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The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin
"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture
And he spent some of his time at the bank meeting with a broad range of colleagues – grey-haired City veterans as well as eager new associates – across whatever business line or department fascinated him next. He was especially keen to meet people who worked on something innovative or unusual. One of those bankers was Lex Greensill, who was making waves with supply chain finance. Supply chain finance was exactly the kind of esoteric business that piqued Heywood’s interest. When he met with Lex, Heywood was intrigued by the potential for supply chain finance to help small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). He thought Lex was interesting, clever, charismatic in a way, and deeply knowledgeable about the product he was working on. Though Lex and Heywood were in different spheres, their paths crossed from time to time.
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Investors had pulled billions out of Lex’s Credit Suisse supply chain finance funds since the pandemic hit. Lex went on: ‘You will recall that the Bank established a supply chain finance facility back in 2010 (as a part of your asset purchase facility). We think there is an urgent need to re-establish the same – given the millions of businesses that now rely on supply chain finance.’ It was a reference to the BofE’s move to support Lex’s supply chain finance programme at Morgan Stanley a decade earlier. If you could do it then, Deputy Governor, you can do it again now, Lex seemed to be saying. Greensill and Cameron were pushing for a meeting with Cunliffe. A couple of days later, they were given a call with a couple of more junior officials.
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Lex was also evangelical about a unique-sounding idea for a new business based around providing short-term loans to clients who were backed by invoices from their own suppliers. It was a form of factoring, or supply chain finance, that involved funding short-term loans to clients backed by the invoices they owed their suppliers. What Lex was pitching was a version of the blueprint put together by Robert Cleland and his team at OzEcom and Transaction Risk Mitigation (TRM). Lex’s potential was not hard to spot – even if he hadn’t gone to the right school. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his supply chain finance idea was potentially a money-spinner, even if it wasn’t quite the winning lottery ticket Lex claimed it would be.
Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh
accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K
Supply chain costs Logistics Logistics Production and warehousing Suppliers Logistics Distributors Logistics Wholesalers retailers Customers ERP software Suppliers’ suppliers supplier network Distributors’ distributors distributor network Cost flow SO processing costs Transportation-in costs PO processing costs Product costs Material costs Supply chain inventory costs SO processing costs lost sales Customer profitability?? Transportation-out costs Returns costs Warranties costs Service costs Supply chain financing costs Supply chain costs by definition include costs across the supply chain, including order processing costs, transportation-in and -out costs, material costs, product costs, warehousing, and supply chain-wide inventory and financing costs. These costs are described below. • Order processing costs: Order processing costs include processing of POs for raw materials and sales orders for finished goods; order capture, validation, sourcing and distribution.
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These may be calculated as the total cost of ownership and must be minimized, since these may be borne by the producer. • Supply chain inventory costs: One of the objectives of SCM is to decrease inventories throughout the supply chain, since inventories are costly. Inventory costs include financing costs, handling costs, wastage and storage costs, among other things. • Supply chain financing costs: These costs capture funds invested in managing the supply chain. Collaborative activities must be planned and appropriate software purchased and operationalized — these activities consume money and time, along with time invested by management. Inventory carrying costs are sometimes included in this category.
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Index 393 SSL 335 Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML) 44 standard manifest 2 stateful inspection 351 statistical analysis 268 steganography 329 stored value cards 169 straight-through processing (STP) 299 strategic enterprise management (SEM) 308 strategic management 293 STN (SunGard Transaction Network) 299 STP (straight-through processing) 299 Structured Query Language (SQL) 19 SUNGARD 297 SunGard Transaction Network (STN) 299 SunGard Treasury System 297 supplier data interchange 18 supplier life cycle management (SLM) 193 supplier relationship management (SRM) 33, 191, 193 supplier relationship management/eprocurement 40 supplier selection strategy 194 supply chain cockpit (SCC) 248 supply chain collaboration 247 supply chain cost accounting 251 supply chain costs 251 supply chain design 235 supply chain event management (SCEM) 243 supply chain execution 237 supply chain financing costs 253 supply chain inventory costs 253 supply chain management (SCM) 33, 40, 232 supply chain monitoring 247 supply chain operations reference model (SCOR) 245 supply chain performance management (SCPM) 244 supply network planning 246 supply planning 235 symmetric encryption (private key) 346 system integrity techniques 362 SysTrust 372 T T&E (travel and entertainment )expenses 215, 219 TAD (trade acceptance drafts) 181 tags 44 target costing 254 TCP/IP 114, 353 telemarketing 137 thick client 21 thin client 21 third-party add-on products 32 three-factor authentication 343 trade acceptance drafts (TAD) 181 transaction manager 299 transaction set 93 TransactionVision 364, 367 translator 96 transportation builder 246 transportation planning 247 transportation-in and -out costs 252 travel and entertainment (T&E) expense 215, 219 treasury function 294 Trojan horses 327 trust services 372 tunneling 353 two-factor authentication 343 U UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) 332 UETA (Uniform Electronic Transactions Act) 332 UNIX (uniplexed information and computing system) 24 U.S.
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
They can use this to saddle the firms they acquire with debt, extract money from them, leave them with more debt, then sell them for even more profit—with all the debtors left holding the (empty) bag. Consider the case of Greensill Capital, which collapsed spectacularly in 2021. Its unsustainable expansion over the course of ten years—from supply-chain finance startup, to multinational middleman with a $4.6 million debt load, to insolvency—was accelerated by investments and loans from SoftBank, who made millions in funds available in spite of the company’s increasingly fishy accounting. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. VC funding and private equity are such a normal part of our economy that it might seem odd to call them hacks.
Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel
Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game
On a ship this big, there are bound to be some leaks, especially given the apparent short attention span of today’s technology worker. HP is a progressive analytics leader. Its analytics department houses 1,700 workers in Bangalore alone. They boast cutting-edge analytical capabilities across sales, marketing, supply chain, finance, and HR domains. Their PA projects include customer loss prediction, sales lead scoring, and supplier fraud detection. Gitali Halder leads HP’s analytics team in Bangalore focused on human resources applications. With a master’s in economics from the Delhi School of Economics and several years of hands-on experience, Halder is your true PA powerhouse.
Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey
Despite the climate of fear, we showed them how such loans to small businesses could achieve results at least as good as they could get from ‘expanding into central Europe’. But making the change rested as much on a mindset shift in the heads of the relevant chief execs as it did on a structural change to state funding. Similarly, extensive efforts were made to encourage large firms to engage in supply chain finance. While Rolls-Royce, with its brand name and cash holdings, might be able to borrow from banks at 2 per cent, its many suppliers might struggle to get banks to lend to them at less than 10 per cent, if at all. But if Rolls-Royce were to underwrite the loan, in effect telling the bank that they would be paying the small business for its work in a specified number of days, the small business could now borrow at rates comparable to that of Rolls-Royce.
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell
"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar
Vision Fund’s profits were up 66 percent: Mayumi Negishi, “SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 Plans to Begin Investing as Soon as Next Month,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 7, 2019. sprinted north over Lake Ontario: Flight path for N1872, FlightAirMap website, accessed Aug. 26, 2019. SoftBank had just invested in Greensill’s business: Duncan Mavin, “SoftBank Invests $800 Million in Supply Chain Finance Firm Greensill,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2019. CHAPTER 35: PARANOIA story published after his departure: Kirsten Grind, Sarah Krouse, and Jim Oberman, “Star Fidelity Manager Gavin Baker Fired over Sexual Harassment Allegations,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12, 2017. T.