell for a great deal more than ‘brand X’ not just because of the crappy toys inside the box. With the growth of international trade in the twentieth century, such intangible assets could be increasingly turned to profit not just in their country of development but across in the world.

Rights, patents, trademarks, licences, sub-licences and much else could be transplanted at the stroke of a lawyer’s pen to companies in low-tax areas that would receive payments for allowing related companies in ‘normal’ tax rate countries to use their new ‘intangible’ assets. And the international rules of the game – drawn up without foreseeing a time when multinationals would break themselves up for tax avoidance – dictated that the tax results of these arrangements must be respected. For British multinationals there remained a major hurdle to overcome. The same 1984 ‘controlled foreign companies’ laws that tackled British multinationals diverting financing income into tax haven subsidiaries applied equally to the parking of intangible assets in such offshore companies. In the same way that they couldn’t stuff these companies with interest payments reducing taxable profits in countries with normal tax rates, neither could they use them as receptacles for royalties or other fees.

The concept was refined when the body set up to administer the United States’ Marshall Plan for the post-war reconstruction of Europe – what is now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – effectively became the custodian of the rules of international taxation (as before, smoothing out the wrinkles in international taxation was recognized as an important pillar of a stable world economic order).‌3 Crucially, in its 1963 ‘model’ taxation treaty, on which countries would base their bilateral agreements, the OECD made a point of ensuring that transfer prices must reflect the value of intangible assets such as patents and trademarks. This was logical: independent parties did indeed pay royalties for using such assets, the legal protections for which were also being strengthened across the world (making them still more valuable). Or the prices paid commercially for goods reflected the technology, know-how and brands that had gone into making and marketing them.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

And they don’t have entire business models built on selling and monetizing data. But they do leverage data to increase their return on investment. It’s telling that the fastest way to become one of those top 10 percent of companies holding 80 percent of corporate wealth is to figure out how to leverage not physical assets or even capital, but the value of “intangible” assets, including data, patents, intellectual property, and networks. Companies in every industry are counting on such electronic data to spur growth over the next several years. Data-driven artificial intelligence could generate up to almost $6 trillion in revenues for companies that deploy it successfully.

Among this group, the top 10 percent (the “superstar” companies) take 80 percent of economic profits—defined as a company’s invested capital multiplied by its returns above the cost of that capital. The top 1 percent alone take 36 percent of the pie.32 We already know who some of the top 10 percent are—they include high-margin Big Tech companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google), as well as a number of others who have been able to exploit the value of intangible assets such as software, data, patents, and brands (these would include not just technology firms but also a good number of financial, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies). We also know that the network effect allows such companies to capture markets quickly and at scale, giving them what’s known in the start-up world as the “first scaler advantages.”

The key point is that users beget users, which allows the players who can grab the most market share quickly to dominate entire industries seemingly overnight. This is not unique to Google, as we’ve seen. But it is much easier these days to grab market share if you are big, and can leverage data and intellectual property across networks. These intangible assets can scale far, far faster and further than the products and services of old.33 Networked businesses are case studies in how what goes big, goes bigger still. But as Varian and Carl Shapiro acknowledge, there’s a dark side to the feedback loop: “Positive feedback [within platforms] also makes the weak get weaker.”


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Only a few rare businesses enjoy excess returns for many years by creating structural competitive advantages or economic moats. An extended period of excess returns increases business value. Competitive advantages stem from various sources, including intangible assets, such as brands, patents, and licenses; switching costs; network effects; or low-cost advantages. Intangible Assets Some brands are ubiquitous and widely trusted. Think Budweiser, Tide, and Maggi. They lower search costs for consumers and offer psychological advantages. They make prospective customers switch from a system 2 type of slow, reasoned, reflective thinking to a system 1 type of fast, automatic, reflexive thinking through mental association and Pavlovian conditioning.

The higher this ratio is, the better. A company should earn more on its tangible assets (as well as tangible equity and capital employed) than the bank’s fixed deposit rate. Pretax return on tangible equity. The higher the pretax return is, the better. Tangible equity is calculated by subtracting intangible assets and preferred equity from the company’s book value. Be cautious of companies for which the high return on equity figure is being primarily driven by higher leverage. Return on capital employed. The higher this return is, the better. This is calculated as earnings before interest and taxes, divided by capital employed. 4.

Great businesses are those with an ever-increasing stream of earnings with virtually no major capital requirements. They produce extraordinarily high returns on incremental invested capital. The truly great businesses are literally drowning in cash all the time. They tend to earn infinitely high return on capital as they require little tangible capital to grow and are driven by intangible assets such as a strong brand name with “share of mind,” intellectual property, or proprietary technology. Great businesses typically are characterized by negative working capital, low fixed asset intensity, and real pricing power. Negative working capital means that customers are paying the company cash up front for goods or services that will be delivered at a later date.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

MCC’s shares, the column concluded, were basically worthless. Far from being in profit, the company was running at a considerable loss. The moment he read this, Maxwell sprang into action, complaining the article was ‘irresponsible and impermissible’. For a start, it made no mention of MCC’s numerous ‘intangible assets’. As their name suggests, intangible assets – things like brand value or intellectual property – have no physical substance. Although you may not be able to see or feel them, they can greatly affect a company’s fortunes. But, because of their nature, putting a value on intangibles is a notoriously subjective business.

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph List of Plates Preface: The King of New York 1.The Salt Mine 2.Out of the Darkness 3.An Adventurer of Great Style 4.Difficulties With Pork 5.Mortality 6.Down on the Bottom 7.The Man Who Gets Things Done 8.Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding 9.Robert Maxwell’s Code of Conduct 10.The Lights Go Out 11.The Grasshopper Returns 12.Strife 13.Written in the Stars 14.Madness 15.In the Lair of the Black Bear 16.An Enormous Spread 17.A Very Happy Person 18.Battle Rejoined 19.Homecomings 20.The Party of the Decade 21.Listening In 22.A Glorious New Dawn 23.Crossing the Line 24.Obsessed 25.Three Departures 26.What Have I Done to Deserve That? 27.Intangible Assets 28.Légumes du Maurier 29.Selling the Crown Jewels 30.Don’t You Worry About a Thing 31.Hurricane Bob 32.A Long Way Down 33.Lost 34.Found 35.The First Autopsy 36.A Hero of Our Time 37.The Second Autopsy 38.The Four Horsemen 39.Everything Must Go 40.The March of Time 41.Curtain Call 42.A True Scotsman Acknowledgements A Note on Sources Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher List of Plates here Maxwell being presented with the Military Cross by Field-Marshal Montgomery in March 1945.

This time Maxwell told her to meet him in Lesbos – a day’s sail away. Off she went once more, but he never showed up there either. For a fourth time she tried. He would definitely be waiting for her in Ephesus on the Turkish coast, Maxwell said. The yacht duly set sail. He never appeared. 27. Intangible Assets Maxwell Communications Press Information. 4 June 1990. MAXWELL INSTITUTE TO BOOST PEACE The Gorbachev–Maxwell Institute of Technology was launched in America yesterday by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The Institute of Global Technology will be an international centre for American, Soviet and European scientists and engineers to conduct research into problems ranging from food and health to global warming and communication.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

—John Maynard Keynes, 1930 The individual technologies and the broader technological acceleration discussed in Chapter 2 are creating enormous value. There is no question that they increase productivity, and thus our collective wealth. But at the same time, the computer, like all general purpose technologies, requires parallel innovation in business models, organizational processes structures, institutions, and skills. These intangible assets, comprising both organizational and human capital, are often ignored on companies’ balance sheets and in the official GDP statistics, but they are no less essential than hardware and software. And that’s a problem. Digital technologies change rapidly, but organizations and skills aren’t keeping pace.

You don’t have to be an ardent Keynesian to believe that the best time to make these investments is when there is plenty of slack in the labor market. 11. Increase funding for basic research and for our preeminent government R&D institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a renewed focus on intangible assets and business innovation. Like other forms of basic research, these investments are often underfunded by private investors because of the spillovers they create. Laws, Regulations, and Taxes 12. Preserve the relative flexibility of American labor markets by resisting efforts to regulate hiring and firing.


pages: 219 words: 15,438

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

It is recorded as an asset on the balance sheet and then amortized as an annual expense, usually 24 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 19:1 over forty years. So the accounting goodwill assigned to that business decreases over time by the aggregate amount of that expense. Economic goodwill is something else. It is the combination of intangible assets, like brand name recognition, that enable a business to produce earnings on tangible assets, like plant and equipment, in excess of average rates. The amount of economic goodwill is the capitalized value of that excess. Economic goodwill tends to increase over time, at least nominally in proportion to inflation for mediocre businesses, and more than that for businesses with solid economic or franchise characteristics.

In 1972 (and now) relatively few businesses could be expected to consistently earn the 25% after tax on net tangible assets that was earned by See's-doing it, furthermore, with conservative accounting and no financial leverage. It was not the fair market value of the inventories, receivables or fixed assets that produced the premium rates of return. Rather it was a combination of intangible assets, particularly a pervasive favorable reputation with consumers based upon countless pleasant experiences they have had with both product and personnel. Such a reputation creates a consumer franchise that allows the value of the product to the purchaser, rather than its production cost, to be the major determinant of selling price.

Should the investor impute a $2 per share amortization charge annually ($80 divided by 40 years) to calculate "true" earnings per share? And, if so, should the new "true" earnings of $3 per share cause him to rethink his purchase price? * * * * * We believe managers and investors alike should view intangible assets from two perspectives: (1) In analysis of operating results-that is, in evaluating the underlying economics of a business unit-amortization charges should be ignored. What a business can be expected to earn on unleveraged net tangible assets, excluding any charges against earnings for amortization of Goodwill, is the best guide to the economic attractiveness of the operation.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Monograph Series on Managing Globalization: Regional Shipping and Port Development Strategies (Container Traffic Forecast), 2011. 26. David Goldman, “Microsoft’s $6 Billion Whoopsie,” CNNMoney, July 12, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/02/technology/microsoft-aquantive/index.htm. 27. Thom and Greif, “Intangible Assets in the Valuation Process: A Small Business Acquisition Study”; Galbreath, “Twenty-First Century Management Rules: The Management of Relationships as Intangible Assets.” 28. Interview with Lorenzo Zambrano, Monterrey, Mexico, 2011. 29. See The Gap Inc. and Inditex annual reports from 2007 to 2011. 30. Data obtained from Zara’s corporate website: http://www.inditex.com/en/who_we_are/timeline. 31.

And some companies still have an immense advantage due to their access to desired assets: for instance, the Russian mining mammoth Norilsk controls 30 percent of the world’s known nickel reserves and 45 percent of its platinum in Siberia. But even within these industries, the increasing importance of intangible assets holds true. Lorenzo Zambrano, the CEO of CEMEX, a Mexican cement company that has broken into the industry’s top ranks and become a global player, told me that “knowledge management” was the crucial factor behind his company’s ability to compete internationally with larger, more established rivals.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. Frydman, Carola, and Raven E. Sacks. “Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936–2005,” FEDS Working Paper No. 200735, July 2007. Galbreath, Jeremy. “Twenty-First Century Management Rules: The Management of Relationships as Intangible Assets.” Management Decision 40, no. 2 (2002). Gammeltoft, Peter. “Emerging Multinationals: Outward FDI from the BRICS Countries.” International Journal of Technology and Globalization 4, no. 1 (2008). Ghemawat, Pankaj. World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.


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The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Because big institutions need us more than ever. Making money from intangible assets—from knowledge, brand, and other nonphysical sources of value—is the primary way corporations make profit these days.4 Many analysts have noted the increasing importance of intangible assets in business, but people often think about these assets in static form—for example, stocks of knowledge, established brands, and existing relationships. It is the growing pressure in the Big Shift to refresh these assets more frequently that makes institutions increasingly dependent on the individuals who create new intangible assets by interacting and collaborating with others.

See Jake von Slatt, “Gas Mask Sawdust Respirator,” Steampunk Workshop, http://steampunkworkshop.com/respirator.shtml. 14 Luke Plunkett, “Americans Spent 2008 Playing World of Warcraft, PlayStation 2 Games,” Kotaku, January 1, 2009, http://kotaku.com/5121962/americans-spent-2008-playing-world-of-warcraft-playstation-2-games#c. 15 Douglas Thomas, “Scalable Learning: From Simple to Complex in World of Warcraft,” On the Horizon 17, no. 1 (2009): 35-46 16 Ibid. 17 See, for instance, Wesley Yin-Poole, “French WoW Player Reaches Level 70 in 28 Hours,” Videogamer.com, January 17, 2007, http://www.videogamer.com/news/french_wow_player_reaches_level_70_in_28_hours.html. 18 SAP has more than 121,000 installed systems today. 19 Conversation with authors, October 2008. 20 Greg Noll, Riding Giants. 21 Matt Higgins, “Rough Waves, Tougher Beaches,” New York Times, January 22, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/sports/othersports/23surfing.html?_r=1. Chapter 5 1 Ellen Levy, interview with authors, September 20, 2009. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 For more about how monetizing intangible assets drives corporate wealth creation, see Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, Mobilizing Minds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). 5 See John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The 2009 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change (San Jose, Calif.: Deloitte Development, June 2009). 6 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Broadway Business, 2007). 7 Ian Millhiser, “Clarence Thomas’s America,” Huffington Post, April 14, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-millhiser/clarence-thomas-america_b_186425.html. 8 Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” blog posting, March 13, 2009, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/. 9 Matthew B.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Importantly, not all intangible resources fall under the IP umbrella. Interests in debts, securities, and government franchises—think liquor licenses or taxi medallions—all concern intangible assets rather than tangible objects, but they aren’t regulated by IP law. Likewise, we can think of assets like digital currencies and virtual objects—a powerful weapon in your favorite video game, for example—in terms of property. The rules surrounding these relatively new intangible assets remain largely undefined.16 Digital objects don’t easily fit into either the IP or the personal property frameworks. Consider a digital movie you purchase from Apple.

And your Netflix subscription doesn’t give you a property interest—personal, intellectual, or intangible—in the movies you watch. But when you pay a one-time fee for a copy of, or permanent access to, an ebook, game, or other digital media, that should be recognized as a sale that transfers ownership of a tangible or intangible asset. Courts struggle to define and identify sales in large part because they can’t decide whether to rely on the privately drafted declarations of copyright holders or facts about a transaction beyond the license. There is no better example of this floundering than a pair of cases argued on the same day in front of the same three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a court whose territory includes both Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

They include the length of possession by the consumer, whether payment is one-time or ongoing; and how the transaction is characterized to the public. In short, we think a one-time payment made in exchange for permanent or open-ended possession of or access to a digital good—whether it’s a tangible copy or an intangible asset—results in ownership. That’s especially true when the transaction is characterized using words like “sale,” “buy,” or “own.” So when you click “Buy Now” and pay $9.99 for a digital movie, you own it, even if no permanent copy is ever stored on your device. And when you exchange cash for a coffee maker, you own both the hardware and the software embedded in it.


pages: 306 words: 97,211

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin, Michael van Biema

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, business logic, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, new economy, place-making, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, Telecommunications Act of 1996, time value of money, tulip mania, Y2K, zero-sum game

Many of them are tangible (or quasi-tangible, like money in the bank account as confirmed by the bank), and these can be valued directly with great precision. Starting at the top of the balance sheet has another advantage. As we work down the asset list from cash at the top, whose value is unambiguous, to various intangible assets like goodwill, whose value is often highly problematic, we are made naturally aware of the decreasing reliability of the stated values. Graham himself preferred to rely totally on current assets that could be realized within a year and whose accounting values did not vary far from the actual cash that could be obtained by selling them.

The second valuation based on assets is to compare the price of the company's shares to the book value per share. The book value is the balance sheet entry for shareholder equity divided by the number of shares. Since equity by definition equals all the assets minus all the liabilities, book value can include the value of intangible assets such as goodwill and a number of other assets that may be worth considerably less than the balance sheet suggests. Buying stocks at a substantial discount to book value has been, as we have said, a successful investment strategy. No adjustment is made to the figures on the financial statement, which makes the strategy appropriate for investors who don't want to do a lot of work.

Some analysts have suggested treating R&D as a capital investment and depreciating it on a straight-line basis over five years. If we simplify and say that this past year's outlays should be fully valued as an asset, last year's at 80 percent, and so on, we can calculate the value of an off-balance sheet intangible asset that estimates what a competitor would need to spend just to get into the business. For Intel in 1975, that amount would have been $27 million. This would have increased the reproduction costs of the assets by 40 percent, and the book value of equity from $74 to $101 million, a gain of 37 percent.


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

It is valued in the tens of billions but, like many twenty-first-century companies, most of its value does not lie in the ownership of Marx’s archetypical means of production: billowing factories, large tracts of land, railways, shipping lines, and the like. Accountants make a distinction between tangible and intangible assets. Examples of tangible assets besides Marx’s archetypical means of production are things like office chairs, computers, vehicles, equipment, and so on. Intangible assets are sometimes referred to as “nonphysical” assets. In saying that they are “nonphysical,” typically accountants do not mean to take a stand on the deep metaphysical issue about the ultimate substance or substances of the universe— they are dull accountants, after all.

In saying that they are “nonphysical,” typically accountants do not mean to take a stand on the deep metaphysical issue about the ultimate substance or substances of the universe— they are dull accountants, after all. Very roughly, by “tangible assets,” accountants mean something that you could put a barcode on for inventory purposes, which is not generally possible with intangible assets. It is easy to imagine putting a barcode on land or vehicles owned by eBay, it is much more difficult to think about how to put a barcode on its proprietary software or the goodwill that eBay enjoys. Most of eBay’s value lies in its nonphysical assets, in particular, its goodwill. eBay is, by far, the largest online auction site. It seems that no one knows for sure how many online markets there are, in part because the basic software to coordinate buying and selling is fairly easy to set up.

After all, US citizens already own something several orders of magnitude greater than eBay. US citizens have a large number of tangible assets under their control. We previously mentioned roads, but the list is far more extensive, for example, parks, bridges, tunnels, nuclear submarines, airports, universities, federally owned lands, and so on.6 The intangible assets of the United States include certain institutional arrangements for buyers and sellers, such as an advanced legal and judiciary system that makes the country an attractive place to do business. Just like eBay, the United States offers a market of trust. Indeed, the market of the United States is several orders of magnitude larger than that offered by eBay, so there is every reason to suppose that the intangible market of trust that United States offers to buyers and sellers is worth several orders of magnitude more than that offered by eBay.


file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

To comply with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, many of these assets must be either depreciated (tangible assets such as buildings, furniture, and equipment) or amortized (intangible assets such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights). Depreciating an asset means allocating its cost as an expense over the period the company uses the asset to generate revenue. On the balance sheet, depreciable assets are shown at their original price, offset by depreciation that has accumulated over the years. Because depreciation is also an expense, it has the effect of reducing earnings in the income statement each year, which I'll explain below. Amortization similarly recognizes that an intangible asset has a limited useful life, and therefore a portion of the asset's cost is recorded as an expense each year.

Amortization similarly recognizes that an intangible asset has a limited useful life, and therefore a portion of the asset's cost is recorded as an expense each year. On the balance sheet, intangibles are recorded at their historical cost less amortization. GAAP used to require companies to amortize all intangible assets over a maximum of forty years. In 2001, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which determines GAAP, eliminated any maximum life over which intangible assets must be amortized and instead required companies to write down the assets when they lose value. Listed after the assets on the balance sheet are the company's liabilities and the stockholders' equity. Total assets must equal the total liabilities and stockholders' equity.


Mastering Book-Keeping: A Complete Guide to the Principles and Practice of Business Accounting by Peter Marshall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, asset allocation, book value, double entry bookkeeping, information retrieval, intangible asset, the market place

Public companies listed on UK or other European stock exchanges already use the international terms such as: UK term Profit and loss account Debenture Turnover Stock Debtors Creditors Profit and loss account b/d Provision for doubtful debts Long-term liabilities International term Income statement Loan note Revenue Inventory Accounts receivable Accounts payable Retained profits Allowance for doubtful debts Non-current liabilities 147 ARMSTRONG ENGINEERING BALANCE SHEET as at 31 Mar 200X INTANGIBLE ASSETS Goodwill 5,000 FIXED ASSETS Freehold premises Plant and machinery Less depreciation 35,000 Motor van Less depreciation Total fixed assets CURRENT ASSETS Stock Debtors Less provision for doubtful debts Cash at bank Cash in hand 15,000 750 14,250 8,000 1,600 6,400 55,650 60,650 9,000 10,000 2,000 8,000 10,000 50 27,050 Less CURRENT LIABILITIES Creditors Working capital TOTAL ASSETS 12,000 15,050 75,700 Financed by CAPITAL Opening balance Add profit for period 63,050 19,100 82,150 6,450 75,700 Less drawings TOTAL LIABILITIES Fig. 98.

Assuming that the creditors had agreed to his transferring to the limited company the responsibility for the debts he had, as a sole proprietor, personally owed to them (by no means always the case), the opening balance sheet of the new company would be as shown below. ARMSTRONG ENGINEERING LTD BALANCE SHEET as at 31 Mar 200X INTANGIBLE ASSETS Goodwill 5,000 FIXED ASSETS Freehold premises Plant and machinery Motor van Total fixed assets 35,000 14,250 6,400 CURRENT ASSETS Stock Debtors Cash at bank Cash in hand 55,650 60,650 9,000 8,000 10,000 50 27,050 Less CURRENT LIABILITIES Creditors Working capital 12,000 15,050 75,700 Financed by Authorised share capital 100,000 Ordinary shares @ £1.00 each 100,000 Issued Share Capital 75,700 Ordinary shares @ £1.00 each 75,700 Fig. 99.

(2) Define the term Shareholders’ Funds (what does it comprise on a Ltd Company Balance Sheet)? Share capital and reserves (3) Debentures are a less risky investment than ordinary shares as they carry a fixed rate of interest. (4) Goodwill shown on a Ltd Company Balance Sheet would be shown as an intangible asset. (5) When comparing a Ltd Company’s current assets with its current liabilities it is a measure of liquidity. (6) In a partnership details of interest on capital, salaries, interest on drawings and shares of profit would be stated in the: partnership agreement / deed of partnership. (7) Why would a Revaluation Reserve appear on the Balance Sheet of a Ltd Company?


pages: 300 words: 77,787

Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights by Lars Kroijer

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, compound rate of return, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, market bubble, money market fund, passive investing, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Other assets Individual investors often tend to think too narrowly about incorporating all their assets when thinking about their personal portfolio. Your personal assets include everything, including intangible assets, and even potential liabilities. Here are a few ideas, some of which may seem far-fetched: Tangible assets: Investment portfolio Future pension (who guarantees it?) Security and generosity of government safety net Insurance policies Property holdings (do you own a house?) Private investments Company shares or options Future inheritance (morbid perhaps, but do you have a sense of timing and how it is invested?) Car and other possessions Intangible assets: Education and qualifications Languages you speak Current job and prospects (if you work in finance you already have a lot of direct and indirect exposure to the financial markets, and may want to temper adding to it through your investment portfolio) Previous job experience (will affect future earnings potential) Partner’s education and job Geographic flexibility Liabilities: Flexibility of liabilities – will you certainly incur them?

Index accountants active managers compared with index trackers, 2nd performance over time active personal portfolio management adding up the costs of advisory charges age life stages of financial planning and risk profile AIG allocations see investment allocations alternative investments alternative weightings ‘angel’ investing, 2nd annuities IRR (internal rate of return), 2nd apocalypse investing avoiding fraud and financial disasters and gold as security assets asset classes to avoid concentration risk customisation and noninvestment growth of, and overpayment of fees and institutional investors intangible and liabilities and portfolio theory in the rational portfolio, assets split tangible see also minimal risk assets avoiding fraud banks bailouts cash deposits with and financial disaster and gold as security and property investment Barclays US High Yield index Bernstein, William The Intelligent Asset Allocator bid/offer spread black swan events, 2nd, 3rd Bogle, John bonds bond indices, 2nd dollar domination of ETFs, 2nd and financial planning income from coupon payments indices and the rational portfolio adding other bonds to risk preferences, 2nd rebalancing your portfolio ‘risky’ bonds and liquidity shortterm, 2nd see also corporate bonds; government bonds; minimal risk assets Brazil government bonds broad-based portfolios and liquidity world equities, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Buffett, Warren, 2nd fee structure capital gains tax (CGT), 2nd, 3rd and gifts car insurance Case-Shiller House Price index, 2nd cash deposits deposit insurance government guarantees risk of CGT see capital gains tax (CGT) civil unrest collectibles commercial property market commodities, 2nd returns form company shares comparison sites, 2nd enhanced independent Contagion (film) corporate bonds adding to minimal risk assets, 2nd, 3rd and financial planning and credit quality ETFs, 2nd and financial planning liquidity of and minimal risk assets and portfolio theory, 2nd and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd adjusting allocations, 2nd risk preferences real return expectations world corporate debt yields, 2nd costs see fees and expenses CRB Commodity index CRB Total Return index, 2nd credit ratings government bonds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th adding to minimal risk assets currency and government bonds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th matching and world equities currency-hedged investment products custody charges customisation Cyprus defined benefits pension schemes defined contribution pension schemes diversification and assets benefits of and corporate bonds, 2nd and equity market risk geographical and government bonds, 2nd and the rational portfolio, 2nd and world equities, 2nd Dow Jones index Industrial Average recovery from losses drop dead allocation early savers edge over the markets see investment edge efficiency frontiers EIS (Enterprise Investment Schemes) Elton, Edwin Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis emerging market companies listed on Western exchanges Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS) equities and government and corporate bonds performance and portfolio theory and property investment and the rational portfolio allocations risk preferences, 2nd rebalancing your portfolio risk of diversification and false sense of security recovering from large losses standard deviation, 2nd, 3rd view that markets will always bounce back see also world equities equity risk premium and financial planning ETFs (exchange traded funds), 2nd, 3rd, 4th advantages to owning buying bonds, 2nd, 3rd commodity trading customisation fees and expenses in global property and gold trading implementing and index funds leveraged maturities and minimal risk bonds, 2nd physical or synthetic rebalancing your portfolio and taxes total expense ratio (TER) tracking errors European Union bonds, 2nd expenses see fees and expenses fat tails fees and expenses, 2nd adding up costs alternative investments benefits of paying lower fees and comparison websites financial advisers index trackers compared with active managers and investment edge pension plans and performance impact over time mutual funds, 2nd and the rational investor and the rational portfolio, 2nd rebalancing your portfolio Ferri, Richard All About Asset Allocation financial advisers, 2nd and comparison websites financial crisis 2008–09 and commodities trading and currency matching and government bonds yields and high risk preferences and liquidity and longterm financial planning, 2nd and market risk, 2nd, 3rd, 4th financial planning building your savings and the financial crisis 2008–09, 2nd and investment allocations, 2nd, 3rd and life stages and risk, 2nd risk surveys rules of thumb to consider supercautious savers financial software packages France government bonds fraud, avoiding frequent trading FTSE All-Share index FTSE All-Share Tracker fund FTSE NAREIT Global index, 2nd, 3rd fund pickers future performance mutual funds GDP and corporate bonds and world equity market value, 2nd Germany government bonds gifts and capital gains tax gold, 2nd as security Goldman Sachs government bonds adding to minimal risk assets, 2nd and financial planning and bank deposits banks and government defaults buying in base currency, 2nd credit ratings, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and diversification earnings ETFs, 2nd and the financial crisis (2008) and financial planning inflationprotected liquidity of longerterm maturity minimal risk and world equities, 2nd, 3rd and portfolio theory, 2nd, 3rd and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd adjusting, 2nd, 3rd allocations, 2nd risk preferences real return expectations time horizons yields Greece government debt and bond yields hedge funds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Japanese government bonds and liquidity high risk preferences home markets overinvestment in Icelandic banks income tax index funds, 2nd and ETFs and government bonds implementing maturities and minimal risk bonds, 2nd total expense ratio (TER) tracking errors index-tracking products, 2nd and active managers adding bonds to a portfolio compared with active managers, 2nd comparison sites, 2nd enhanced independent costs of fund changes and taxes future product development implementing license fees for and liquidity and mutual funds and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd different risk preferences total expense ratio (TER), 2nd versus mutual fund returns over time world equities, 2nd see also ETFs (exchange traded funds); index funds India government bonds inflation earnings from minimal risk bonds inflation-adjusted government bonds inflation-protected bonds returns on world equities information/research costs institutional investors insurance buying deposit insurance schemes intangible assets interest rates cash deposits in banks government bonds, 2nd international investment investment allocations adding other government and corporate bonds and financial planning, 2nd, 3rd flexibility of financial goals life stages rebalancing your portfolio, 2nd investment edge, 2nd absence of, 2nd adding up the costs asset classes to avoid and commodities trading, 2nd and the competition different ways of having and expenses and performance picking your moment and private investments and the rational portfolio reconsidering your edge and world equities ‘invisible hand’ of the market IOUs (promissory notes) IRR (internal rate of return) annuities, 2nd iShares, 2nd Ishikawa, Tets How I Caused the Credit Crunch Japan commodities trading government bonds Nikkei index jewellery leverage ETFs and mortgages portfolios liabilities and the rational portfolio life insurance, 2nd life stages and financial planning liquidity equity portfolio and ‘risky’ bonds and ETFs minimal risk and private investments and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd returns on illiquid investments selling your investment, 2nd localised risks avoiding and noninvestment assets Madoff, Bernie market capitalisation and world equities, 2nd market efficiency and inefficiency Mexico government bonds Microsoft investors, 2nd, 3rd and liquidity, 2nd mid-life savers minimal risk assets, 2nd adding other bonds to corporate bonds, 2nd, 3rd government bonds, 2nd adjusting the risk profile asset classes to avoid buying and diversification and equity markets ETFs and financial planning 50/50 split with world equities, 2nd, 3rd allocations government bonds earnings inflation-protected time horizons of inflationprotected bonds and liquidity as optimal portfolio and portfolio theory, 2nd in the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th real return expectations and world equities, 2nd Morgan Stanley mortgages and currency matching and leverage MSCI World Index, 2nd, 3rd, 4th mutual funds fees and performance, 2nd and index trackers national economies and equity market risk OEICs (openended investment companies) oil trading, 2nd optimal portfolio theory minimal risk asset past performance and future performance Paulson, John pension funds, 2nd, 3rd benefits and charges defined benefits schemes underfunded performance and fees index trackers versus active managers versus mutual funds portfolio theory and government bonds optimal and the rational investor price impact private equity capital, 2nd private investments, 2nd and liquidity privatisations and world equities professional investment managers property market investments, 2nd avoiding and financial disasters institutional investors and liquidity and the rational portfolio US subprime housing markets, 2nd, 3rd rational investing, 2nd core of ongoing tasks of rational portfolio adding other bonds to adjusting allocations and equity risk return expectations asset classes to avoid assets and liabilities assets split checklist corporate bonds, 2nd diversification financial benefits of and financial disasters geographical diversification government bonds, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th implementation incorporating other assets and investment edge key components of a and liquidity, 2nd, 3rd and pension plans and portfolio theory and risk preferences risk/return profile, 2nd, 3rd, 4th tailoring to specific needs and circumstances tax adjustments tax benefits of holding and tax efficiency, 2nd, 3rd, 4th world equities, 2nd, 3rd, 4th see also minimal risk assets rebalancing your portfolio ticket size REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) residential property market retirees investment allocation retirement annuities and financial planning risk cash deposits credit risk and corporate bonds of equity markets equity risk premium high risk preferences and longterm financial planning, 2nd and the optimised market and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd asset split risk preferences risk expertise websites risk surveys risk/return profile equity markets and financial planning, 2nd, 3rd and long-term financial planning minimal risk assets adding government and corporate bonds to pension plans and portfolio theory and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th rebalancing your portfolio world equities riskless investment choice, 2nd S&P 500 index and the CRB Commodity index Index Tracker Portfolio standard deviation stocks volatility savings ‘doing nothing’ with and long-term financial planning life stages SD see standard deviation (SD) selling investments and liquidity software packages Spain government bonds standard deviation (SD) building your savings and equity market risk, 2nd, 3rd synthetic ETFs Taleb, Nassim Nicholas The Black Swan, 2nd tangency points tangible assets tax efficient proxies tax wrappers, 2nd taxes, 2nd advisers or accountants questions to ask benefits of the rational portfolio capital gains tax (CGT), 2nd, 3rd, 4th creating trading lots and financial disaster and pension plans, 2nd rational portfolio adjustment realising losses against tax advice websites tax efficiency and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd, 4th tax schemes tax-sheltered or optimised products transaction tax, 2nd technology-focused funds, 2nd TER (total expense ratio), 2nd This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Reinhart and Rogoff) total expense ratio (TER), 2nd transaction taxes, 2nd, 3rd transfer charges turnover costs unit trusts, 2nd United Kingdom bank deposits and credit guarantee equities government bonds credit rating earnings from sterling investors United States corporate bonds, 2nd Dow Jones index, 2nd equity market, 2nd risk, 2nd, 3rd and total expense ratio government bonds credit ratings dollar investors earnings from versus property investment sub-prime housing market, 2nd, 3rd Vanguard, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th FTSE AllShare index venture capital, 2nd Virgin FTSE All-Share Tracker fund volatility and financial planning predicting future Waal, Edmund de The Hare with Amber Eyes world equities adjusting the rational portfolio alternative weightings defining diversification benefits, 2nd, 3rd ETFs expected returns and financial planning 50/50 split with minimal risk assets, 2nd, 3rd investment allocation and high risk preferences indices liquidity of market value and minimal risk assets, 2nd overweighing ‘home’ equities and portfolio theory and the rational portfolio, 2nd, 3rd, 4th allocations risk preferences real return expectations US market, 2nd ‘Investing Demystified delivers, with great clarity and lucidity, the best possible advice you can get when it comes to personal investments and financial planning.’


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

During this span of time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) evolved from being mainly recording systems - writing and manuscript production - to being also communication systems, especially after Gutenberg and the invention of printing - to being also processing and producing systems, especially after Turing and the diffusion of computers. Thanks to this evolution, nowadays the most advanced societies highly depend on information-based, intangible assets, information-intensive services (especially business and property services, communications, finance and insurance, and entertainment), and information-oriented public sectors (especially education, public administration, and health care). For example, all members of the G7 group - namely Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America - qualify as information societies because, in each country, at least 70% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on intangible goods, which are information-related, not on material goods, which are the physical output of agricultural or manufacturing processes.

Information has always had great value, and whoever has owned it has usually been keen on protecting it. This is why, for example, there are legal systems regulating intellectual property. Intellectual property rights concern artistic and commercial creations of the mind, and hence the relevant kinds of information and intangible assets. Copyrights, patents, industrial design rights, trade secrets, and trademarks are meant to provide an economic incentive to their beneficiaries to develop and share their information through a sort of temporary monopoly. Similarly, in many countries it is illegal to trade the securities of a corporation (e.g. bonds) on the basis of some privileged access to that corporation's non-public information, typically obtained while working for it (this is why it is referred to as insider trading).


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

But the relationship between the cost of assets and the value of the enterprise does not work as well for companies with intangible assets, and these increasingly form the basis of 137 ccc_demon_125-142_ch07.qxd 2/13/07 A DEMON 1:46 PM OF Page 138 OUR OWN DESIGN economic value today. Intangible assets—ideas, patents, proprietary software, brand names, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights—have values that cannot be extracted from their costs. The reach of intangibles is extensive; as Charles Leadbeater has said, “modern corn is 80 percent science and 20 percent corn,” alluding to the extensive lab development behind hybrid corn seed. By some estimates, intangible assets now make up 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500.

By some estimates, intangible assets now make up 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500. They are what provide companies with their franchise value, sometimes bordering on monopolistic market position. Intangible assets are the product of imaginative people who walk out the door every night; others are formulas locked in a vault. And in many cases, once they have been created and the intellectual property has been claimed, they cannot be reproduced at any price. One simple indication that the current accounting conventions do not reflect the actual value of the enterprise is the disconnect that has appeared between market and book value. In the industrial era of the railroads, market value was all but defined by book value.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Now much corporate investment is intangible: capital goes into R&D, design, market research, business processes, and software.[38] The new intangible investments fall squarely in the sweet spot of VCs: in explaining venture capital back in 1962, Rock said he was financing “intellectual book value.” In contrast, intangible assets pose challenges to other sorts of financiers. Banks and bond investors try to protect themselves from losses by securing “collateral”—claims on a borrower’s assets that can be seized and sold if the borrower defaults. But intangible assets exhibit sunkenness: once the investment is made, there is no physical object that can be hawked to recoup capital.[39] Likewise, traditional equity investors evaluate companies partly by tallying their physical assets, which are clearly reported in financial statements. But intangible assets are harder to measure. They elude standard accounting rules and their value is opaque: to evaluate a software development project, for example, you have to be close to the technology.

They elude standard accounting rules and their value is opaque: to evaluate a software development project, for example, you have to be close to the technology. Hands-on venture capitalists are better equipped to allocate capital in this bewildering world: a world in which tangibles are displaced by intangibles. Because venture capital is particularly well suited to financing intangible assets, it is no surprise that it has spread geographically. Silicon Valley is still the center of the industry: Within the United States, the Valley is home to two-thirds of U.S. venture partners, and California’s share of U.S. venture fundraising jumped from 44 percent to 62 percent between 2004 and 2019.[40] At the same time, however, California-based investors are increasingly willing to back companies in other states, and the explosion of flows into VC funds has left plenty of money to find its way to partnerships outside the Valley.

The global embrace of venture capital confirms what has been argued here: the attractions of the industry far outweigh its alleged shortcomings. As individuals, VCs do exhibit skill. As a group, they finance the most dynamic companies, generate disproportionate wealth and R&D, and knit together the fertile networks that drive the knowledge economy. In the future, as intangible assets increasingly eclipse tangible ones, venture capitalists’ hands-on style will contribute even more to our prosperity. Of course, there are myriad social problems that the venture industry won’t fix, and some it may exacerbate—inequality, for example.[45] But the right response to inequality is not to doubt venture capital’s importance or throw sand in its gears.


pages: 169 words: 43,906

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

Because many of the products are digital or service-oriented, there is limited cost invested in goods sold. “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.” —Vince Lombardi Businesses have traditionally had physical and intangible assets. Websites have a third category of assets: digital assets. They are tangible because you can actually see them. You can go to a website and download the eBook or look at the pictures and read the articles. However, they are not physical, and they do not have the same level of cost as physical assets.

Other Valuation Considerations Assets sometimes come into play when valuing websites. By assets, I mean physical property that will hold much or all of its value over a long period of time. This includes typical business assets, like facilities, automobiles, tools, machines, computer equipment, and inventory. There may also be digital assets, like software, or intangible assets, like patents. However, if a piece of software purchased today with the website won’t be able to be sold a year from now, either with or apart from the website, it may not have any current appreciable value. Only ascribe value to assets if they can be sold quickly. Only ascribe value to assets if they can be sold quickly.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The result is that some markets have a greater element of winner-take-all, as is suggested by the data on corporate valuations. If we look at the S&P 500 stock index in 1975, the category of “intangible assets” accounted for about 18 percent of the value of American capital. Most American capital was in physical assets, such as machines and factories, tangible items that can be purchased and replicated if need be. Today, over 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500 is due to intangible assets, including trademarks, patents, brand name reputation, consumer goodwill, and other factors. That’s a big leap upward, from below 20 percent to above 80 percent for the value of corporate intangibles.

Hirst, Damien history, models of homeownership Hsieh, Chang-Tai Huang, Te-Sheng Huckleberry Finn (Twain) Hurricane Katrina I Love Lucy (sit-com) immigration African and European Union and labor force and mobility and segregation See also migration incarceration crisis inequality income and mobility and returns on capital information technology (IT) and the Complacency Class and instability and matching and policing and productivity and segregation and social protest infovores infrastructure innovation and crime and culture decline in historical trends and living standards and matching and mobility and monopoly and productivity R&D and segregation and technology instability and crime domestic and dynamic future global and government and higher education See also social protests and riot intangible assets International Monetary Fund internet dating investment drought Ip, Greg Iran Iraq ISIS iTunes Jasper, James M. Jim Crow era job creation job switching Johnson, Ron Kalia, Ajay Kalven, Harry, Jr. Katz, Lawrence Kent State shootings Kerouac, Jack Keynes, John Maynard King, Martin Luther, Jr.


pages: 317 words: 87,566

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

In the mental and moral world indeed he may produce new ideas; but when he is said to produce material things, he really only produces utilities; or in other words, his efforts and sacrifices result in changing the form or arrangement of matter to adapt it better for the satisfaction of wants.18 During the 1980s, it became fashionable to declare that capitalism had suddenly become based upon ‘knowledge’, ‘intangible assets’ and ‘intellectual capital’, following the demise of many heavy industries in the West. In truth, the economy was reconceived as a phenomenon of the mind a whole century earlier. Capitalism became oriented around consumer desire, directed by that most alluring spokesman for our silent inner feelings, money.

By the 1980s, an employee’s customer care, service ethic and enthusiasm were not simply mental resources, which existed to help churn out more products: they were the product. The importance of employee happiness and psychological engagement becomes all the greater once corporations are in the business of selling ideas, experiences and services. Businesses speak of ‘intangible assets’ and ‘human capital’ in the hope of capturing this amorphous workplace ethos, but in practice it is nothing which resembles either an asset or capital. Some other way of conceiving of work is required. Secondly, the concept of health started to undergo some profound changes. In 1948, the newly founded World Health Organization redefined health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’ – an almost utopian proposition that few of us ever attain for very long.

., 28, 30 The Hidden Persuaders (Packard), 73, 74 Hilton, Steve, 191 homo economicus, 61–2 Hoover, Herbert, 100 HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement) programme, 235 Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, 175 Hsieh, Tony, 113 Hudson Yards real estate project (NYC), 233–4, 235, 237 human capital, 126, 151, 160 human existence, ideal form of, 112 human optimality/optimization, 5, 129, 274 human resource management, 189, 238, 276 human resources profession, 108, 133 Hume, David, 14 Hyde Park (Chicago), 148 idealism, 27, 181 Ignite U, 134 imipramine, 162 income inequality, 34, 144. See also economic inequality Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme, 111 indices, 176 individual choice, theory of, 59 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini), 238 Infoglut (Andrejevic), 260 Ingeus, 110, 112 insurance fraud, 42, 44, 45, 46 intangible assets, 126 internet addiction, 204–5, 207 internships, 274 interventions, 17, 20, 35, 108, 111, 265 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham), 22 introspection, 22, 48, 63, 64, 78, 86 iPhone 6, 26, 135 iproniazid, 162 J. Walter Thompson (JWT), 93, 94, 95, 97, 215–16, 217, 218, 220, 225, 242 James, William, 83, 84, 86 Jawbone UP, 240 Jennings, Richard, 49, 50, 51 Jevons, William Stanley and Chicago School of economics, 150–1 childhood, 47–8 on commodities, 58 as converting economics into form of psychological mathematics, 116 on decision-making, 59 as fascinated with machine-like qualities of the mind, 56 on happiness, 113 on how we experience pleasures and pains, 65, 66 as imagining mind through metaphors of geometry and mechanics, 62 introduction of to economics, 60 on the mind as mechanical balancing device, 264 on money as yielding happiness, 114 and natural sciences, 59 as obsessed with understanding fluctuations in pleasure, 84 as one developer of theory of utility maximization, 62 on pleasure and pain having own discernible quantities, 61 reading of economics, 50, 55 representation of capitalism, 57 on true comprehension of Value, 54 as turning market into mind-reading device, 57 vision of calculating hedonist, 56 weight-lifting experiments of, 49, 59 Jobs, Steve, 161 Johns Hopkins University, 92 Johnson & Johnson, 94 Jourard Self-Disclosure Scale, 165 Jung, Minah, 182 just noticeable difference, 30, 36, 37 justice, theory of, 62 JWT (J.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

But you will also want to include many assets that are valuable and even tradable, but which are not things you can easily touch and feel: a copyright, part of the radio spectrum, an entitlement to walk across someone’s land or to emit smoke or extract water. Some assets – such as software – are on the borderline between the tangible and the intangible. Many goods and services have dematerialised. Possession of knowledge is as important as the ownership of physical property. These intangible assets have far greater significance today than Marx imagined (with wideranging implications). But this extension of the concept of capital should not – at least for present purposes – be taken too far. Economists talk about ‘human capital’, derived from education and training, which although not tradable is manifestly valuable.

Apple’s future customers do not, however, report any matching liability, and perhaps they should not, since they will buy the company’s products only if they are delighted to do so. The difference between the value of Apple as a company and the value of its physical assets might be quantified as an ‘intangible asset’, the value of the ‘Apple brand’. But this reasoning is essentially circular. The ‘Apple brand’ is no more, or less, than the company, its products and its operations. The ‘brand value’ is simply a number calculated to make the stock market value of the company and the book value of its assets the same.2 To attach value to Apple stock far in excess of Graham’s book value is to recognise that a modern economy rests on design and ideas rather than on physical activity.

Indeed the scale of demand for government funding and higher loan-to-value mortgages requires such funding. Asset managers should occupy the same central role in the investment channel that banks enjoy in the deposit channel. The goals are similar. Good and stable returns for savers, economic and financial stability. Control of costs. Flows of information about physical and intangible assets and their management, which promote economic efficiency for the benefit of savers, consumers, employees and taxpayers. Managed intermediation by asset managers, which has no need of daily valuation and redemption, potentially offers greater flexibility and the opportunity for asset managers and their customers to escape the tyranny of public markets and the predation of the high-frequency trader.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

It is possible to estimate returns on human capital-the value of additional earnings that people can expect from an investment in schooling or an MBA. 8 Successful businesses-businesses with competitive advantages from distinctive capabilities-are worth more than the value of their buildings, their plant, and their stocks. Accountants used to call this the goodwill of the business. For the shop, the pub, or the small manufacturer, that was an appropriate term. The intangible asset was the loyalty of satisfied customers. The modern economy has many different kinds of distinctive capabilities and so many different kinds of intangible assets: competitive advantages based on brands or reputations with groups of customers; strategic assets such as patents and copyrights or local monopolies; structures of relationships with suppliers or employees. "Our people are our greatest asset" is a cliche of company reports, and there is a lot in it.

But there is desperation in the term social capital. Putnam fears he can attract the attention of his audience only by expressing himself in economic terms. There is much to be said for reserving the term capital for what can be bought and sold in the market for capital. Some, but not many, intangible assets meet this test; human capital does not, and social capital certainly not. Education and skills are an asset and so is the glue that holds society together, but they are not in this sense capital. {15} ........................... . General Equilibrium The Coordination Problem Revisited ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• It is now time to go back to the problem posed in chapter 11.

Insider trading is the use of information gained through a relationship with the firm-e.g., as director or adviser. It is now illegal in Britain, the United States, and many other countries. 8. See, for example, estimates of rates of return to higher education in Harkness and Machin (1999). 9. These "intangible assets" are the capitalized value of rents arising from competitive advantages. This is why "Tobin's q" -the ratio of the market value of a company to its tangible assets-can appropriately exceed one. 10. Putnam (2000). 11. "Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds, constantly unite." Tocqueville (1835), 489.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

THE OLD STORY Intriguingly, the online Lexicon, at least when consulted, failed to offer an entry for the term. Instead, having defined an asset as “something belonging to an individual or a business that has value or the power to earn money,” it went on to distinguish between tangible assets, “that have physical form, such as plant and equipment,” and intangible assets, which “have no physical form but are considered valuable resources of the business, e.g. patents, trademarks, goodwill, brand names, licenses, franchises, etc.” It did, however, mention wasting assets, “such as property or a business, that is losing money over time,” and toxic assets, “the value of which has fallen significantly and may fall further, especially as the market for them has frozen.

But the future of capitalism has more to do with money than with technology, regulation, or standards—even if all three are crucially important. And my concern about the limitations of CSR, shared value, and even current conceptions of the circular economy stems from the respective movements’ absolute, and sometimes insufficiently critical, reliance on current forms of capitalism. True, we can expect the accelerating shift to intangible assets and investments to accelerate the transition to lower resource input economic models, but this alone is very unlikely to save us.81 So, alongside initiatives designed to redirect investment and, even more fundamentally, to reinvent economics, we need to dedicate a growing effort to exploring how business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, city mayors, policy makers, and politicians can co-evolve what we might call the “Tomorrow’s Capitalism Roadshow.”

See also change process stages; Future-Fit change approach; technology allowing to flourish, 166 Anthropocenic route, taking, 230–234 antibiotics through lens of, 108 assets with characteristics of, 73 be a leader, not an algorithm, 223–230 Black Swans starting off as, 182 business models with characteristics of, 53 calories through lens of, 102 capitalism with characteristics of, 202–208 carbon economy through lens of, 111 defined, 9, 22, 167 democracy with characteristics of, 208–213 different thinking, need for, 23–27 early sharing of content about, 199–201 exponential leaders, 236–242 future, differing views of, 190–193 global grand challenges approach, 186–187 governance with characteristics of, 71 gradual, then sudden evolution of, 76 growth with characteristics of, 57–58 historical, 43 impact with characteristics of, 64 liability with characteristics of, 68 losing control, risk of, 193–197 materiality with characteristics of, 69–70 overview, 1–3, 22–23, 219–223 as parallel reality with Black Swans, 9–10 plastics through lens of, 97 profitability with characteristics of, 55 purpose with characteristics of, 50 push and pull in evolution of, 189–190 recent examples, 42 reinventing everything, 197–199 space junk through eyes of, 116 spotting, 254–256 sustainability with characteristics of, 213–218 systemic change overview, 201–202 three horizons, two scenarios, 2000-2100, 38–39 and triple bottom line concept, 12–13 U-bend, unclogging, 234–236 value with characteristics of, 61 Green Swans (film), 9–10, 248 Green Transition Scoreboard, 233 growth, 47, 55–58 The Guardian (newspaper), 96 H Haan, Nick, 200, 222 Hamid, Mohsin, 109, 110 Harvard Business Review (HBR), 32, 155–158 Haut, Sonja, 253 Hawken, Paul, 141, 142, 232 Hemingway, Ernest, 79 Hichens, Robert, 198–199 Hill-Landolt, Julian, 229–230 Hippocratic Oath, 108 Hoffman, Donald, 27 Hofstetter, Dominic, 220 Holocene epoch, 86 Honda, 135 horseshoe crabs, 231–232 How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life (Roberts), 80 The Human Planet (Lewis and Maslin), 29 Humanitarians, exponential leaders as, 238 humor, 120–121 Hunter, Sarah, 240 Hurd, Nick, 212–213 Hutton, Will, 196 Hwang Sang-ki, 126 Hyatt, John Wesley, 94 hydropower, 201 Hype Cycle, Gartner, 173–175 I Ibbitson, John, 222–223 Ignatius, Adi, 155–156 illusion of control, 44 impact, 47, 61–64, 256 impact investing, 63, 64 Impossible Foods, 233 incremental change, 34, 35f, 57, 233–234 India, 82 Indonesia, 220–221 industrial revolutions, 175–176 industry federations and associations, 132 inflated expectations, in Gartner Hype Cycle, 174 influencing activities, 145–146 information, role in economy, 190, 192 Innovation Trigger stage, Gartner Hype Cycle, 174 innovations, in three horizons framework, 38–39 Innovators, exponential leaders as, 238 Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, 242 Institute for Transformative Technologies (ITT), 184–185 insulin, 156–157 insurance industry, 136–137 intangible assets, 72 integrated business models, 52 Interface, 142 intergenerational transfer of wealth, 201 International Accounting Standards Board, 58 International Finance Corporation, 119 international OTA, need for, 183, 185 International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 133 International Space Station (ISS), 111 internet, 173, 175, 192 Internet of Things (IoT), 177 investors/investing, 63, 64, 162, 205–208, 242–244 invisible hand, 18, 25, 85 Ipsos, 219 Israel, 171 Ive, Jony, 213–214 Iversen, Torben, 212 ivory, 93 J Jackson, Clive, 245–246 Jackson, Tim, 56 Jakarta, Indonesia, 220–221 Japan, 135 Johnson, Nicholas, 113 Johnson & Johnson, 13 Johnson County, Indiana, 126–127 joint and several liability, 66 Jørgensen, Lars Fruergaard, 158–159 journalists, 227 JPMorgan, 142–143 Just, Inc., 233 JWT, 140–141 K Kahneman, Daniel, 204 Kaiser Permanente, 255 Kelly, Kevin, 36 Kelly, Marjorie, 205 Kendall, Geoff, 159–164 Kerr, Andrew, 201 Kessler, Donald, 112 Kingston, Phil, 189 Klee, Louis, 109 Klimenko, Svetlana, 207–208 Kondratiev, Nikolai, 203 Kramer, Mark, 59 Kuhn, Thomas, 41, 121–122, 123, 191, 230 L Langer, Ellen, 44 Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 184–185 Layton, David, 190–191 leaded gasoline, 172 leaders, 223–230, 236–242.


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The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

However, the global corporate landscape is changing fast. So-called ‘idea-intensive’ firms – in pharmaceuticals, media, finance and information technology – now account for 31 per cent of the profits of Western corporations, up from 17 per cent in 1999. They are global rentiers, deriving income from possession of ‘intangible assets’ such as patents, brands and copyright under a strengthened intellectual property regime constructed since the 1990s (see Chapter 2).25 And the industrialised-country share in global profits is set to decline; multinationals from emerging market economies already account for a quarter of the Fortune Global 500 biggest companies in the world and McKinsey expects them to account for half by 2025.

As WIPO noted, ‘Strong brands can create high barriers to market entry, as new competitors may not be able to bear the high advertising costs of inducing consumers to switch to their products.’31 According to WIPO, between 1987 and 2011 US investment in brands accounted for 22 per cent of all investment in intangible assets, exceeding research and development and design. Globally, companies invested $466 billion in brands in 2011 (excluding in-house investment in marketing), with US companies in the lead. The value of the top 100 global brands was $3.3 trillion in 2015.32 Brand value can be a high proportion of a firm’s market capitalisation – a third, on average, according to a study by Interbrand, but some put it much higher.33 Coca Cola’s brand may contribute one half of its market capitalisation.

Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.) 29 ‘Academics want you to read their work for free’, The Atlantic, 26 January 2016. 30 ‘Do not enclose the cultural commons’, Financial Times, 19 April 2009. 31 WIPO, World Intellectual Property Report: Brands – Reputation and Image in the Global Market Place (Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization, 2013). 32 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2015 (Millward Brown, 2015). 33 Ian McClure suggests that intangible assets have risen from 20 per cent to 80 per cent of US corporate value since 1975. I. McClure, From a Patent Market for Lemons to a Marketplace for Patents: Benchmarking Intellectual Property in its Evolution to Asset Class Status, mimeo, May 2015. 34 K. Tienhaara, ‘Resisting the “law of greed”’, greenagenda.org.au, September 2015. 35 ‘Free exchange: Game of zones’, The Economist, 21 March 2015, p. 65. 36 C.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

More broadly, according to the European Commission,13 the EU effective tax rate for digital businesses, such as online retailing or social media, which derive much or all of their value from the intangible assets of information and data, is 8.5 percent, or less than half the effective tax rate for traditional businesses (which are between 20.9 percent and 23.2 percent). This lower rate occurs because digital businesses are based on intangible assets that benefit both from specific tax incentives and the ease of shifting the recorded source of profits to low-tax jurisdictions. With aggressive tax planning, corporations can winnow down their effective taxation to essentially zero.

.§ Of course, firms that were constrained in their investment to retained earnings also had to cut back on investments, since, as we have noted, profits typically fell, sometimes dramatically, during the downturn. Moreover, as firms borrowed to survive, they were less able to access credit for investment. In short, the downturn constrained private investment in capital goods (equipment), as well as in intangible assets like intellectual property. At the same time, the downturn, exacerbated by austerity, hurt firm and bank balance sheets. The adverse effect on banks’ balance sheets was one of the reasons for the cutback in credit: banks were less able and willing to lend.¶ The worsening of firm balance sheets—the decrease in their net worth and in their cash positions—made many less willing to invest (even if they could get access to credit), and sometimes even less willing to produce.# The combination of weak private investment and sagging public investment meant, of course, that overall investment was depressed.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

‘Manu-services’ mean that we also underestimate the evolution of companies like Rolls-Royce, who make more money servicing and maintaining their engines than selling the engines themselves and yet continue to be viewed as a manufacturer rather than a supplier of services. It’s not only the output of services that’s intangible; the investment is too. Economists are debating whether better measurement of intangible assets would increase GDP. When research and development (R&D) and other intangible investments were included, US GDP was increased by 3 per cent.10 The OECD estimates that intangible investment, including that in human capital, such as education, and software, is as important as investment in tangible machinery and equipment in the UK.11 Since 2014, investment in private R&D has been included in UK GDP.

Walker, Vancouver: Fraser Institute ________, 1990, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press North, Douglass C., Gardner Brown and Dean Lueck, 2015, ‘A Conversation with Douglass North’, Annual Review of Resource Economics, 7, pp. 1–10 OECD, 2012, ‘Income Inequality and Growth: The Role of Taxes and Transfers’, OECD Economics Department Policy Notes, No. 9 ________, 2013, ‘New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets’, Paris: OECD; www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46349020.pdf ________, 2015, Economic Surveys: United Kingdom, Paris: OECD Ostry, Jonathan D., Andrew Berg and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, 2014, ‘Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth’, International Monetary Fund Staff Discussion Note SDN/14/02; www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf Parsons, Talcott, 1931, ‘Wants and Activities in Marshall’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 46(1), pp. 101–40 Pessoa, João Paulo and John Van Reenen, 2013, ‘Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth?

Mitchell, 1988, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 869–73. 10.  Stephanie H. McCulla, Alyssa E. Holdren and Shelly Smith, 2013, ‘Improved Estimates of the National Income and Product Accounts: Results of the 2013 Comprehensive Revision’, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Washington, DC 11.  OECD, 2013, ‘New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets’, Paris: OECD; www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46349020.pdf 12.  Adam Smith, 1978 [1763], Lectures on Jurisprudence (alternative title for the Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms), ed. Ronald E. Meek, David D. Raphael and Peter G. Stein, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 499. 13.  Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk I, ch. 2, para. 12. 14.  


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

‘Manu-services’ mean that we also underestimate the evolution of companies like Rolls-Royce, who make more money servicing and maintaining their engines than selling the engines themselves and yet continue to be viewed as a manufacturer rather than a supplier of services. It’s not only the output of services that’s intangible; the investment is too. Economists are debating whether better measurement of intangible assets would increase GDP. When research and development (R&D) and other intangible investments were included, US GDP was increased by 3 per cent.10 The OECD estimates that intangible investment, including that in human capital, such as education, and software, is as important as investment in tangible machinery and equipment in the UK.11 Since 2014, investment in private R&D has been included in UK GDP.

Mitchell, 1988, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 869–73. 10. Stephanie H. McCulla, Alyssa E. Holdren and Shelly Smith, 2013, ‘Improved Estimates of the National Income and Product Accounts: Results of the 2013 Comprehensive Revision’, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Washington, DC 11. OECD, 2013, ‘New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets’, Paris: OECD; www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46349020.pdf 12. Adam Smith, 1978 [1763], Lectures on Jurisprudence (alternative title for the Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms), ed. Ronald E. Meek, David D. Raphael and Peter G. Stein, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 499. 13. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk I, ch. 2, para. 12. 14.

Walker, Vancouver: Fraser Institute ———, 1990, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press North, Douglass C., Gardner Brown and Dean Lueck, 2015, ‘A Conversation with Douglass North’, Annual Review of Resource Economics, 7, pp. 1–10 OECD, 2012, ‘Income Inequality and Growth: The Role of Taxes and Transfers’, OECD Economics Department Policy Notes, No. 9 ———, 2013, ‘New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets’, Paris: OECD; www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46349020.pdf ———, 2015, Economic Surveys: United Kingdom, Paris: OECD Ostry, Jonathan D., Andrew Berg and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, 2014, ‘Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth’, International Monetary Fund Staff Discussion Note SDN/14/02; www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf Parsons, Talcott, 1931, ‘Wants and Activities in Marshall’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 46(1), pp. 101–40 Pessoa, João Paulo and John Van Reenen, 2013, ‘Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth?


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Common Sources of Competitive Advantages To help you identify the sources of competitive advantage, I’ve borrowed several concepts from financial-services company Morningstar, which uses these concepts as the foundation of its stock analysis. Dorsey distills the sources of competitive advantage into four categories (Dorsey combines brand loyalty, patents, and regulatory licenses into one category titled intangible assets) which I have broken down into six categories: 1. Network economics 2. Brand loyalty 3. Patents 4. Regulatory licenses 5. Switching costs 6. Cost advantages stemming from scale, location, or access to a unique asset Let’s take a closer look at each source. Source #1: Network Economics One of the strongest sources of competitive advantage is network economics.

You need to adapt the calculation to the type of business you are analyzing. The pros and cons of each method are highlighted below. The Basic Equation Let’s first start with the basic equation for ROIC: Invested capital = total assets − excess cash +/− accumulated amortization and depreciation +/− goodwill or other intangible assets + off-balance sheet items − non-interest bearing current liabilities Calculate the Numerator First, isolate the earnings from the operations of the business by removing interest income, taxes, and interest expense: Remove interest income from cash balances because it is not generated by the core operations of the business.

During 2010, Schultz said that his customer-satisfaction scores actually rose, reaching their highest levels ever because, “We reinvested in our people, we reinvested in innovation, and we reinvested in the values of the company.”56 Also, think about this: If the management team is continually announcing cost-cutting programs, this is a sign that they are not focused on continually cutting unnecessary costs. These types of businesses are often serial restructurers as well. For example, during his Hewlett-Packard tenure (2005 to 2010), CEO Mark Hurd took $3.2 billion in restructuring charges and $3.3 billion in write-downs for amortization of intangible assets related to acquisitions. This buy-and-restructure strategy helped HP deliver annual revenue growth of 7.5 percent and 22 percent growth in earnings per share during Hurd’s tenure. However, Hurd was constantly restructuring the workforce by increasing the use of contract manufacturing and other cost-cutting measures.


pages: 263 words: 75,455

Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray, Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, compound rate of return, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, intangible asset, Jim Simons, Louis Bachelier, p-value, passive investing, performance metric, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, transaction costs

Asset quality is measured as the ratio of noncurrent assets other than plant, property and equipment to total assets. AQI measures the proportion of total assets where future benefits are more opaque and the assets are considered intangible. The measure may indicate attempts at cost deferrals in the form of intangible assets on the balance sheet. SGI = sales growth index. Ratio of sales in year t to sales in year t − 1. Sales growth does not indicate manipulation; however, high sales growth does create certain expectations for management—many of which are unsustainable. Managers who face decelerating fundamentals and who currently manage high-expected-growth firms have high incentive to manipulate earnings.

The BM performance pattern offers no evidence for the hypothesis that balance-sheet-based value measures perform better than income or cash flow statement TABLE 7.5 Price Ratio Performance During Economic Expansions value metrics when the economy generates more returns from tangible assets (e.g., property, plant and equipment) relative to intangible assets (e.g., human capital, research and development, and brand equity). Overall, there is little evidence that a particular price ratio delivers better performance than all other metrics during expanding economic periods. Table 7.6 again shows no clear evidence that a particular price ratio consistently outperforms all other strategies in contracting economic periods.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

One of the boldest is Baruch Lev, an NYU accounting professor who shed his fields reputation for caution, rudely violating Italo Svevo's dictum that there's no room for dreams in double entry. (No marginal figure, in August 2000 Lev won the aptly named Wildman Medal, given by the American Accounting Association, for making the year's greatest contribution to his profession.) Lev dreams in numbers—or, more precisely, he wants to put numbers on "intangible assets, ideas, brands, ways of working, and franchises," as an introduction to an interview with Lev in the New Economy bible Fast Company put it (Webber 2000). Lev argues that the 500-year-old discipline, invented by the 14th-century Venetian mathematician Luca PacioH, is simply inadequate to the ineffable glories of 21st-century capitalism.Today, knowledge, not things, rule.

.^ That's what drove the stock-market rally, promoted the exuberant mood, and provided the cash to keep things going. New Economists would argue that conventional measures of profit- After the New Economy profit rate, 1952-2002 nonfinancial corporations 07o ''■'■■"''' 1952 1958 1964 1970 1976 1982 1988 1994 2000 ability shown here—^profits divided by the value of the capital stock—undervalues intangible assets like brand names, patents, and ways of working. But to include them as capital would lower the profit rate—and since the value of such intangibles has pu-tatively been rising, adding them to capital would reduce the great upsurge of the 1980s and 1990s. Conceptually, these intangibles seem instead like ways of increasing profit—though often at the expense of competitors.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Specifically, State Street Global Advisors published a letter to board members entitled “Aligning Corporate Culture with Long-Term Strategy,” stating, “This year we will be focusing on corporate culture as one of the many, growing intangible value drivers that affect a company’s ability to execute its long-term strategy.” The global accounting firm EY recently found that “intangible assets” such as culture make up, on average, 52 percent of an organization’s market value (and in some sectors as much as 90 percent). Researchers have documented that, in the United States and UK, value is driven more by intangible, rather than tangible, assets—further underscoring the importance of corporate culture.

This is unfolding alongside a number of other employment trends that corporate boards should be attuned to, including the development of the information gig economy, the trend of working beyond traditional retirement age, and changes in workplace behavior and dress. Securing top talent is becoming tougher in part because of greater competition for fewer high-quality candidates and rising barriers to immigration. But, perhaps more crucially, it is also becoming harder at precisely the moment when the knowledge economy is taking off. Investment in intangible assets—for example, R&D, strong brands, and intellectual property—has doubled as a share of trade in recent years, from 5.5 percent to 13.1 percent. A 2019 McKinsey report underscored this point, explaining that “value creation is shifting to upstream activities, such as R&D and design, and to downstream activities, such as distribution, marketing, and after-sales services.”


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Starting with manufacturing, progressing to tradable services, multinationals outsourced low-value activities—often to low-income countries—and retained the high-value intangible activities within their corporate walls. At the same time, the corporate boundaries crossed national boundaries while intangible assets were easily shifted to low-tax territories. The driver has been the rapidly declining cost of transmitting information and performing computations. Richard Baldwin (2006) has traced the effects on the international structure of production, describing the ‘unbundling’ of different stages in the value chain into differently located links, and particularly the separation of ideas from manufacture.

The costs of information and communication also reshape organisations’ internal structures. Better access to information makes it more efficient for important decisions to be delegated while cheaper communication may mean it is easier to refer up for decisions (Bloom et al. 2014). In practice, the decentralisation effect has dominated. Multinationals retain intangible assets at the centre of production networks or—as it is often described—as the dominant member of a production ecosystem. The transformation of production goes beyond conventional outsourcing, and the delayering of corporate hierarchies, however. The scope for reorganising production by combining inputs internal to the firm—capital assets, direct employees, intangibles—with external ones such as cloud computing (Coyle and Nguyen 2019) or a contingent workforce (Boeri et al. 2020) is immense.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“There will always be those who refuse to follow the protocol, who abscond and hide secret value in parallel off-grid networks, what we call the black market, off balance sheet, shadow banking.”69 How does one reconcile non-transaction-based accounting measures, particularly the recognition of intangible assets? How are we going to track intellectual property rights, brand value, or even celebrity status—think Tom Hanks? How many bad films must this Oscar winner make before the blockchain impairs the Hanks brand value? The argument for triple-entry accounting is not against traditional accounting.

Sure, the networks have enabled companies to outsource to low-cost geographies. But the Internet dropped transaction costs inside the firm as well. From Hierarchy to Monopoly So companies today remain hierarchies, and most activities occur within corporate boundaries. Managers still view them as a better model for organizing talent and intangible assets such as brands, intellectual property, knowledge, and culture, as well as for motivating people. Corporate boards still compensate executives and CEOs far beyond any reasonable measure of the value they create. Not incidentally, the industrial complex continues to generate wealth, but not prosperity.

Through smart contracts, an entrepreneur could automate many aspects of a company’s operations: purchase orders, payroll, interest on debt, and financial audits in real time. Two new models for individual entrepreneurship will gain traction: METERING EXCESS CAPACITY. From the centralized sharing economy to the distributed metering economy, individuals will be able to loan out their spare beds, wheelbarrows, oxen, and other tangible and intangible assets to peers in a network based on reputation scores. Blockchain enables previously impossible revenue streams such as metering Wi-Fi, electricity generated from roof-installed solar panels, Netflix subscriptions, latent computing power in your phone, and other household appliances—all through micropayments and smart contracts.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In that case, following the same logic, private inheritance should also be abolished. If private inheritance is allowed, then the principle of social inheritance should be too. The Rentier Economy Our inherited wealth does not only consist of land and physical assets, but intangible assets as well, including financial assets and ‘intellectual property’. Intangible assets also generate economic rents derived from natural or contrived scarcity, enabling companies and individuals to gain income simply by virtue of possession. In the case of intellectual property, the state creates and enforces regulations and laws that have generated vast rental incomes from patents, copyrights, brands and the like.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The analysis also points to the appropriate financial tools to assess various businesses. 24 You’ll Meet a Bad Fate If You Extrapolate The Folly of Using Average P/Es For past averages to be meaningful, the data being averaged have to be drawn from the same population. If this is not the case—if the data come from populations that are different—the data are said to be nonstationary. When data are nonstationary, projecting past averages typically produces nonsensical results. —Bradford Cornell, The Equity Risk Premium Intangible assets . . . surpass physical assets in most business enterprises, both in value and contribution to growth, yet they are routinely expensed in the financial reports and hence remain absent from corporate balance sheets. This asymmetric treatment of capitalizing (considering as assets) physical and financial investment while expensing intangibles leads to biased and deficient reporting of firms’ performance and value.

The intangible group comprises Altria, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Procter and Gamble. Over the five reported fiscal years that ended with 2006, the tangible group had a cash-flow-to-net-income ratio of 28 percent, versus a 111 percent ratio for the intangible group. There is pervasive evidence that the global economy is moving from a reliance on tangible to intangible assets, including market-to-book ratios, workforce allocation, and the rising significance of education. Further, because intangible-reliant businesses have few assets on their balance sheets, they tend to show high returns on capital. With other factors held constant, higher cash-flow-to-net-income ratios and returns on capital support higher price-earnings ratios.4 The final factor that dictates the price-earnings ratio is the equity-risk premium, or the return that equity investors demand above and beyond a risk-free security.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The book’s authors argue that this is nothing short of a “quiet revolution.” Today, companies invest more in intangible assets—things like design, branding, patents, R&D, and software—than in traditional, tangible assets—things like machinery, buildings, and computers. Thoughts, not things, if you will. The sea change started in the 1970s. Investment in tangible assets—let’s just call it capital—as a share of the economy peaked around 1979 and has fallen since. Investment in intangible assets—call it “knowledge”—has instead risen steadily. Knowledge overtook capital around 1990. Increasingly, value is created by labor working with knowledge—either knowledge clusters controlled by firms like Google and Apple, or knowledge stuck into people’s heads in the form of education and experience.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Profit-maximising banks will pour more lending into sectors or places that already have plenty of it (because that is where asset values are high), and stay away from those in the grip of a credit drought (where they are low).7 Finally, an overgrown financial sector allocates resources to the wrong things. Rather than funding the business activities that promise most productivity growth, it, too, often funds activities that offer physical security for loans—above all, real estate and construction.8 In contrast, the sectors of the future—especially knowledge-intensive ones with only intangible assets—get less funding than they need.9 This is a feature of credit, and above all bank credit, because such loans commonly require the borrower to offer security that the promised payment terms are upheld. Noncredit financing—such as equity or other forms of direct or indirect ownership—does not promise a predefined return that needs to be secured.

In line with the policies I proposed for financial reform in chapter 9, such institutions may be chartered with a view to providing noncredit forms of financing. They could also be set up to favour the sort of activities that traditional lending is biased against (see chapter 9), and target, for example, knowledge-intensive start-ups with intangible assets that normal bank lending struggles to use as collateral.32 Another example is to use planning laws to lower business costs—for example, by improving the use of land—or increase population density. The UK think tank the Centre for Cities argues, based on successes in the Netherlands and Germany, that making a region thrive depends on increasing the density of its cities to deepen the available pool of knowledge workers available and “make it easier for people and organisations to share information and come up with new ideas.”33 Fourth, a necessary ingredient for a critical mass of knowledge workers is a critical mass of knowledge-intensive jobs.


pages: 321

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies by Igor Tulchinsky

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, data science, deep learning, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, natural language processing, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, systematic trading, text mining, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

By comparing snapshots, investors can find changes that could cause a repricing of the company’s outstanding equity. Total assets are typically used as a normalizing factor to make the values of other factors comparable among different companies or to compare snapshots of the same company at different times. For US companies, the value of total assets includes the intangible asset known as goodwill, defined as what a company pays for another company above book value. Though goodwill contains items such as branding, investors should generally consider whether to discount the goodwill included in the total assets as a normalizing factor. The following well-known factors constructed from the balance sheet were positively correlated with future returns from 1976 to 1996, as observed by Piotroski (2000): •• Increased liquidity (current assets over current liabilities) •• Improved sales over total assets •• No equity issuance •• Less long-term debt Table 19.1 The balance sheet equation Balance sheet YYYYMMDD Assets Liabilities + Equity Current assets Current liabilities Other assets Long-term debt Intangible assets (goodwill, etc.)

The following well-known factors constructed from the balance sheet were positively correlated with future returns from 1976 to 1996, as observed by Piotroski (2000): •• Increased liquidity (current assets over current liabilities) •• Improved sales over total assets •• No equity issuance •• Less long-term debt Table 19.1 The balance sheet equation Balance sheet YYYYMMDD Assets Liabilities + Equity Current assets Current liabilities Other assets Long-term debt Intangible assets (goodwill, etc.) Total assets Shareholders’ equity 144 Table 19.2 Finding Alphas The income statement Income statement YYYMMDD Net sales (sales) A Interest income B Cost of goods C Operating expenses D Income taxes E Gross margin A C Income from operations A C D Gross income A B Net income A B C D E THE INCOME STATEMENT The income statement reflects changes in the balance sheet from one time period to the next, as shown in Table 19.2.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

To illustrate the scale of the opportunity, consider this change: on July 31, 2013, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis released GDP figures that for the first time categorized research and development and software into a new category of “intellectual property products.” We estimate that digital capital is now the source of roughly one-third of total global GDP growth, with intangible assets (think of the value of Google’s search algorithm or Amazon’s recommendation engine) being the main driver.41 For businesses and governments alike, failing to navigate today’s technological tide will mean losing out on a huge economic opportunity as well as increasing vulnerability to potential disruptions.

For GE, Africa is one of the most promising growth regions, having produced revenues of $5.2 billion in 2013. GE in 2014 partnered with the Millennium Challenge Corporation to provide $500 million in financing for the Ghana1000 project, a huge, 1-gigawatt power plant the company is helping to build in Western Ghana.47 Beyond tapping tangible assets, companies are able to mine intangible assets—knowledge, competencies, data—that can help them participate in global flows. Some do so for philanthropic purposes. Coca-Cola used its market distribution expertise in sub-Saharan Africa to manage the storage and delivery of AIDS drugs in countries such as Tanzania. “We’re not lending our trucks or our fleet, or our motorcycles,” as Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent put it.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Mankiw, Gregory, ‘Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving’, The New York Times, 6 February 2014. 25. Corn, David, ‘Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He Really Thinks of Obama Voters’, www.motherjones.com, 17 September 2012. 26. On a PPP-adjusted, per capita basis; data from the IMF. 27. Ocean Tomo, ‘Annual Study of Intangible Asset Market Value’, LLC, 2015. 28. Weil, David, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad and What Can be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 29. US Census Bureau, New Residential Construction. 30. S & P Case-Shiller Home Prices Indexes. 31. ‘The model minority is losing patience’, The Economist, 3 October 2015; IMF data. 32. 

., Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2012) 5. The Firm as an Information-Processing Organism   1. OECD, Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2015, August 2015.   2. Coase, R. H., ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, Vol. 4, No. 16 (Nov. 1937).   3. Ocean Tomo, ‘Annual Study of Intangible Asset Market Value’, LLC, 2015.   4. Clayton M. Christensen (1952–), Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997).   5. 


pages: 287 words: 44,739

Guide to business modelling by John Tennent, Graham Friend, Economist Group

book value, business cycle, correlation coefficient, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, G4S, Herman Kahn, intangible asset, iterative process, low interest rates, price elasticity of demand, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, risk free rate, shareholder value, the market place, time value of money

But this ignores the fact that the benefit of most assets is more likely to be derived over time rather than moving with market values. The method used is to spread the cost of the asset over an estimated period of benefit or useful economic life. This spreading concept, or matching of cost against the years that derive benefit, is known as “depreciation” for tangible assets and “amortisation” for intangible assets. A common exception to this principle is land, which, unless the land value is being eroded by the business (such as is in mining), need not be depreciated. In most companies, the administration required for capitalising and depreciating assets means small assets are often written off on purchase.

A decline in the ratio may indicate that the company is over-provided with assets and could free up capital with some disposals. Rapid growth in the ratio may indicate that capacity constraints have been reached and more time for maintenance and repairs should be considered. The ratio is normally confined to just tangible fixed assets – the ones used operationally. Intangible assets included in the ratio (or evaluated individually) can give rise to some strange results over the life of a model which do not help in interpreting performance. For example, goodwill may be amortised and hence the ratio is likely to rise year on year for this reason alone. Working capital turnover This measure indicates how well the cash cycle of stock/inventory, debtors/receivables and creditors/payables is managed. 202 16.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

These changes, if and when they’re successfully put into practice, are called intangible assets,II and they’re what allow a company to put new technologies to work, obtain higher productivity, pay more, and gain competitive advantage over rivals in an industry. So a period of broad, deep, and fast tech progress such as we’re experiencing during this Second Machine Age should be expected to generate both superstars and zombies in industries around the world. In an era where few companies succeed at the difficult work of not only acquiring powerful new technologies but also the right intangible assets, the superstars pull ahead. Concentration thus increases.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

These variations have been exploited by creative problem-solvers at accountancy firms and within large corporations. People who in previous eras might have written symphonies or designed cathedrals have instead saved companies hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes by shifting trillions of dollars of intangible assets across the world over the past two decades. One consequence is that many companies avoid paying any tax on their foreign sales. Another is that many countries’ trade figures are now unusable. When the U.S. income tax was introduced in 1913, it assessed nothing on money earned abroad. Nobody seemed to mind until the 1950s, when American companies started aggressively relocating parts of their businesses to foreign countries to exploit lower tax rates.

Although the tax law passed at the end of 2017 lowered the effective corporate tax rate below 20 percent and more or less replaced America’s worldwide system of corporate taxation with a territorial system, it did not remove the incentives for profit shifting.28 These profit shifts have also done strange things to the official figures on trade and investment, especially as companies have transferred more and more of the value of what they produce into intangible assets. About 40 percent of all profits earned by multinational corporations outside their home markets are shifted from high-tax jurisdictions, such as China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, into low-tax jurisdictions, such as the Cayman Islands, Ireland, and Singapore. Exports from the high-tax countries are artificially depressed, imports are artificially elevated, and profits earned from subsidiaries in corporate tax havens are unreasonably large.29 Consider Apple.


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

Section 936 allowed corporations to shelter from federal tax a substantial amount of U.S. income obtained from products with intangible assets, such as drug patents, manufactured in Puerto Rico. In 1982, Congress made changes to Section 936 to “lessen the abuse caused by companies’ claiming tax-free income generated by intangibles developed outside of Puerto Rico.” The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 established that, in general, income from intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, and trade names, transferred by a parent company to its Section 936 subsidiary would be taxable to U.S. shareholders.

The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 established that, in general, income from intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, and trade names, transferred by a parent company to its Section 936 subsidiary would be taxable to U.S. shareholders. But the Act still gave corporations the right to claim income attributable to certain intangible assets as nontaxable. Thus, even after 1982, Section 936 corporations were able to shelter from federal tax a substantial portion of the income earned on certain products manufactured in Puerto Rico. Carl Vergari’s only interest in J&J’s Puerto Rican operation was in discovering where the Tylenol manufactured there was actually packaged. What Vergari had already come to understand, or was very close to understanding, was that the Tylenol from Lot AHA090, in the second bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, had been shipped from Puerto Rico in bulk containers and had then undergone the packaging process at a repackaging facility in the continental United States.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Quoted in ibid. 68. See, for example, T. F. Bresnahan, E. Brynjolfsson, and L. M. Hitt, 2002, “Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (1): 339–76; E. Brynjolfsson, L. M. Hitt, and S. Yang, 2002, “Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2002 (1): 137–81; E. Brynjolfsson and L. M. Hitt, 2000, “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4): 23–48. 69. M. Hammer, 1990, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Harvard Business Review 68 (4): 104–12. 70.

The question of whether the recent productivity slowdown is an artifact of mismeasurement is thus not a question of whether mismeasurement exists but one of whether it has gotten larger in recent years. Economists have shown that the answer is no. While there is surely mismeasurement, it seems to have gotten smaller, not larger. Mismeasurement associated with prices of computer hardware and related services as well as intangible assets (such as patents, trademarks, and advertising expenditures) only make the productivity slowdown worse. The decline in domestic production of computer-related goods and services since the period 1995–2004 means that despite mismeasurement’s having worsened for some digital technologies, the mismeasurement problem was greater then than it is now.

Pancras, London at Seven Years of Age, to Endure the Horrors of a Cotton-Mill. London: J. Doherty. Brynjolfsson, E., and L. M. Hitt. 2000. “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4): 23–48. Brynjolfsson, E., L. M. Hitt, and S. Yang. 2002. “Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2002 (1): 137–81. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. 2017. Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“PayPal going public is what allowed me to have the capital to start SpaceX, because I could sell stock or borrow against the stock,” Musk said. “Before that, I didn’t really have meaningful cash.” I. “Goodwill” in accounting refers to the attempt to quantify intangible assets—brand value, training, loyal employees, and the like. They matter especially in the context of a financial transaction—like the merger of Confinity and X.com—when those intangible assets must be priced for accounting purposes. In 2001, companies were required to “amortize” those costs over a period, which reduced profitability. 22 AND ALL I GOT WAS A T-SHIRT In the IPO aftermath, PayPal’s employees undertook a new ritual: checking PYPL’s stock price.

“What do you want”… “driving him”: Author interview with Chris Payne, September 13, 2019. “Imagine you could”… “Yahoo goes by”: Author interview with Ed Ho, August 8, 2019. “the coolest URL” Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. They sold X.com: The details of the transaction are included in PayPal’s S-1 filing, under a section regarding Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets. “In May 1999, the Company acquired the X.com domain name in exchange for 1,500,000 shares of the Company’s Series A mandatorily redeemable convertible preferred stock at an aggregate value of $0.5 million,” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205. “Under the looming”: Email from Dave Weinstein to author on August 9, 2019, containing “The Early History of X.com” as a Word document.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

According to the study’s estimates, intangible investments rose from about 7 percent of non-farm-business output in the late 1970s to 10 percent in the early 1990s to about 14 percent today. Intangible investments rose dramatically in the 1990s when productivity accelerated (see Figure 1-4, “U.S. Investment in Intangibles as a Percentage of GDP”). Visit bit.ly/2bpMCid for a larger version of this image. Given America’s heavy investment in knowledge-intensive intangible assets, it hardly seems coincidental that total factor productivity—productivity growth from innovation and know-how rather than from greater capital investment or education per worker—surged from a growth rate of 0.5 percent per year from 1974 to 1995 to 1.75 percent a year from 1995 to the economic peak preceding the financial crisis.

Nor does innovation create assets that risk-averse savers have typically demanded as collateral, namely assets that are easy to value and sell in the event of a default, such as real estate, inventory, credit card and other accounts receivables, and auto loans. Lenders have been far more reluctant to fund risky venture capital investments or expertise-driven companies with intangible assets—the types of companies that drive growth today—like consulting, accounting, and law firms that are difficult to value and sell. So far we have not seen diversified portfolios of risky hard-to-value venture investments funded with debt. Instead, we have seen an explosion of subprime mortgages in the United States, the construction of empty cities in China, and the funding of never-to-be-paid-back “government-guaranteed” Greek consumption by German-financed debt.


Risk Management in Trading by Davis Edwards

Abraham Maslow, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discrete time, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, implied volatility, intangible asset, interest rate swap, iterative process, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, systematic trading, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, zero-coupon bond

An illiquid market does not allow easy trading. Typically, an illiquid market requires the trader to spend a substantial amount of time finding a trading partner or to take an unfavorable price. REAL ASSETS Real assets include both tangible and intangible assets. Tangible assets are physical assets like physical commodities, buildings, equipment, and land. Intangible assets don’t have physical form but still have value. Some examples of intangible real assets are inventions, works of art, and advertising trademarks. Some of the most commonly traded real assets are petroleum products, metals, and agricultural commodities.


How to Form Your Own California Corporation by Anthony Mancuso

book value, business cycle, corporate governance, corporate raider, distributed generation, estate planning, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, passive income, passive investing, Silicon Valley

In return for the issuance of           (number of shares)           3 shares of stock of the corporation, transferor(s) hereby sell(s), assign(s), and transfer(s) to the corporation all right, title, and interest in the following property: All the tangible assets listed on the inventory attached to this bill of sale and all stock in trade, goodwill, leasehold interests, trade names, and other intangible assets [except           (any nontransferred (address assets shown here)       4] of      (name of prior business)      5, located at      6. of prior business)   In return for the transfer of the above property to it, the corpo­­ ration hereby agrees to assume, pay, and discharge all debts, ­duties and obligations that appear on the date of this agree­ment on the books and owed on account of said business [except                      (any unassumed ­ liabilities shown here)           7].

In return for the issuance of __________________________________ shares of stock of the corporation, transferor(s) hereby sell(s), assign(s), and transfer(s) to the corporation all right, title, and interest in the following property: All the tangible assets listed on the inventory attached to this Bill of Sale and all stock in trade, goodwill, leasehold interests, trade names, and other intangible assets except _____________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ of ________________________________________________________ , located at ______________________________________________________________________ .


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As Peter Elkind wrote in Fortune in May 2001, “Among the stocks she has never downgraded are Priceline, Amazon, Yahoo, and FreeMarkets—all of which have declined between 85% and 97% from their peak.” Meeker concluded that America’s liabilities vastly outweighed its assets. But she ignored some of America’s tangible assets, such as the nation’s holdings of gold and its huge stock market capitalization. And she ignored many of the nation’s intangible assets, like the ability to conjure up giant global Internet companies from nothing. In the summer of 2011 I was at a dinner with Tung Chee Hwa, the billionaire shipping magnate and former chief executive of Hong Kong, and a handful of journalists. When one of my colleagues mentioned Meeker’s analysis, he was somewhat incredulous.

Financial Investments, 38–39 unions, 78, 136, 166, 174, 206 efficiency economy and, 62–63 Uniqlo, 92–93, 144 United Kingdom, 4–5, 19, 29, 46, 110–11, 202 bank bailouts in, 38–39 exports and, 103, 121–22, 125, 129 FDI and, 84, 86, 95 in history, 13–14, 25, 46 timely policy decisions and, 32, 38–39 United States: exceptionalism of, 21 in future, 24 in history, 12–16, 18, 25, 61, 81–82, 97, 99, 141, 200, 205–6, 218 tangible and intangible assets of, 22, 25 and unpopularity of Americans, 3 United States of Europe, The (Reid), 19 UPS, 76–77, 182 US Block Windows, 169 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 146–47 Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, 94 Vestas, 85–86 Vietnam, 15, 26, 128, 140, 168–69, 177, 230 Virginia, 13, 88–91, 103 Volvo, 88 von Claparede, Clemens, 91–92 Wallquest, 110–14, 116, 119 Wall Street Journal, 3, 5, 41, 84, 87, 96, 161, 185, 203, 212, 227 China and, 165, 167 exports and, 100–101, 103, 106–8, 125 Walmart, 141, 218, 227 efficiency economy and, 62, 68, 75–76 supersizing and, 202, 207 W&H Properties, 70 Wang, David and Mei Xu, 176–77 Wang Feng, 165 Wanzek, Terry, 158 Washington Mutual, 39, 46 Washington Post, 6, 172 Waste Management, 65–66 Wedding of the Waters (Bernstein), 206 Weill, Sandy, 85 Weiner, Stephanie, 188 Welch, Jack, 146 Wells Fargo, 37–38 Wessel, David, 100 Whirlpool, 173 White, Martha C., 108 Whitney, Richard, 13 Will, George, 5 Williams, Brad, 96 Williams, Deron, 126 Willis, Bruce, 129–30 Willoughby, Jack, 47 wind turbines, 26, 85–86, 178 Wolf, Martin, 28–29 Woodside, Chuck, 104–5 World Economic Forum, 3–4, 26, 86, 172, 197–98, 203 World War I, 14, 24–25, 137 World War II, 2, 7, 17–18, 24–25, 61 Worth, 170–71 Wylie, Andrew, 127 Yagerman, Justin, 76–77 Yanai, Tadashi, 93 Yergin, Daniel, 106 Yessbuts, 217 Yoplait, 89 Yum Brands, 138–39 Zakaria, Fareed, 19 Zandi, Mark, 31, 207 Zions Bank, 38 Zipcar, 192–93, 195 Zuckerberg, Mark and Randi, 197 Zynga, 18, 84, 201 About the Author Daniel Gross, economics editor and columnist at Yahoo!


pages: 139 words: 33,246

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

‘You might think: I want to go this way, now I want to go this way, and what about this way?’ A person born in the developed world today has a 50% chance of living to 105 and this age has been increasing steady at the rate of two years every decade.42 Increasing longevity means you need to be adaptable, flexible and invest in both intangible assets (health, well-being, skills, education, relationships) and tangible financial assets (savings, investments and property). Financial planning is a process, not a one-time event or static written document and it is the thinking behind the process that is important, particularly in the context of a very long life.


pages: 1,845 words: 567,850

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014 by J. K. Lasser

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

A sale of property that allows for tax deferment if at least one payment is received after the end of the tax year in which the sale occurs. The installment method does not apply to year-end sales of publicly traded securities. Dealers may not use the installment method. Investors with very large installment balances could face a special tax; see 5.21. Intangible assets. Intangible assets that come within Section 197, such as goodwill, are amortizable over a 15-year period; see 42.17. Inter vivos or lifetime trust. A trust created during the lifetime of the person who created the trust. If irrevocable, income on the trust principal is generally shifted to the trust beneficiaries; see 39.6.

If the useful life of an item is less than a year, its cost, including sales tax on the purchase, is deductible. Otherwise, you generally may recover your cost only through depreciation except to the extent first-year expensing applies (42.3). IRS regulations provide safe harbors, including a “12-month” rule, for expenditures relating to intangible assets or benefits (40.3). - - - - - - - - - - Caution Penalties and Fines Penalties or fines paid to a government agency because of a violation of any law are not deductible. You may deduct penalties imposed by a business contract for late performance or nonperformance. - - - - - - - - - - EXAMPLE A new roof is installed on your office building.

In the case of art objects and antiques used as business assets, the useful life requirement remains relevant because such assets are not subject to exhaustion, wear or tear, or obsolescence. The IRS may continue to dispute and litigate cases in which depreciation is claimed on assets with indeterminable useful lives. For example, in a private ruling, the IRS did not allow a developer to depreciate street improvements that had been turned over to a city. The improvements were an intangible asset that improved the developer’s access to its real estate projects, but this asset had an unlimited life. There was no determinable useful life because the city had agreed to maintain and replace the improvements as necessary, and there was no evidence that the city would ever assess the developer for replacement costs.


Schaum's Outline of Bookkeeping and Accounting, Fourth Edition (Schaum's Outlines) by Joel Lerner, Rajul Gokarn

accelerated depreciation, book value, intangible asset

These assets, sometimes called fixed assets or plant assets, are used in the operation of the business rather than being held for sale, as are inventory items. Other Assets. Various assets other than current assets, fixed assets, or as­ sets to which specific captions are given. For instance, the caption “In­ vestments” would be used if significant sums were invested. Often com­ panies show a caption for intangible assets such as patents or goodwill. In other cases, there may be a separate caption for deferred charges. If, 22 BOOKKEEPING AND ACCOUNTING however, the amounts are not large in relation to total assets, the various items may be grouped under one caption, “Other Assets.” Current Liabilities. Debts that must be satisfied from current assets with­ in the next operating period, usually one year.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

This was because Celanese would have to pay more for Celluloid than its assets – such as its debts, stocks, plant and technology rights like patents – were worth in isolation. There was nothing unusual about that in an acquisition. But the extra cost, which double-entry bookkeeping dictated would be treated as acquiring an intangible asset known as ‘goodwill’, would have to be written off over the following years. Predicted future profits would be reduced. Black reasoned that this would not give a fair picture of the combined enterprise. So he formulated a new method of accounting for such a merger, which he called ‘pooling-of-interest’ accounting.

By the mid 1990s, retailers like Gap and Nike, as well as major food and drinks companies, began selling to customers around the world from the Netherlands and other tax-efficient locations. Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline made sure that rights to blockbuster drugs were held in fiscally friendly locations: Singapore, Switzerland, Puerto Rico. A new form of competition opened up among countries bidding to host the valuable financial capital and intangible assets that companies could now locate anywhere in the world. In return for small local contributions, these territories would enable the world’s largest companies to avoid far larger amounts of tax in the countries where they really did business. The bean counters would show them how to do it. Ireland had been offering tax breaks in an attempt to attract industry into its troubled economy, mainly from the UK, since the 1950s.


pages: 368 words: 32,950

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile by Alexander Davidson

accounting loophole / creative accounting, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Exxon Valdez, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, information security, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, pension reform, Piper Alpha, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk free rate, shareholder value, short selling, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Sometimes, the integration of two companies can be problematic and not all deals enhance shareholder value, at least in the short term. Disclosure and regulation When acquisitions take place, it is hard to assess their value creation due to significant goodwill expenditure, coupled with under-reporting of intangible assets and a general lack of disclosure, according to Intangible Business, a brand valuation consultancy. The FTSE 100 reported about £40 billion spent on acquisitions in 2006, and over half of this expenditure was put down to goodwill, according to a survey by Intangible Business. One conclusion was that the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 3, the accounting standard for business combinations, had failed in its objective of showing investors how their money was being spent on acquisitions.

Under IFRS, the cost of stock options estimated at the date of grant has been included as an expense on the income statement for the first time. Many companies have restructured their remuneration schemes to avoid calculating the expense, which requires option valuation models. Goodwill must be recognised and tested annually for impairment, and there must be significant disclosure of key assumptions and sensitivities. Valuing of intangible assets such as brands has proved more complex than anticipated, according to accountants. Dividends are no longer accrued, unless they are declared before the year end. Deferred taxes are calculated on revaluations as well as on timing differences and feedback suggests that this broad area of accounting has been challenging, as predicted.


Not for Bread Alone: A Business Ethos, a Management Ethic by 松下幸之助

fear of failure, intangible asset, Kōnosuke Matsushita

To me, the union and the management are the two wheels of a wagon that hold up the company. If one wheel expands more than the other, the wagon will tilt. Only when both wheels are balanced can we move forward smoothly, together. 148 14. Pricetag on the Intangible IT is much more diffIcult to assign a value to a hidden, intangible asset than it is to a clearly defmed, visible object, but it can be just as important. In business, managerial ability cannot be seen, but clearly it is worth a great deal more when it is strong than when it is weak, when it fosters growth in the company and higher standards of employee welfare. Superior management ultimately works to benefIt society as a whole, which gives it a very high value indeed.


pages: 147 words: 37,622

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne Demaria Barry

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Bluma Zeigarnik, corporate governance, Howard Rheingold, intangible asset, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Ken Thompson, pattern recognition, performance metric, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Yogi Berra

She juggles two jobs, each located on opposite ends of her city. She’s studying for her financial advisor certification. She’s training for a triathlon. She wants to write a book. She’s thinking about opening her own business, perhaps getting another degree. The list goes on. As a mathematician and an expert in intangible assets, Jessica understands she has so much on her plate that busting her WIP limit is almost guaranteed, and money is just one asset to focus on out of many. One Sunday over brunch, we mapped out her Personal Kanban. We discussed what she enjoyed, what she valued, what her aspirations were. Within minutes of what would become a three hour conversation, it became apparent that Jessica was not simply goal-oriented, she was a goal-collector.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

A sale of property that allows for tax deferment if at least one payment is received after the end of the tax year in which the sale occurs. The installment method does not apply to year-end sales of publicly traded securities. Dealers may not use the installment method. Investors with very large installment balances could face a special tax; see 5.21. Intangible assets. Intangible assets that come within Section 197, such as goodwill, are amortizable over a 15-year period; see 42.17. Inter vivos or lifetime trust. A trust created during the lifetime of the person who created the trust. If irrevocable, income on the trust principal is generally shifted to the trust beneficiaries; see 39.6.

If the useful life of an item is less than a year, its cost, including sales tax on the purchase, is deductible. Otherwise, you generally may recover your cost only through depreciation except to the extent first-year expensing applies (42.3). IRS regulations provide safe harbors, including a “12-month” rule, for expenditures relating to intangible assets or benefits (40.3). Caution Penalties and Fines Penalties or fines paid to a government agency because of a violation of any law are not deductible. You may deduct penalties imposed by a business contract for late performance or nonperformance. EXAMPLE A new roof is installed on your office building.

In the case of art objects and antiques used as business assets, the useful life requirement remains relevant because such assets are not subject to exhaustion, wear or tear, or obsolescence. The IRS may continue to dispute and litigate cases in which depreciation is claimed on assets with indeterminable useful lives. For example, in a private ruling, the IRS did not allow a developer to depreciate street improvements that had been turned over to a city. The improvements were an intangible asset that improved the developer’s access to its real estate projects, but this asset had an unlimited life. There was no determinable useful life because the city had agreed to maintain and replace the improvements as necessary, and there was no evidence that the city would ever assess the developer for replacement costs.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Several forces can widen a company’s moat: a strong brand identity (think of Harley Davidson, whose buyers tattoo the company’s logo onto their bodies); a monopoly or near-monopoly on the market; economies of scale, or the ability to supply huge amounts of goods or services cheaply (consider Gillette, which churns out razor blades by the billion); a unique intangible asset (think of Coca-Cola, whose secret formula for flavored syrup has no real physical value but maintains a priceless hold on consumers); a resistance to substitution (most businesses have no alternative to electricity, so utility companies are unlikely to be supplanted any time soon).5 The company is a marathoner, not a sprinter.

According to Morgan Stanley, a generous total of 185 companies passed Graham’s test. Moderate price-to-book ratio. Graham recommends a “ratio of price to assets” (or price-to-book-value ratio) of no more than 1.5. In recent years, an increasing proportion of the value of companies has come from intangible assets like franchises, brand names, and patents and trademarks. Since these factors (along with goodwill from acquisitions) are excluded from the standard definition of book value, most companies today are priced at higher price-to-book multiples than in Graham’s day. According to Morgan Stanley, 123 of the companies in the S & P 500 (or one in four) are priced below 1.5 times book value.

A generation or more ago it was the standard rule, recognized both in average stock prices and in formal or legal valuations, that intangibles were to be appraised on a more conservative basis than tangibles. A good industrial company might be required to earn between 6 per cent and 8 per cent on its tangible assets, represented typically by bonds and preferred stock; but its excess earnings, or the intangible assets they gave rise to, would be valued on, say, a 15 per cent basis. (You will find approximately these ratios in the initial offering of Woolworth preferred and common stock in 1911, and in numerous others.) But what has happened since the 1920s? Essentially the exact reverse of these relationships may now be seen.


pages: 2,045 words: 566,714

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax by J K Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

A sale of property that allows for tax deferment if at least one payment is received after the end of the tax year in which the sale occurs. The installment method does not apply to year-end sales of publicly traded securities. Dealers may not use the installment method. Investors with very large installment balances could face a special tax; see 5.21. Intangible assets. Intangible assets that come within Section 197, such as goodwill, are amortizable over a 15-year period; see 42.17. Inter vivos or lifetime trust. A trust created during the lifetime of the person who created the trust. If irrevocable, income on the trust principal is generally shifted to the trust beneficiaries; see 39.6.

If the useful life of an item is less than a year, its cost, including sales tax on the purchase, is deductible. Otherwise, you generally may recover your cost only through depreciation except to the extent first-year expensing applies (42.3). IRS regulations provide safe harbors, including a “12-month” rule, for expenditures relating to intangible assets or benefits (40.3). - - - - - - - - - - Caution Penalties and Fines Penalties or fines paid to a government agency because of a violation of any law are not deductible. You may deduct penalties imposed by a business contract for late performance or nonperformance. - - - - - - - - - - EXAMPLE A new roof is installed on your office building.

In the case of art objects and antiques used as business assets, the useful life requirement remains relevant because such assets are not subject to exhaustion, wear or tear, or obsolescence. The IRS may continue to dispute and litigate cases in which depreciation is claimed on assets with indeterminable useful lives. For example, in a private ruling, the IRS did not allow a developer to depreciate street improvements that had been turned over to a city. The improvements were an intangible asset that improved the developer’s access to its real estate projects, but this asset had an unlimited life. There was no determinable useful life because the city had agreed to maintain and replace the improvements as necessary, and there was no evidence that the city would ever assess the developer for replacement costs.


pages: 120 words: 39,637

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt

backtesting, book value, General Magic , index fund, intangible asset, random walk, survivorship bias, transaction costs

In addition to working capital requirements, a company must also fund the purchase of fixed assets necessary to conduct its business, such as real estate, plant, and equipment. The depreciated net cost of these fixed assets was then added to the net working capital requirements already calculated to arrive at an estimate for tangible capital employed. NOTE: Intangible assets, specifically goodwill, were excluded from the tangible capital employed calculations. Goodwill usually arises as a result of an acquisition of another company. The cost of an acquisition in excess of the tangible assets acquired is usually assigned to a goodwill account. In order to conduct its future business, the acquiring company usually only has to replace tangible assets, such as plant and equipment.


pages: 482 words: 125,973

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

The problem lay on virtually every line of Cisco’s income statement, but the main culprits were research and development. TABLE 7.4 Cisco’s increased costs as a percentage of sales, 1996–2000 Cost of sales Total Change 1996–2000 Cost of goods sold 1.2% Research and development 4.5% Sales and marketing 3.1% General and administrative –0.6% Amortization of goodwill and purchased intangible assets 1.5% In-process research and development 7.3% Total 17.0% CHANGING CLASS Cisco did not one day decide that it should spend more on research and development because it had all these talented engineers and wanted to keep them busy. Beneath the decline in margins lay a major change in the nature of Cisco’s business.

For example, when a record company buys an independent label with its stable of recording artists, or when a major drug company buys a start-up firm with a promising product, or when a cable company buys a local cable system with its customer contracts, a reproduction value has been put on these intangible assets. Calculating the reproduction value of the assets of a firm in a viable business, just like establishing the liquidation value, does not require projections into the future. The necessary information is all currently available. Also, in working down the balance sheet, the estimates of value move from the most certain (cash and marketable securities) to the least certain (the intangibles).


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

If these costs can be socialized by delegating the protection of legal rights to a state, asset holders save huge costs. More important, they can use their assets in ways that simply would not be available otherwise. They can own assets without exercising physical control over them. They can even own intangibles, assets that cannot be touched and exist only in legal code, and move assets into legal shells where they are protected from their own creditors, pledge and even repledge them without leaving more than a paper trail. They can do all of this only with the help of law that is backed by state power. Private and public power are often juxtaposed and depicted as engaged in ongoing bargaining with each other for favors.

Economic Growth,” The Review of Income and Wealth 55, no. 3 (2009):661–686, p. 661. 31. The saying is attributed in slight variations to different authors, including Peter Ducker (a business economist), Peason (a mathematical statistician), or Thomas Monson. 32. Corrado et al., “Intangible Capital,” p. 683. Leonard I. Nakamura, “Intangible Assets and National Income Accounting,” Review of Income and Wealth 56, no. S1 (2010):S135–S155. For a summary of this literature, see also Saskia Clausen and Stefan Hirth, “Measuring the Value of Intangibles,” Journal of Corporate Finance 40 (2016):110–127. 33. Haskel and Westlake, Capitalism without Capital, figures 2.1 and 2.2, pp. 24–25. 34.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

The recession may have complicated the picture somewhat, but the war for talent continues to rage. The global economy is becoming ever more brain-intensive. Baruch Lev, of New York University, argues that “intangible assets”—ranging from a skilled workforce to patents to know-how—account for more than half of the market capitalization of America’s public companies.6 Accenture, a management consultancy, calculates that intangible assets have shot up from 20 percent of the value of companies in the S&P 500 in 1980 to about 70 percent today. McKinsey has divided American jobs into three categories: “transformational” (extracting raw materials or converting them into finished goods), “transactional” (interactions that can easily be scripted or automated), and “tacit” (complex interactions requiring a high level of judgment).


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

Or the money-managers who buy shares of well-performing stocks and sell shares of underperforming stocks in time for listing in quarterly reports, disguising the fact that they bought the high-performing stocks at high prices and that their poorly-performing stocks may have turned around had they held onto them—known in the trade as “window dressing.”24 A focus on measurable performance indicators can lead managers to neglect tasks for which no clear measures of performance are available, as the organizational scholars Nelson Repenning and Rebecca Henderson have recently noted.25 Unable to count intangible assets such as reputation, employee satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, trust, and cooperation, those enamored of performance metrics squeeze assets in the short term at the expense of long-term consequences. For all these reasons, reliance upon measurable metrics is conducive to short-termism, a besetting malady of contemporary American corporations.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

For a global perspective on the interaction between part-time employment and women’s entry into the labour force, see Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor’, World Development 17:7, 1989; and Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited’, World Development 27:3, 1999. 7 There is sizeable mainstream literature arguing that new technology has altered the nature of work by adding intangible organizational assets to the production process; see Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, ‘Beyond Computation’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14:4, 2000; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, ‘Computing Productivity’, MIT-Sloan Working Paper 4210–01, 2003; Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Shinkyu Yang, ‘Intangible Assets’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Macroeconomics, vol. 1, 2002; Timothy Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt, ‘Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117:1, 2002; Marshall Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson, ‘Global Village or Cyber-Balkans’, Management Science, 2004.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin Hitt, ‘Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14:4, 2000, pp. 23–48. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin Hitt, ‘Computing Productivity: Firm-Level Evidence’, MIT-Sloan Working Paper 4210–01, 2003. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Lorin Hitt, and Shinkyu Yang, ‘Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Macroeconomics, vol. 1, 2002, pp. 137–99. Buiter, Willem, and Anne Sibert, ‘The Central Bank as the Market-Maker of Last Resort: From Lender of Last Resort to Market-Maker of Last Resort’, in The First Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century, ed.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

The effectiveness of a predictive modeling solution may depend critically on the problem engineering, the attributes created, the combining of different models, and so on. It often is not clear to a competitor how performance is achieved in practice. Even if our algorithms are published in detail, many implementation details may be critical to get a solution that works in the lab to work in production. Furthermore, success may be based on intangible assets such as a company culture that is particularly suitable to the deployment of data science solutions. For example, a culture that embraces business experimentation and the (rigorous) supporting of claims with data will naturally be an easier place for data science solutions to succeed. Alternatively, if developers are encouraged to understand data science, they are less likely to screw up an otherwise top-quality solution.

., Ranking Instead of Classifying–Ranking Instead of Classifying climatology, Evaluation, Baseline Performance, and Implications for Investments in Data clipping dendrograms, Hierarchical Clustering cloud labor, Final Example: From Crowd-Sourcing to Cloud-Sourcing clumps of instances, Example: Overfitting Linear Functions cluster centers, Nearest Neighbors Revisited: Clustering Around Centroids cluster distortion, Nearest Neighbors Revisited: Clustering Around Centroids clustering, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, Clustering–* Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions, Representing and Mining Text algorithm, Nearest Neighbors Revisited: Clustering Around Centroids business news stories example, Example: Clustering Business News Stories–The news story clusters centroid-based, Example: Clustering Business News Stories creating, Hierarchical Clustering data preparation for, Data preparation–Data preparation hierarchical, Hierarchical Clustering–Hierarchical Clustering indicating, Hierarchical Clustering interpreting results of, Understanding the Results of Clustering–Understanding the Results of Clustering nearest neighbors and, Nearest Neighbors Revisited: Clustering Around Centroids–Nearest Neighbors Revisited: Clustering Around Centroids profiling and, Profiling: Finding Typical Behavior soft, Profiling: Finding Typical Behavior supervised learning and, * Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions–* Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions whiskey example, Example: Whiskey Analytics Revisited–Hierarchical Clustering clusters, Similarity, Neighbors, and Clusters, Understanding the Results of Clustering co-occurrence grouping, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks–From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, Co-occurrences and Associations: Finding Items That Go Together–Associations Among Facebook Likes beer and lottery example, Example: Beer and Lottery Tickets–Example: Beer and Lottery Tickets eWatch/eBracelet example, Co-occurrences and Associations: Finding Items That Go Together–Co-occurrences and Associations: Finding Items That Go Together market basket analysis, Associations Among Facebook Likes–Associations Among Facebook Likes surprisingness, Measuring Surprise: Lift and Leverage–Measuring Surprise: Lift and Leverage Coelho, Paul, Example: Evidence Lifts from Facebook “Likes” cognition, Machine Learning and Data Mining Coltrane, John, Example: Jazz Musicians combining functions, Nearest Neighbors for Predictive Modeling, * Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors–* Combining Functions: Calculating Scores from Neighbors common tasks, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks–From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks communication, between scientists and business people, Superior Data Science Management, The Fundamental Concepts of Data Science company culture, as intangible asset, Unique Intangible Collateral Assets comparisons, multiple, * Avoiding Overfitting for Parameter Optimization–* Avoiding Overfitting for Parameter Optimization complex functions, Overfitting in Mathematical Functions, Example: Overfitting Linear Functions complexity, Learning Curves complexity control, Overfitting Avoidance and Complexity Control–* Avoiding Overfitting for Parameter Optimization, * Avoiding Overfitting for Parameter Optimization ensemble method and, Bias, Variance, and Ensemble Methods nearest-neighbor reasoning and, Geometric Interpretation, Overfitting, and Complexity Control–Geometric Interpretation, Overfitting, and Complexity Control complications, Selecting Informative Attributes comprehensibility, of models, Evaluation computing errors, Regression via Mathematical Functions computing likelihood, * Logistic Regression: Some Technical Details conditional independence and Bayes’ Rule, Bayes’ Rule unconditional vs., Conditional Independence and Naive Bayes conditional probability, Combining Evidence Probabilistically conditioning bar, Combining Evidence Probabilistically confidence, in association mining, Co-occurrences and Associations: Finding Items That Go Together confusion matrix and points in ROC space, ROC Graphs and Curves evaluating models with, The Confusion Matrix–The Confusion Matrix expected value corresponding to, Profit Curves produced by classifiers, Ranking Instead of Classifying–Ranking Instead of Classifying true positive and false negative rates for, ROC Graphs and Curves constraints budget, Profit Curves workforce, Profit Curves consumer movie-viewing preferences example, Data Reduction, Latent Information, and Movie Recommendation consumer voice, From Big Data 1.0 to Big Data 2.0 consumers, describing, Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements–Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements content pieces, online consumer targeting based on, Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements context, importance of, Why Text Is Difficult control group, evaluating data models with, Flaws in the Big Red Proposal converting data, Data Preparation cookies, browser, Example: Targeting Online Consumers With Advertisements corpus, Representation correlations, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, Statistics causation vs., The news story clusters general-purpose meaning, Statistics specific technical meaning, Statistics cosine distance, * Other Distance Functions, * Other Distance Functions cosine similarity, * Other Distance Functions Cosine Similarity function, Example: Jazz Musicians cost matrix, Profit Curves cost-benefit matrix, Costs and benefits, Costs and benefits, Costs and benefits costs and underlying profit calculation, ROC Graphs and Curves estimating, Costs and benefits in budgeting, Ranking Instead of Classifying of data, Data Understanding counterfactual analysis, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks Cray Computer Corporation, The Data credit-card transactions, Data Understanding, Profiling: Finding Typical Behavior creditworthiness model, as example of selection bias, A Brief Digression on Selection Bias CRISP cycle, Implications for Managing the Data Science Team approaches and, Implications for Managing the Data Science Team strategy and, Implications for Managing the Data Science Team CRISP-DM, Data Mining and Data Science, Revisited, The Data Mining Process Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP), Data Mining and Data Science, Revisited, The Data Mining Process–Deployment, The Data Mining Process business understanding, Business Understanding–Business Understanding data preparation, Data Preparation–Data Preparation data understanding, Data Understanding–Data Understanding deployment, Deployment–Deployment evaluation, Evaluation–Evaluation modeling, Modeling software development cycle vs., Implications for Managing the Data Science Team–Implications for Managing the Data Science Team cross-validation, From Holdout Evaluation to Cross-Validation, Summary beginning, From Holdout Evaluation to Cross-Validation datasets and, From Holdout Evaluation to Cross-Validation nested, A General Method for Avoiding Overfitting overfitting and, From Holdout Evaluation to Cross-Validation–From Holdout Evaluation to Cross-Validation cumulative response curves, Cumulative Response and Lift Curves–Cumulative Response and Lift Curves curse of dimensionality, Dimensionality and domain knowledge customer churn example analytic engineering example, Our Churn Example Revisited with Even More Sophistication–From an Expected Value Decomposition to a Data Science Solution and data firm maturity, A Firm’s Data Science Maturity customer churn, predicting, Example: Predicting Customer Churn with cross-validation, The Churn Dataset Revisited–The Churn Dataset Revisited with tree induction, Example: Addressing the Churn Problem with Tree Induction–Example: Addressing the Churn Problem with Tree Induction customer retention, Example: Predicting Customer Churn customers, characterizing, Answering Business Questions with These Techniques D data as a strategic asset, Data and Data Science Capability as a Strategic Asset converting, Data Preparation cost, Data Understanding holdout, Holdout Data and Fitting Graphs investment in, From an Expected Value Decomposition to a Data Science Solution labeled, Models, Induction, and Prediction objective truth vs., What Data Can’t Do: Humans in the Loop, Revisited obtaining, From an Expected Value Decomposition to a Data Science Solution training, Introduction to Predictive Modeling: From Correlation to Supervised Segmentation, Models, Induction, and Prediction data analysis, Example: Predicting Customer Churn, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks data exploration, Stepping Back: Solving a Business Problem Versus Data Exploration–Stepping Back: Solving a Business Problem Versus Data Exploration data landscape, Hierarchical Clustering data mining, Business Problems and Data Science Solutions–Summary and Bayes’ Rule, Applying Bayes’ Rule to Data Science applying, Answering Business Questions with These Techniques–Answering Business Questions with These Techniques, Supervised Segmentation as strategic component, Data-Analytic Thinking CRISP codification of, The Data Mining Process–Deployment data science and, The Ubiquity of Data Opportunities, Data Mining and Data Science, Revisited–Data Mining and Data Science, Revisited domain knowledge and, Dimensionality and domain knowledge early stages, Supervised Versus Unsupervised Methods fundamental ideas, Supervised Segmentation with Tree-Structured Models implementing techniques, Data Processing and “Big Data” important distinctions, Data Mining and Its Results matching analytic techniques to problems, Other Analytics Techniques and Technologies–Answering Business Questions with These Techniques process of, The Data Mining Process–Deployment results of, Data Mining and Its Results–Data Mining and Its Results, Deployment skills, Implications for Managing the Data Science Team software development cycle vs., Implications for Managing the Data Science Team–Implications for Managing the Data Science Team stages, Data Mining and Data Science, Revisited structuring projects, Business Problems and Data Science Solutions supervised vs. unsupervised methods of, Supervised Versus Unsupervised Methods–Supervised Versus Unsupervised Methods systems, Deployment tasks, fitting business problems to, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks–From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks techniques, Deployment Data Mining (field), Machine Learning and Data Mining data mining algorithms, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks data mining proposal example, Example Data Mining Proposal–Flaws in the Big Red Proposal data preparation, Data Preparation, Representing and Mining Text data preprocessing, Data Preprocessing–Data Preprocessing data processing technologies, Data Processing and “Big Data” data processing, data science vs., Data Processing and “Big Data”–Data Processing and “Big Data” data reduction, From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks–From Business Problems to Data Mining Tasks, Data Reduction, Latent Information, and Movie Recommendation–Data Reduction, Latent Information, and Movie Recommendation data requirements, Data Preparation data science, Introduction: Data-Analytic Thinking–Summary, Data Science and Business Strategy–A Firm’s Data Science Maturity, Conclusion–Final Words and adding value to applications, Decision Analytic Thinking I: What Is a Good Model?


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

Smith leveraged his real estate expertise to creatively finance the purchase via a sale/leaseback of ABC’s manufacturing facilities (he is still justifiably proud of this coup). Smith had grown up in the bricks-and-mortar world of movie theaters, and ABC was his first exposure to the value of businesses with intangible assets, like beverage brands. Smith grew to love the beverage business, which was an oligopoly with very high returns on capital and attractive long-term growth trends. He particularly liked the dynamics within the Pepsi bottler universe, which was fragmented and had many second- and third-generation owners who were potential sellers (unlike the Coke system, which was dominated by a smaller number of large independents).


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

When I started out, I didn’t have the name recognition of Robert Parker, or the clout of Wine Spectator, so I didn’t talk about Gary Vaynerchuk or Wine Library—I talked about Chardonnay. Social media gives you the opportunity to take your business to its fullest potential. Grab it. The Answer Is Always the Same I think we’re entering a business golden age. It took a long time for people to recognize the value of intellectual capital, whose intangible assets don’t show up on a spreadsheet, couldn’t be tracked, and couldn’t be expressed in dollars. Now it’s widely understood that intellectual capital is part of the backbone of every organization, and worth protecting. While the ability to form relationships has always been considered a subset of intellectual capital, social media has catapulted that skill into a wealth-building category.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

The tax haven is thus, once again, only a conduit – or, as Ronen Palan calls it, a ‘booking location’. Other than cash and shares, the most common assets recorded as held in tax havens are property, in the form of the title to land and buildings; shares in private companies; and other tangible assets, such as art, yachts and the like as well as intangible assets such as patents and copyrights. In each case, it is very unlikely that the assets recorded as being owned in the tax haven will have ever had anything to do with it, or will ever (even in the case of some yachts) have been near it. All that the tax haven does is provide an opportunity to record the legal ownership of these assets.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

The partners were familiar with MCI from their days at Drexel Burnham Lambert, when MCI had been a pioneer junk bond issuer. We doubled down. We bought significantly more bonds at twenty cents. The bankruptcy was long and complicated, starting with a new CEO from Compaq and the write-off of $80 billion of goodwill, intangible assets, property, and equipment. The next step was to settle charges of accounting fraud with the different parties: the SEC and the Oklahoma attorney general (where the campus was based). The plan was to emerge with a long-distance business under the MCI name and let the tainted WorldCom brand die in the process.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Such companies are prime examples of what I described in the Preface as balance-sheet capitalists. Figure 3.3 shows the estimated value of proprietary IP assets alongside non-IP assets for a selection of the leading UK IP rentiers mentioned above, and clearly demonstrates the disproportionate importance of the former category.19 Note the presence of an important but awkward form of intangible asset on the balance sheets of all three: ‘goodwill’. If one company acquires another and the purchase consideration is greater than the cumulative value of the acquired company’s separately identifiable assets (minus its liabilities), goodwill – representing the ‘excess’ amount – arises, and must be accounted for.

‘McDonald’s Corporation Form 10-K: Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2018’, p. 44. 12. EPO and EUIPO, ‘Intellectual Property Rights Intensive Industries and Economic Performance in the European Union’, October 2016, p. 88 – pdf available at euipo. europa.eu. 13. Ibid., p. 7. 14. On these assumptions, see P. Goodridge, J. Haskel and G. Wallis, Estimating UK Investment in Intangible Assets and Intellectual Property Rights (Newport: Intellectual Property Office, 2014). 15. S. Turnock, ‘IP and the Intangible Economy’, 20 March 2018, at ipo.blog.gov.uk. 16. Intellectual Property Office, Trends at Intellectual Property Office UK 1995–2017 (Newport: Intellectual Property Office, 2018), pp. 1–2. 17.


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

As with all such strategies, however, the increased returns tended to shrink as more people adopted it. A ratio that seems to be more strongly related to increased returns than price-to-dividends or price-to-earnings is the price-to-book ratio, P/B. The denominator B is the company’s book value per share—its total assets minus the sum of total liabilities and intangible assets, divided by the number of shares. The P/B ratio changes less over time than does the P/E ratio and has the further virtue of almost always being positive. Book value is meant to capture something basic about a company, but like earnings it can be a rather malleable number. Nevertheless, a well-known and influential study by the economists Eugene Fama and Ken French has shown P/B to be a useful diagnostic device.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

To outmaneuver the IRS and European collectors, Amazon hatched Project Goldcrest. The code name referenced the national bird of Luxembourg. In 2003, the company sought out a deal with the Grand Duchy. As a reward for building a headquarters there, it would pay hardly any tax. Once Amazon set up shop in Luxembourg, it transferred a vast swath of its intangible assets there—vital software, trademarks, and other shards of intellectual property. Truly, these assets exist in no particular country—does one-click shopping really have a physical location?—but they have a basis in contracts, and those contracts are the basis for taxation. Amazon devised a labyrinthine corporate structure, a dizzying network of subsidiaries and holding companies.


The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William J. Bernstein

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, p-value, passive investing, prediction markets, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, the scientific method, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Bid price: A broker’s price to buy a stock or bond. Bond: Debt issued by a corporation or governmental entity. Carries a coupon, or the amount of interest it yields. Bonds are usually of greater than one-year maturity. (Treasury securities of 1–10 years’ maturity are called notes.) Book value: A company’s assets minus intangible assets and liabilities; very roughly speaking, a company’s net assets. Capital asset pricing model (CAPM): A theory relating risk and expected return. Basically, it states that the return of a security or portfolio is equal to the risk-free rate plus a risk premium defined by Glossary 189 its beta.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

On the notion of commercialization of state sovereignty, see Palan (2002). 17. Tørsløv, Wier, and Zucman (2018). Chapter 5: SPIRAL 1. The income earned by self-employed workers is mixed in the sense that it conceptually corresponds to both a payment for their work (time spent curing patients or performing legal services) and their capital (medical devices, intangible assets such as the brand value of a law firm). Attributing 70% of self-employment income to labor is somewhat arbitrary, but because most workers are salaried individuals (not self-employed), varying this assumption is largely immaterial. 2. In public financial statements, total labor costs are not reported separately (they are lumped with other costs under “costs of goods sold”).


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

At least when the UK government came to passing its national orphan works legislation, it recognised that there was an important economic dimension to the problem: “The Government’s position, following the Hargreaves Review, is that it benefits no-one to have a wealth of copyright works be entirely unusable under any circumstances because the owner of one or more rights in the work cannot be contacted. This is not simply a cultural issue; it is also a very real economic issue that potentially valuable intangible assets are not being used, and an issue of respect for copyright if they are being used unlawfully. The Government therefore proposed an orphan works scheme that allows for both commercial and cultural uses of orphan works, subject to satisfactory safeguards for the interests of both owners of ‘orphan rights’ and rights holders who could potentially suffer from unfair competition from an orphan works scheme.”46 A press release from the UK government in October 2014 claimed that the new UK licensing scheme, brought in to address the orphan works problem, ‘could give wider access to at least 91 million culturally valuable creative works—including diaries, photographs, oral history recordings and documentary films.’47 In 2019, Merisa Martinez48 of the Swedish School of Library and Information Science and Melissa Terras49 of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences University of Edinburgh, looked at how things had gone in the four years since the UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme had started operation: “As of October 2018, 144 licenses have been granted of a total of 877 items.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

Installment sale A sale of property that allows for tax deferment if at least one payment is received after the end of the tax year in which the sale occurs. The installment method does not apply to year-end sales of publicly traded securities. Dealers may not use the installment method. Investors with very large installment balances could face a special tax; see 5.21. Intangible assets Intangible assets that come within Section 197, such as goodwill, are amortizable over a 15-year period; see 42.17. Inter vivos or lifetime trust A trust created during the lifetime of the person who created the trust. If irrevocable, income on the trust principal is generally shifted to the trust beneficiaries; see 39.6.

If the useful life of an item is less than a year, its cost, including sales tax on the purchase, is deductible. Otherwise, you generally may recover your cost only through depreciation except to the extent first-year expensing (42.3) or bonus depreciation (42.30) applies. IRS regulations provide safe harbors, including a “12-month” rule, for expenditures relating to intangible assets or benefits (40.3). Expenses while you are not in business. You are not allowed to deduct business expenses incurred during the time you are not engaged in your business or profession. Caution Penalties and Fines Penalties or fines paid to a government agency because of a violation of any law are not deductible.

In the case of art objects and antiques used as business assets, the useful life requirement remains relevant because such assets are not subject to exhaustion, wear or tear, or obsolescence. The IRS may continue to dispute and litigate cases in which depreciation is claimed on assets with indeterminable useful lives. For example, in a private ruling, the IRS did not allow a developer to depreciate street improvements that had been turned over to a city. The improvements were an intangible asset that improved the developer's access to its real estate projects, but this asset had an unlimited life. There was no determinable useful life because the city had agreed to maintain and replace the improvements as necessary, and there was no evidence that the city would ever assess the developer for replacement costs.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

When it decided to make an eBook reader, it came to Shenzhen, found a fixer and a factory, and within nine months they had something very close to what it took Sony years to develop. In Silicon Val ey, the network is what makes the ecosystem so powerful, especial y as the region grew to rely on companies with intangible assets like software and the Web. There’s a misconception in much of the emerging world that it’s easy to start a company in Silicon Val ey, that venture capital seems to fal from the sky. But—for al the talk of the Val ey being a meritocracy—if you don’t know anyone, raising money can take as long and be as frustrating as it is anywhere.


pages: 244 words: 79,044

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Essentially the MSCI World consists of 45 individual country index exposures, and deselecting one or several of those to suit the individual investor would administratively be a fairly simple thing to do. Similarly you could tailor the non-equity part of the portfolio. Taking this a stage further, you could analyse all the assets of the person or entity to figure out where there is existing exposure. This could include looking at things like your house, education, stock options, intangible assets (what you are good at, etc.), future inheritance, etc. and could even go as far as seeing how potential or real liabilities could be included. Again, these are important issues outside the scope of this book. A wish to the financial sector You would think that things get simple once you decide to buy an index exposure, but unfortunately not so.


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

11 concepts and ideas – something positively encouraged by the organisation and by founder Richard Branson, himself a powerful brand.) That’s not all. When your brand is strong, it’s actually worth something and becomes part of the intellectual property on your balance sheet. Valuation of brands as intangible assets has become a major area of focus for investors and shareholders. In 2005, for example, Interbrand/Business Week estimated the value of Coca-Cola’s brand (no, not the drink, or the bottling plants or the office furniture) to be a staggering $67.5 billion! By the time this book is published, it may well be that Microsoft has easily exceeded that valuation.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

GROUP COMPANY 2007 £m 2006 £m 2007 £m 2006 £m ASSETS Cash and balances at central banks 17,866 6,121 — — Treasury and other eligible bills subject to repurchase agreements 7,090 1,426 — — Other treasury and other eligible bills 11,139 4,065 — — Treasury and other eligible bills 18,229 5,491 — — Loans and advances to banks 219,460 82,606 7,686 7,252 Loans and advances to customers 829,250 466,893 307 286 Debt securities subject to repurchase agreements 100,561 58,874 — — Other debt securities 175,866 68,377 — — Debt securities 276,427 127,251 — — Equity shares 53.026 13.504 — — Investments in Group undertakings — — 43,542 21,784 Settlement balances 16,589 7,425 — — Derivatives 337,410 116,681 173 — Intangible assets 48,492 18,904 — — Property, plant and equipment 18,750 18,420 — — Prepayments, accrued income and other assets 19,066 8,136 127 3 Assets of disposal groups 45,954 — — — TOTAL ASSETS 1,900,519 871,432 51,835 29,325 LIABILITIES Deposits by banks 312,633 132,143 5,572 738 Customer accounts 682,365 384,222 — — Debt securities in issue 273,615 85,963 13,453 2,139 Settlement balances and short positions 91,021 49,476 — — Derivatives 332,060 118,112 179 42 Accruals, deferred income and other liabilities 34,024 15,660 8 15 Retirement benefit liabilities 496 1,992 — — Deferred taxation 5,510 3,264 3 — Insurance liabilities 10,162 7,456 — — Subordinated liabilities 37,979 27,654 7,743 8,194 Liabilities of disposal groups 29,228 — — — Total liabilities 1,809,093 825,942 26,958 11,128 Minority interests 38,388 5,263 — — Equity owners 53,038 40,227 24,877 18,197 TOTAL EQUITY 91,426 45,490 24,877 18,197 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 1,900,519 871,432 51,835 29,325 Our business school chums will have no trouble working this one out: from the huge levels of assets and liabilities and the fact that the main category of liabilities is customer deposits, it will be immediately apparent that this business is a bank.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

This requires elaborate accounting systems and mecha- Digital Taylorism 67 nisms of control that safeguard property rights. It is these concerns that are shaping the direction of technological and organizational change. If the profitability of companies depends on the productivity of knowledge, companies confront the problem of imposing their property rights over intangible assets and of how to manage what resides in their employees’ heads. This is a variation on the age-old issue of how to convert an individual’s capacity to think and act into added value for the company. For this reason, some management scholars, including Barbro Anell and Timothy Wilson, argue that the question of how to extract and distribute knowledge efficiently will not be answered by relying on the initiative and intellectual capital of knowledge workers, as it is difficult to control, standardize, or profit from ideas that remain in the heads of individual workers.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In the financial markets they are used by those concerned about movements in interest rates, currencies and stock indices GEARING The ratio between a company’s debt and equity. See also leverage GILTS Bonds issued by the UK government GOLDEN HELLO Payment made to an employee of a rival firm to entice him or her to transfer. One of a whole range of City perks, including golden handcuffs and golden parachutes GOODWILL An accounting term which describes the intangible assets of a company (e.g. brand names, the skill of the staff) GOWER REPORT Produced in 1984, its recommendations were the basis of the new regulatory structure in the City GROSS YIELD TO REDEMPTION The return which an investor will receive on a bond, allowing for both interest and capital growth, as a percentage of the bond’s price HEDGE FUNDS Private investment vehicles that use borrowed money and shorting (see below) in order to earn returns in both bull and bear markets HEDGING The process whereby an institution buys or sells a financial instrument in order to offset the risk that the price of another financial instrument will rise or fall IDB Inter-dealer broker.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Yet today’s business is largely run as a technology advisory company rather than a digital platform. We note, however, that the firm is investing in new capabilities that may allow it to transition to a platformpowered ecosystem model. 9 Alibaba raised $25 billion on the NYSE in September 2014. 10 This is the value of the intangible asset of the brand itself. 11 At the time of writing, neither Airbnb nor Uber are quoted on the stock market, so market valuations for these firms are based on the implied value of their last private round of financing. 12 A unicorn, a legendary animal that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a pointed horn on its forehead, is notoriously difficult to find.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

As Colin Mayer pointed out in his book Prosperity, since financial and physical capital were the primary source of value in the twentieth century it was critical that they were measured well, so they could be managed well.1 But in the twenty-first century, it’s human capital, social capital, and natural capital that are in short supply. Intangible assets such as intellectual property, brand trust, and great people matter more than tangible assets such as plant, equipment, oil in the ground, or product in warehouses. And a company’s effect on the environment is just beginning to be factored into values. Creating the tools to measure returns to human capital, to society, and to the natural environment, and to hold companies accountable for their performance against these measures, will be critical to making stakeholder capitalism a reality.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Cohen 2015a; Associated Press 2015; Dougherty 2016. 12 Personal and National Debts The discussion in part III has concentrated on tangible assets used by the low-wage sector, willingly or unwillingly: prisons, schools, bridges, and public transportation. It is now time to add some intangible assets and liabilities that affect the low-wage sector. This chapter interprets the treatment of debts in a dual economy. Individual debts are concentrated in bad mortgages and education loans. Societal debts come from the efforts of a democratic government to reduce risks for its members. Individual debts are contracted between borrowers and lenders.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Sometimes it is possible to detach the service from the network: train companies can compete on a shared rail network; electricity generators can compete on a shared grid. But the network itself is a natural monopoly. The emergence of the e-economy has created new network industries that can extend to global monopoly. These firms need very little capital as conventionally defined – the tangible assets of equipment and buildings. Their value is an intangible asset: their networks.8 Unlike tangible assets, these are very difficult for competitors to replicate; and, being immaterial, they have no fixed location subject to public policy. Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay and Uber are all examples of networks that tend towards natural global monopoly in their particular niches.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Needless to say, given that even defining the term culture has proven enduringly difficult, this is a particularly challenging step. According to noted hotelier Chip Conley, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves.” We think that pretty much sums it up, and would only add that culture is a company’s greatest intangible asset. (As many have observed, including Joi Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”) From the “HP Way” and IBM’s “Think” to Google’s playrooms and Twitter’s warehouse, it is hard to overstate culture’s added value. Very few people would argue that a big part of Zappos’ success (and its billion-dollar valuation) is not due to its company culture.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

At the press conference announcing the new partnership between Sidewalk Labs and Toronto, Schmidt thanked Canada for allowing Google in, saying that his company’s long-held dream had come true: for “someone to give us a city and put us in charge.”32 Writing in the Globe and Mail a year later, Jim Balsillie, the former chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion, a company that commercializes intellectual property in more than 150 countries, summed up the significance of this first trial run in creating a privatized smart city that so excited Schmidt. Balsillie pointed out that “‘smart cities’ are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalizations.” The real commercial value, according to Balsillie, is that “‘smart cities’ rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool.”33 In the year since the official announcement, it has become even clearer that Sidewalk Labs wants Toronto’s blessing, but it does not relish the city’s active involvement and oversight in the build-out and management of the smart neighborhood on the waterfront.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

The state first began to adapt its tax laws in the late nineteenth century, making changes to attract businesses from larger, more prosperous states like New York. Delaware became an “onshore” tax haven for US companies, not only because of the ease of doing business, but also because of the “Delaware Loophole”: the state collects zero tax on income relating to intangible assets held by a Delaware holding company. This allows companies to shift royalties and similar revenues from where they actually do business to holding companies in Delaware, where they are not taxed. But this means a loss of millions of dollars for states in which corporations are actually operating.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

In the Dyson example, for instance, offshoring helped create new jobs and higher pay for engineers in Malmesbury. Trade policy must therefore aim at making global value chains (GVCs) work better. For G7 nations, this means writing trade rules that help their firms maximize the value of the tangible and intangible assets. To understand the point, it helps to rethink goods. One can think of a Toyota Land Cruiser not as a vehicle but rather as a bundle of Japanese labor, capital, innovation, and managerial, marketing, engineering, and production know-how. In 1982, the Land Cruiser could be exported to any nation without regard to the destination’s property rights because it was basically impossible to unbundle the inputs.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

But Booz & Company (now Strategy&) and innovation consultants Doblin (part of Deloitte, one of the big four professional services firms) claim that two-thirds of new products fail within two years and 96% do not generate enough sales to recoup their cost of capital. Indeed, the US generates intellectual property worth over $5 trillion, nearly 35% of its economy. But US firms waste over $1 trillion annually in underused IP – such as patents, copyrights and know-how – because they fail to extract maximum value from these intangible assets. BTG (British Technology Group), an international specialist health-care company, reports that over two-thirds of US firms own technologies they fail to exploit, and on average 35% of technologies patented by US companies are wasted because these organisations lack a clear commercial strategy.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

American entertainment, fashion, and style remain influential. The US has favorable demographics and is still a magnet for immigration. The country's preeminence is based on complex systems and processes that are difficult to replicate. A World Bank study estimated that 80 percent of its wealth derives from intangible assets, such as property rights, the judicial system, skills, and the knowledge and trust embedded within its society. America's ability to reinvent itself and change is crucial. Faced with massive problems of low or slowing growth, a lack of competitiveness, and excessive debt levels, Japan, Europe, and many emerging nations have struggled to agree on and implement the required reforms.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

It was heavily involved in the successful Leadership, governance and policy 63 Agencies 1991 2002 Campaigns Figure 5.4: 2013 Creation of the GLA Promotional agencies and campaigns in London since 1991 bid to host the NFL’s first ever regular season game held outside the Americas at Wembley Stadium. Initially, these agencies encountered some difficulties communicating a coordinated message. The period up to 2009 only made limited use of the city’s intangible assets, from its history, to architecture and culture (see Figure 5.4). London’s susceptibility to reputational damage at the height of the financial crisis triggered a new effort to create an integrated brand message under a coalition of agencies (Sherwood, 2009b). As a result, the Promote London Council was created in 2009 as part of the new Mayor’s Economic Development Strategy, in order to properly assemble key representatives of London’s promotional agencies and business groups and create a more joined-up approach.


pages: 345 words: 87,745

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work by Richard A. Ferri

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Madoff, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

The market (or index) is assigned a beta of 1.00, so a portfolio with a beta of 1.20 would have seen its share price rise or fall by 12 percent when the overall market rose or fell by 10 percent. bid-ask spread The difference between what a buyer is willing to bid (pay) for a security and the seller’s asking (offer) price. book value A company’s assets, minus any liabilities and intangible assets. book-to-market value (BtM) The book value of a company divided by its market value. broker/broker-dealer An individual or firm that buys or sells mutual funds or other securities for the public. capital gain/loss The difference between the sale price of an asset—such as a mutual fund, stock, or bond—and the original cost of the asset.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

As superior outcomes lead to new products and/or services that, in turn, improve the quality of lives, create new employment opportunities for the able workforce, significantly increase the nation’s foreign export and competitiveness, and then lead to significant increase in tax revenues, it is often believed that investments in innovation would eventually be reinvested in the nation’s tangible and intangible assets. Through this upward cycle of multiplying State investments in the science and technology base, the national economy would pave the way for future sustainable prosperity. And yet, the irony of these successes is that as companies such as Apple, Google, GE, Cisco etc. are flourishing financially, their home economy is struggling to find its way out of debilitating economic issues like the growing trade deficit against Asian economies, declining manufacturing activities, increasing unemployment, widening budget deficits, inequality, deteriorating infrastructure etc.


pages: 295 words: 90,821

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

Physical capital, by type Note: Data is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Each series is indexed to the total capital stock in 2009. “Residential structures” are homes. “Firm structures” are commercial real estate, including manufacturing plants, warehouses, and office buildings. “Intellectual property” includes intangible assets such as software. “Equipment” includes goods used in production such as computers, industrial machinery, and business vehicles. Equipment is the kind of thing you would normally think of as capital: bulldozers and drill presses and computers. But this stock is small compared to the structures such items are housed in.


Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

The value to be ascribed to the assets however, will vary according to their character. Graham determined the net current asset value by calculating the company’s current assets, and then deducting from that calculation all liabilities, both current and long term. Long-term asset values—for example, intangible assets and fixed assets like plants—were totally excluded from the calculation. In ordinary times, and for the vast majority of companies, the net current asset value calculated after conducting such an examination was negative, indicating a surplus of liabilities over current assets. For a small number of stocks, however, the net current asset value would be positive, indicating a surplus of cash, receivables, and inventory over all liabilities.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Examples range from Oracle to JP Morgan to Jiffy Lube. These companies hire employees who provide services to customers. Generally, services companies fall in one of two camps. The first kind makes and sells physical services. Your car mechanic and plumber both fall into this category. The second builds human capital or intangible assets, like intellectual property, and uses those assets to sell specialized services. This type of services company includes everyone from tax attorneys to investment bankers or management consultants. These models dominated the twentieth century for a good reason: They can be very efficient.


All About Asset Allocation, Second Edition by Richard Ferri

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, inverted yield curve, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Mason jar, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, pattern recognition, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Blue Chip Stocks Common stocks of well-known companies with a history of growth and dividend payments. Bond Covenant The contractual provision in a bond indenture. A positive covenant requires certain actions, and a negative covenant limits certain actions. Book Value A company’s assets, minus any liabilities and intangible assets. Broker/Broker-Dealer An individual or firm that buys or sells mutual funds or other securities for the public. Capital Gain/Loss The difference between the sale price of an asset—such as a mutual fund, stock, or bond—and the original cost of the asset. Capital Gains Distributions Payments to mutual fund shareholders of gains realized during the year on securities that the fund has sold at a profit, minus any realized losses.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Network strength provides network power, and the most successful executives reach the top not solely based on their analytical skills, but because of their strong relational aptitude. We all begin our professional lives with our own personal human capital, but at a certain level executives are expected to cultivate wide and deep professional networks. Relational capital is an intangible asset that reflects the value inherent in a person’s relationships. The more high-level the relationships and the greater their strength, the more valuable the “relational capital”. It is a prized asset, because in a knowledge economy where almost everything can be replicated, a person’s relationships are unique.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

In the nineteenth century, it was about access to and the effective use of industrial machines. In the twenty-first century, it is about access to and the effective use of knowledge. As the Economic and Social Research Council puts it: ‘Economic success is increasingly based upon the effective utilisation of intangible assets such as knowledge, skills and innovative potential as the key resource for competitive advantage.’ What do people mean by knowledge? A century ago knowledge was a tool. If you knew stuff you could use that to sell other tangible stuff. Now knowledge is increasingly the product in its own right.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

We’d need that program to be able to tell us, for example, how many Basic Attention Tokens it would take to buy the rights to a third of a Jackson Pollock painting. It would be a world of digital barter, a world without money as we know it. As far-fetched as it seems, some are already setting out to build this alternative world. In their vision, all of our physical assets—our cars, boats, houses—as well as intangible assets such as brands, can be represented as secure digital assets on an immutable blockchain and traded directly with other such assets, with their prices set by a matrix of billions of buyers and sellers. It’s an idea that has long interested Zurich-based financial technology inventor Richard Olsen, and we quoted his thoughts in the final pages of The Age of Cryptocurrency.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Investors search for companies that achieve such scale that they become the “Low-Cost Producer.” Investors try to find firms with “High Switching Costs” that lock clients into a relationship. They try to find businesses with “Network Effects” where you win by being the only system people can use to call or pay each other, for example. They also look for industries with “Intangible Assets” such as patents that keep your competitors out by law. In the medical industry, in particular, patents allow companies to charge astronomic prices because, by law, no other companies can compete with them while they hold a patent. Company CEOs and investors are all behaving in a perfectly rational way when they buy competitors and find ways to monopolize their industries.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Companies across the world scrambled to get in on the expert systems boom, and not just software companies. By the 1980s industry was beginning to understand that knowledge and expertise were important assets that could be nurtured and developed, to profitable advantage. Expert systems seemed to make this intangible asset tangible. The concept of a knowledge-based system resonated with the then prevailing view that Western economies were entering a post-industrial period, in which new opportunities for economic development would come primarily from the so-called knowledge-based industries and services, rather than from manufacturing and other traditional industries.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in an attempt to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor its market value, nor the future income it might generate could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits and risks could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth.6 The report showed that while ‘intangible assets’ were growing on US and UK company balance sheets at nearly three times the rate of tangible assets, the actual size of the digital sector in the GDP figures had remained static. So something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern economy. However, by any measure, it is clear that the mix of inputs has altered.


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

If this leads to a fall in the price of the asset then leverage will increase, requiring further asset sales – a positive feedback loop. Adrian and Shin conclude that the pro cyclical behaviour of banks in response to changes in leverage is likely to exacerbate fluctuations in asset markets. i. Technically, it is defined as Tier 1 capital ∕ (Total assets – intangible assets) – see D’Hulster (2009). Problems with intervening – unintended consequences of fiscal policy Government intervention can create problems for the economy in the long run. Taking the case of fiscal interventions first, the suggestion that the government should act counter-cyclically is relatively uncontroversial and has been standard economic practice since Keynes.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089.17 The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same. When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D.


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

Hooley’s promotion of the Dunlop Company established the template: 101 BOOM AND BUST table 6.1 Capitalisation of cycle companies17 Number of companies established Total nominal capital (£’000s) 1895 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 17 12 15 26 357.5 182.5 1,624.0 1,476.1 1896 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 34 94 96 139 1,641.1 13,847.2 5,316.6 6,454.6 1897 Q1 Q2 156 82 7,370.0 4,763.6 671 43,033.2 Total buy a small bicycle company, issue a prospectus full of unrealistic promises, pay influential figures to support the flotation and offer it to the public for a much higher price than you paid. On balance sheets, the discrepancy between the price paid by the promoter and the price offered to the public was resolved by placing unjustifiably large valuations on patents, or by referring to the intangible asset of ‘goodwill’.18 This practice could be incredibly lucrative: one firm was reportedly issued to the public for a price ten times as large as the promoter had paid for all its constituent private firms combined.19 The methods used in promotion could be remarkably creative. For several years before the boom, J.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

If you are planning to run a clean business and move money around easily and frequently, you will want a place that facilitates that with ease; Swiss banks, for example, tend to dislike frequent transactions. Third, what is your business about? If you own intellectual property such as patents or trademarks, that must be considered, as IP is often taxed differently. You may also need to sell any IP you own now to a new foreign company, meaning businesses with intangible assets may have more planning to do. Lastly, what is your citizenship? Citizens of the United States are subject to more restrictions than citizens of other countries when moving offshore. You will need to make sure that you tick all the boxes at home before packing your bags. You will have a clearer vision of where to plant your company’s flag once you know the answers to these questions.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

But today, Jersey is among the world’s most popular tax havens. In late 2014, Apple had two of its three “stateless” Irish subsidiaries claim tax residence in Jersey, and then a third Irish subsidiary claimed residence in Ireland. Around the time of this restructuring, nearly $270 billion of intangible assets suddenly appeared in Ireland. This influx of wealth—more than the value of all the residential property on the island—was so significant that it boosted Ireland’s GDP by 26 percent that year. At the time, nobody was sure what had caused this economic spike. Eventually, tax experts recognized it as a sign that one of the world’s biggest companies had landed on the shores of the Emerald Isle.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As co-CEO, Snabe helped implement the new strategy and was there to see its initial results. Though he stepped down in 2014, he was proud to see the company achieving its twin goals in 2018, doubling revenue and halving CO2 emissions ahead of schedule.,8,9 With that experience under its belt, he took on the challenge of transforming Mærsk. Mærsk did have one important intangible asset: a strong core of values. “The basic principle is that people can trust us,” former Chairman Arnold Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, and A.P.'s son, had once said. That focus on trust had helped the company build long-lasting relationships with its clients, as well as the government. Beyond that, the company was guided by five more values: “Constant Care, Humbleness, Uprightness, Our Employees, and Our Name.”10  They were officially announced when the 90-year-old Mc-Kinney Møller stepped down as chairman in 2003, but they had been present all throughout the family's leadership of the company.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As co-CEO, Snabe helped implement the new strategy and was there to see its initial results. Though he stepped down in 2014, he was proud to see the company achieving its twin goals in 2018, doubling revenue and halving CO2 emissions ahead of schedule.,8,9 With that experience under its belt, he took on the challenge of transforming Mærsk. Mærsk did have one important intangible asset: a strong core of values. “The basic principle is that people can trust us,” former Chairman Arnold Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, and A.P.'s son, had once said. That focus on trust had helped the company build long-lasting relationships with its clients, as well as the government. Beyond that, the company was guided by five more values: “Constant Care, Humbleness, Uprightness, Our Employees, and Our Name.”10  They were officially announced when the 90-year-old Mc-Kinney Møller stepped down as chairman in 2003, but they had been present all throughout the family's leadership of the company.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Perhaps liberal democracy is producing a generation of “satisfied malcontents”, rightfully angry that political elites don’t give them enough bread but enjoying the cake crumbs of liberalism (and capitalism) nonetheless. The correlation between life satisfaction and income is also problematic since it would follow that there is an incentive for satisfied people to vote for radical candidates if they have less to lose financially but more to lose with intangible assets like their status on socio-economic and cultural hierarchies. This may explain why Trump obtained higher shares of support among higher-income voters than Clinton did,36 and why studies have shown that the leave vote in Britain was more prominent among the so-called “squeezed-middle” class than the working class, which goes contrary to popular myth of poorer voters shifting to the far right.


The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This is the risk that, given that a guarantee against loss is available, a firm ceases to act prudently and enters into high-risk transactions, in the expectation that it can always call on the authorities should its risk strategy land it in financial trouble. 6 304 THE GLOBAL MONEY MARKETS EXHIBIT 14.2 European Union Regulatory Capital Rules Limits Capital type Tier 1 • No limit to Tier 1 • “Esoteric” instruments such as trust-preferred securities are restricted to 15% of total Tier 1 • Equity share capital, including share premium account • Retained profits • Non-cumulative preference shares and other hybrid capital securities • Bank holding’s of its own Tier 1 instruments • Goodwill and other intangible assets • Current year unpublished losses Tier 2 • Total Tier 2 may not exceed 100% of Tier 1 • Perpetual subordinated, loss-absorbing debt • Cumulative preference shares • General reserves • Revaluation reserves • Holdings of other banks’ own fund instruments in excess of 10% of the value of own capital • Holding of more than 10% of another credit institution’s own funds • Specified investments in non-consolidated subsidiaries • Qualified investments, defined as a holding of more 10% of a company Upper Tier 2 Deductions Lower • Cannot exceed 50% of • Fixed maturity subordiTier 2 Tier 1 nated debt • Amount qualifying as • Perpetual subordinated capital amortizes on a non-loss absorbing debt straight-line basis in the last five years Tier 3 • Minimum 28.5% of • Trading book profits • Trading book losses capital covering market • Short-term subordinated risk must be Tier 1 debt with a minimum • Tier 3 capital can only maturity of two years, cover market risk on plus a feature enabling trading books.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Had the city chosen to pay those costs itself—as it had in other projects, such as the recent Battery Park City in lower Manhattan—it could more readily have dictated terms to developers. But the Koch administration made the fateful decision to sacrifice a large measure of public control in exchange for private investment. In doing so, it also surrendered pieces of the sky, and of the urban landscape: intangible assets that seemed, at least to city planners, far easier to part with than money. And so the Koch administration preserved public control of the project by surrendering precious public assets. Commercial development was not only a means to some other good on 42nd Street, but an end in itself. The city had been trying since the 1960s to shift development westward; by the late 1970s, the west side of midtown retained the low scale it had had for generations, while the east side was choking on office buildings.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

If the riskreward trade-off is there, these new banks could lend directly to the old banks that are solvent. As existing solvent banks regain confidence in the availability of funds, they too will start lending. The insolvent old banks will be allowed to fail gracefully, and many of their good operational, human, and intangible assets will be preserved as they are bought by the new banks. Perhaps most importantly, there is a considerable amount of private capital on the sidelines (both at home and abroad) that would love to invest in the American financial system, just not in banks with shrinking/toxic assets and uncertain access to credit.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

Nowadays, branding is nearly anything that differentiates products or services in such a way that makes them more familiar and desirable than similar products or services [5]. Research has shown that brands have a significant impact on consumers’ perception and selection of products. Branding is a top business priority, as a brand is a company’s most valuable intangible asset [6]. Branding is an essential element in sponsored search. Branding traits are inherent to the entire process, from the search engine selection, to the search engine results page (SERP), to the individual ad, to the advertiser’s Web site. We know that brands affect searchers’ relevance judgments of results in a variety of subjective, affective, cognitive, and contextual manners [7, 8].


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Such digital authorities are the digital successors to the industrial-age nation-state. Digital society is not a single authority, it is many. When an authority tries to cheat, the outcome is simple: people abandon it. The freedom to leave one on-line community and go to another is unquestioned and unparalleled in the real world. Knowledge Finally, we have the intangible asset called "knowledge." Of all the websites in the world, one is precious beyond any measure, and becoming more so every day, and that is Wikipedia. Any attempt to describe how important and valuable Wikipedia is would fail by understatement. As a species, we only really have two fundamental assets: ourselves, and our knowledge.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, et cetera to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”14 Data must thus be presented as an ownerless resource that can be exploited only by certain parties (what Julie Cohen calls data refineries).15 A few excerpts from a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are worth quoting at length. Data are an intangible asset; like other information-related goods, they can be reproduced and transferred at almost zero marginal costs. So in contrast to the concept of ownership of physical goods, where the owner typically has exclusive rights and control over the good—including for instance the freedom to destroy the good—this is not the case for intangibles such as data. . . .


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Incentives for wrenching change wither in this environment – indeed, sectors that have a near miss on a major merger or acquisition remain more innovative, see more new companies and investment come in.31 The results are the pronounced shifts, already observed, towards development and away from research; pressure to return earnings to shareholders rather than reinvest them; a consolidation of big, older companies unwilling to disrupt themselves; a requirement to prove financial return that infects everything from the arts to academia.32 Over 80 per cent of the value of the S&P 500 is in intangible assets, which only makes companies want to husband and protect such assets, not radically alter them.33 The holding of such assets, including software, has moreover been correlated with decreased dynamism: sectors associated with these investments see a greater persistence of firms and less leapfrogging.34 All this creates what Mazzucato calls a ‘parasitic innovation ecosystem’, where large, powerful incumbents coast on work done elsewhere.35 Away from the glossy brochures, the phalanx of buzzword-spouting management consultants, the calendar-filling conferences, is a system both short-termist and static, risk-averse and returns-driven, timid and defensive.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” Working Paper #18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Aug. 2012, nber.org/papers/w18315. 16. Compustat North America, Fundamentals Annual; Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), University of Pennsylvania (retrieved June 4, 2012). 17. Andrew J. Sherman, Harvesting Intangible Assets (New York: Amacom, 2012), xi. 18. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: The Free Press, 2012), 9. 19. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011), 76. 20. Jeremy Rifkin was on to this at the beginning of the digital era.


pages: 399 words: 122,688

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

banking crisis, corporate raider, fail fast, fear of failure, fixed income, index card, intangible asset, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley

And one day, maybe, in Japan. “Farfetched,” I wrote. “But it seems worth shooting for.” This last line was wholly truthful. It was worth shooting for. If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

On the other hand, many Indian graduate students learned socialist economics at the London School of Economics and came home to take prominent positions in their overly bureaucratic government. They kept applying these socialist principles long after they were discredited around the globe. India also has picked up an intangible asset virtually by osmosis. Part of the British colonial legacy was that English became the national language uniting the diverse Indian peoples, who also speak a wealth of local languages. True, English was imposed on the Indians, but as alien as the language was, it proved so useful that the Indians themselves retained it as their national language long after the British left.


pages: 960 words: 125,049

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

Resource A token can represent a resource earned or produced in a sharing economy or resource-sharing environment; for example, a storage or CPU token representing resources that can be shared over a network. Asset A token can represent ownership of an intrinsic or extrinsic, tangible or intangible asset; for example, gold, real estate, a car, oil, energy, MMOG items, etc. Access A token can represent access rights and grant access to a digital or physical property, such as a discussion forum, an exclusive website, a hotel room, or a rental car. Equity A token can represent shareholder equity in a digital organization (e.g., a DAO) or legal entity (e.g., a corporation).


pages: 992 words: 292,389

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

Glisan made a short presentation, saying that demand for the company’s bonds was soft but that Enron still had more liquidity than it needed. Lay recognized Causey. In the middle of all these troubles, the company had to deal with another issue: the rules had changed for the accounting of certain intangible assets. The arcane revision meant Enron would have to report a noncash reduction in earnings of $200 million in the first quarter of 2002. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, Causey said. The intangible assets acquired in the purchase of Wessex Water by Azurix so many years before did not have to be written down. Causey left the meeting, and Lay turned to the most serious issue. “I would like to open up a discussion, to see if any members of the board have a recollection of obtaining any information about the financial returns earned by Andy Fastow through the LJM structures,” he said.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

For the Obama White House’s critique of market power, see ‘Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power’, US Council of Economic Advisers Issue Brief, May 2016; Jan de Loecker and Jan Eeckhout, ‘The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications’, NBER Working Paper 23687, August 2017. On the erosion of real wages and the loss of trust within firms, see Robert Solow, ‘The Future of Work: Why Wages Aren’t Keeping Up’, Pacific Standard, 11 August 2015 Scalability of technology platforms: this is just one aspect of the economic effects of investment in intangible assets, which now outstrips investment in tangible assets in the US and UK. For a pioneering analysis see Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, Princeton University Press 2017 ‘Competition is for losers’: Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 Effects of information and choice overload, especially on the poor: see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough, Allen Lane 2013 Consumer detriment from UK retail electricity market: UK Competition and Markets Authority, Energy Market Investigation: Final Report, 24 June 2016 Volkswagen scandal: see Frank Dohmen and Dieter Hawranek, ‘Collusion between Germany’s Biggest Carmakers’, Der Spiegel, 27 July 2017, and Jack Ewing, Faster, Higher, Farther: The Inside Story of the Volkswagen Scandal, Bantam Press 2017 Limits of competition policy: recent arguments, and disparate US and EU views, are explored by John Vickers in ‘Competition Policy and Property Rights’, Economic Journal, 120.544, 2010 Hidden costs of price comparison websites: see e.g.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Silicon Valley and Hollywood may each have their faults, but these are the clusters of excellence and innovation that most other countries want to imitate. And even old-fashioned companies are bent on mastering the intangible. Coca-Cola and Nike are in the business of selling lifestyles as much as carbonated drinks or overpriced shoes. Accenture, a management consultancy, calculates that “intangible” assets, such as brand names, now account for 70 percent of the value of companies in the S&P 500 compared with 20 percent in 1980.2 Much is made in the emerging world of America’s thirst for commodities, particularly oil. But as Benjamin Barber has argued in his prescient Jihad Versus McWorld (1995), it is America’s ability to create entertainment and information that poses the biggest problems for traditional societies.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

But “smart contracts” need not be limited to finance. When paired with “smart property”—where deeds, titles, and other certifications of ownership are put in digital form to be acted upon by software—these contracts allow the automatic transfer of ownership of a physical asset such as a house or a car, or an intangible asset, such as a patent. Similarly, the software initiates the transfer when contractual obligations are met. With companies now busily putting bar codes, QR codes, microchips, and Bluetooth antennae on just about every gadget and piece of merchandise, the emerging “Internet of Things” should make it possible to transfer ownership in many kinds of physical property in this manner.


Mastering Private Equity by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl, Bowen White

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, book value, business process, buy low sell high, capital controls, carbon credits, carried interest, clean tech, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, currency risk, deal flow, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, fixed income, high net worth, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, junk bonds, Lean Startup, low interest rates, market clearing, Michael Milken, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty

EBITDA Multiple Enterprise value expressed as a multiple of EBITDA. Economic Net Income (ENI) Non-generally accepted accounting principles performance measure used by several listed PE firms adjusting regular net income for income taxes, non-cash charges related to vesting of equity-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) An ESOP sets aside a percentage of shares in a company to non-founder/owner employees in the form of stock options to attract, reward and retain talent. Enterprise Value (EV) A company's total value—calculated as equity value plus net debt. Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Management Actively and systematically manage environmental, social and governance factors by establishing structured ESG programs with ESG policies and procedures being put in place.


pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

* * * THE FUTURES CONTRACTS that really worried the SEC’s Harold Williams and his fellow financial regulators had nothing to do with tangible commodities such as wheat or corn or even silver. These regulators were worried about “financial futures,” newly designed contracts based on the shifting prices of intangible assets in the world’s financial markets. The Treasury and the Fed were fretting about futures based on government bonds; the SEC was concerned about futures based on mortgage-backed securities and (still on the drawing board) futures based on major stock market barometers such as the Value Line index or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

She has a mind that can wrap itself around minutiae, and she had mastered the intricacies of the UN—how to navigate the various bureaucracies and procedures, how to craft a resolution, how to cajole votes. Her direct manner served her well in an environment that values strong personalities, and her relationship with Obama gave her that intangible asset that foreign governments value most: closeness to the president. We’d done some of our biggest business through Security Council resolutions on Iran sanctions and Libya, and she’d delivered. The position of UN ambassador is one of the stepping stones to secretary of state, and Susan was in a strong position if Obama was reelected.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Locking inventions and creations up in patents and copyrights means that the next generation of producers must pay to build on them, which in practice may prevent them from doing so at all.66 A commons of shared cultural resources, by contrast, would allow for creative OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 334 FUTURE POLITICS adaptation, editing, remixing, parody, co-option, correction, criticism, commentary, and customization.67 Debate over the merits of the commons will continue to rage as long as intangible assets like ideas, inventions, designs, and software grow in economic importance. Recall McAfee and Brynjolffson’s prediction that those capable of generating ‘new ideas and innovations’ will reap ‘huge rewards’.68 But justice requires us to ask: what about those who are not so capable? Or who never had the opportunity to make their ideas known?


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Put differently, corporations will adapt to effective antitrust enforcement, and given the improvements in contracting and communications, we will likely get both competition and productive efficiency at the same time. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AS A SOURCE OF MARKET POWER In the new economy being created by the ICT revolution, information, knowledge, creative works, and ideas—broadly termed intellectual property—are the key assets. Such intangible assets are nonrival—if I sing or listen to a song, it does not preclude you from singing or listening to that same song. If a song could be sung by anybody, the songwriter could never benefit monetarily from her creativity; without legal protection, intellectual property, especially property that needs to be used publicly, would have no value.


pages: 442 words: 39,064

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, continuous double auction, currency peg, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, Erdős number, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, global village, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, law of one price, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

In these circumstances, the buy decision is based on the belief that you are among the first to realize that the corresponding stock is underpriced. The reverse is expected to occur if the market price is larger than the fundamental value. However, in practice, there are severe difficulties in obtaining a precise estimation of the fundamental value, as it is not clear how to value some of the important intangible assets of a company such as the quality of its managers, its position in its market niche, and so on. In addition, predicting future earnings and their growth is an inexact science, to say the least. This has a very important consequence that we now discuss. An important feature of our model is the nonlinear dependence of the net order size as a function of the difference between the logarithm of the price and the logarithm of the fundamental value.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Globalization reinforces the winner-takes-all effect not just by multiplying the rewards for winning but also by allowing global companies to game the tax system. Companies buy foreign companies in order to move their nominal headquarters and thereby minimize their tax obligations (‘inversion’). They also charge affiliates for using intangible assets, such as brands, intellectual property or business services, in order to shift profits around (‘transfer pricing’). Not that long ago, only the most buccaneering companies made extensive use of tax havens. Now, leading companies such as Google do. Google achieved an effective tax rate of 2.4 per cent on its non-American profits in 2007–9 by routing profits to Bermuda, via Ireland and the Netherlands, an arrangement known as a double Irish.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Banking in America is often referred to as a “dual” system because some banks operate under federal charters obtained from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), while others are chartered by the states. U.S. bank regulation comes in layers. State banks are regulated by 27 According to the Federal Reserve, tier 1 and tier 2 capital are regulatory measures. Tier 1 capital consists primarily of common equity (excluding intangible assets such as goodwill and excluding net unrealized gains on investment account securities classified as available for sale) and certain perpetual preferred stock. Tier 2 capital consists primarily of subordinated debt, preferred stock not included in tier 1 capital, and loan-loss reserves up to a cap of 1.25% of risk-weighted assets.

Tier 1 and Tier 2 capital are simply fancy names for the types of capital needed for firms to obtain the primary dealer designation. Tier 1 capital includes common stockholders’ equity, qualifying noncumulative perpetual preferred stock, and minority interest in the equity accounts of consolidated subsidiaries. Tier 1 capital is normally defined as the sum of core capital elements, less goodwill and other intangible assets. The Tier 2 component of a bank’s qualifying total capital may consist of supplementary capital elements such as allowance for loan and lease losses, perpetual preferred stock and related surplus, hybrid capital instruments and mandatory convertible debt securities, and term subordinated debt and intermediate term preferred stock.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Here is one way to think about it: in every major economic shift, “a new asset class becomes the main basis for productivity growth, wealth creation, and opportunity,” argued Byron Auguste, a former economic adviser to President Obama who cofounded Opportunity@Work, a social venture that aims to enable at least one million more Americans to “work, learn, and earn to their full potential” in the next decade. “In the agrarian economy, that asset was land,” Auguste said. “In the industrial economy it was physical capital. In the services economy it was intangible assets, such as methods, designs, software, and patents.” “In today’s knowledge-human economy it will be human capital—talent, skills, tacit know-how, empathy, and creativity,” he added. “These are massive, undervalued human assets to unlock”—and our educational institutions and labor markets need to adapt to that.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The discs that end up in your PC or DVR are made of components stamped in its Asian factories, sent by plane to Orange County for final assembly, and then flown out again. Western Digital’s output is typical of American exports and manufacturing in the Instant Age. Our exports are airborne to an even greater extent than our imports—at last count around $554 billion worth, or more than half the total. As America’s intangible assets have cratered—$12 trillion in household wealth has simply evaporated—its exports of goods and services have arguably been the only thing keeping the economy afloat. (That, and government stimulus.) President Barack Obama’s prescription for a “new economic foundation” amounts to “export more and consume less”—a goal made explicit in his first State of the Union address, in which he called for a doubling of exports within five years.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

On July 30, as soon as Congress granted the Treasury the authority to oversee Fannie and Freddie, regulators from the Treasury began working to assess just how dire the situation was. With the help of the Fed and outside accounting specialists, Treasury officials pored over the GSEs’ books. They soon discovered that both Fannie and Freddie had been papering over massive capital losses. Once they had properly accounted for questionably valued intangible assets and improperly valued mortgage guarantees, they saw that both companies were at least tens of billions of dollars underwater. As Paulson later put it, “We’d been prepared for bad news, but the extent of the problems was startling.”33 From mid-August until the bailout, the situation was analyzed; terms were finalized on September 7.


pages: 272 words: 19,172

Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Edward Thorp, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, hindsight bias, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jones Act, legacy carrier, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, oil shock, pattern recognition, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

We used to argue, why buy a piece of commercial real estate with a 6 percent cap rate or a bond with a 7 percent yield if you could buy a business like Macy’s with a 20 percent cap rate? For financial companies and banks, I use some of the following: Price/tangible book value—The tangible book value (TBV) is equal to the book value minus intangible assets, such as patents and goodwill. Assuming the loans on a bank’s balance sheet have been appropriately accounted for—a big assumption considering the events in the financial industry over the past several years—a bank trading around its TBV would represent the value at which one could theoretically liquidate the bank.


The Spirit of ST Louis by Charles A. Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh, intangible asset, Mercator projection, sugar pill

When wings and wires hold their shape through loops, spins, and barrel rolls, they can surely carry the fuel load I'll need for a flight to Paris. 14 1 overcoat, blue 1 hat, gray felt 1 pair gloves, fur lined 1 scarf, silk 2 pair sox, wool 1 necktie, silk 1 suitcase, leather I read, upside down, the items on the clerk's sales slip. He hasn't filled in the prices yet. Good Lord, that's going to run close to a hundred dollars, and there's still my suit to pay for. Shoes and shirts are about the only things I can economize on. The ones I wear with my uniform will do. I don't like to spend money on such intangible assets as clothes. But if I'm really going to fly to Paris, I must be willing to put everything I’ve got into the project – time, energy, money, even my position as chief pilot on the airmail line. I'll hold back only enough to pay for room and board until I can get a new start flying if I fail.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

The company’s Brazilian managers had proved more adept at borrowing and cutting costs than managing brands. In early 2019 the value of Kraft Heinz’s brands was written down by $15 billion and its share price plunged.58 This write-down was the tip of an iceberg. When a company acquires another business at a premium, an intangible asset known as ‘good will’ is recorded on its balance sheet. In more conservative times, good will was amortized gradually over the years. In the age of financial engineering, however, it remained on the balance sheet until it was deemed bad. After the latest merger mania, companies around the world reported some $7 trillion of good will on their balance sheets.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

They called their Delaware-registered corporation Amarco—for American Arabian Company. Salem and Khalid Bin Mahfouz each took 40 percent and Freeman took 20 percent. Freeman hoped they would enrich themselves through ambitious undertakings, mainly in commercial real estate; he discovered that Salem was averse to stocks and other intangible assets.11 Freeman introduced Salem to Donald Trump. The Bin Ladens owned a vacant tract of land near a royal palace in Riyadh, and Freeman thought the property offered “an excellent opportunity for Donald Trump to build one of his signature buildings, like the Trump Tower in New York.” When they met in Trump’s office, the developer told Salem that he was intrigued, but he would require $25,000 in cash plus two first-class tickets to Riyadh for himself and a colleague.


pages: 897 words: 260,608

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

dark pattern, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, the market place

It was to be the biggest operation of the Arabs in their memory; dismissing those who saw it to their homes, with a sense that their world had changed indeed; so that there would be no more silly defections and jealousies of clans behind us in future, to cripple us with family politics in the middle of our fighting. Not that we expected immediate opposition. We bothered to take this unwieldy mob with us to Wejh, in the teeth of efficiency and experience, just because there was no fighting in the bill. We had intangible assets on our side. In the first place, the Turks had now engaged their surplus strength in attacking Rabegh, or rather in prolonging their occupied area so as to attack Rabegh. It would take them days to transfer back north. Then the Turks were stupid, and we reckoned on their not hearing all at once of our move, and on their not believing its first tale, and not seeing till later what chances it had given them.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

*25Assuming the Dow averaged four percent a year, a partner’s thousand-dollar investment in BPL would turn into $5,604 after twenty years at nine percent—$3,413 more than the $2,191 that an owner of the Dow would have. Return to text. *26Later Remington Rand merged with Sperry and became Sperry Rand, then, after merging with Burroughs in 1986, it became Unisys. Return to text. *27If a company’s book value is $1 million and a buyer pays $3 million, the remaining $2 million is for intangible assets—some specifically identifiable, like trademarks and patents, the rest unidentifiable customer “goodwill.” Accounting rules used to require sellers to gradually charge off, or amortize, these costs over time. Return to text. *28Wite-Out and Liquid Paper are opaque correction fluids, once commonly painted over typewritten material so that words would either disappear or could be typed over.