Weekend reading links

1. Interest rates may be inching upwards, but the rate at which it is happening appears not to be having much impact on leveraging. Ananth points to this FT Alphaville article on the unabated rise in the share of Covenant-lite loans, or loans with weak lending protections, among loans given to riskier borrowers (leverage loans).

The robust economic growth in the US makes everyone lower their guard and borrow more and lend less prudently.  

2. Oil prices are declining again reflecting good and bad signs for the Indian economy. Good in terms of likely lowering the twin deficits and bad in terms of its portends for weaknesses in the global economy. 

One of the features of the oil market in recent times has been the rise and rise of US oil production. Sometime between May and June this year, US became the largest crude producer at 11.65 m barrels per day, the first time since 1973.

3. The cost of US sanctions on China, at least for now, appears to being borne by the Chinese exporters than US consumers. Bloomberg points to a new paper by Benedikt Zoller-Rydzek and Gabriel Felbermayr appears to point out that US companies and consumers will only pay 4.5 percent more due to the 25% tariffs on $250 bn Chinese imports and the other 20.5% will fall on Chinese exporters.  

The reason being the smart choice of goods for the first round of tariffs, those with the highest "price elasticity" or availability of substitutes which can replace the Chinese imports. This in turn prevents importers from passing through the tariffs to consumers in the US. They find that total welfare gain to US consumers to be $18.4 bn. Further, they show that this would cut US imports of affected Chinese goods by more than a third and lower the bilateral deficient by 17%.

The challenge will be when the basket of goods expands to those with lower elasticity. But for now, give Trump some credit!

4. The issues raised by Carlos Ghosn arrest in Japan on charges of fraud from an internal enquiry for having deceived Nissan by consistently under-reporting on his pay package and benefits claims and using company assets for personal purposes is symptomatic of executive culture in the corporate world. It is only a surprise that more such demeanours do not come out to the open. Perhaps the reason this came out in the open is because it happened in Japan, which, unlike in the US, has less cultural tolerance for such corporate excesses.  

The Nissan-Renault alliance, which was expanded in 2016 to include Mitsubishi, produces 10.6 million cars annually, making it the world's largest car maker. 

Rest assured that in the coming days, more stories will come out about the details of the power-struggle between the French and Japanese parts of the Nissan-Renault empire. Nissan's Japanese employees had long resented the dominance of Renault's French owners. For long, Ghosn's dominating presence had papered over differences. This FT article may only be the preview to what could come out in the open.

All this again raises questions about the alleged superiority of the "efficient" US business management style and culture over the "inefficient" Oriental one. The argument in favour of this comes from the market performance of US firms compared to their Japanese counterparts, especially the stock market performance and bottomline growth. The idea of cutting costs aggressively (Ghosn built his larger-than-life image on being the "Le cost killer") and promoting performance payments with eye only on the financial reporting bottomline imposes significant long-term costs besides corroding corporate culture. Ghosn compensation was a massive outlier in Japan - Takeshi Uchiyamada, chairman of Toyota, for example, was paid ¥181 million in 2017, compared to Mr. Ghosn’s reported ¥735 million.

But, as we all know now, these things come at considerable costs. Not just on the corporate governance and ethics, but even on business practices (sample Nissan's grow-at-all-cost discounting strategy in the US market which alienated stakeholders like its dealers) the claims of superiority appears questionable. On the net, and taking a long-term view, one cannot but not get the impression that the adoption of western management and business practices may have come at a net cost to Japanese companies.

5. Staying on the theme of corporate governance, there are growing signs that the 1MDB-Goldman Sachs scandal involved the topmost leadership of Goldman. It now emerges that Jha Low, a financier with close ties to the then Malaysian PM, Najib Razaq, and the alleged mastermind in the plot to siphon over $6 bn of Malaysian public funds, met one-on-one with Goldman Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein in December 2012. This seriously weakens Goldman's efforts to spin the scandal as the work of a few rogue employees.

Sample this,

In the three years before the 2012 meeting, the bank’s compliance staff had repeatedly rejected Mr. Low’s attempts to become a Goldman client because it was unclear how he had amassed his wealth... The compliance team also identified Mr. Low as someone Goldman should avoid working with on any 1MDB transactions...  But when Mr. Blankfein’s aides sought information about Mr. Low in preparation for the meeting, a senior investment banker in Asia praised Mr. Low and did not mention the compliance concerns, according to a person who has reviewed internal Goldman emails about the meeting. Nor did the compliance red flags stop the bank from doing extensive business with 1MDB, which Malaysia’s prime minister at the time had set up in 2009 ostensibly to invest in infrastructure and other projects to improve Malaysians’ daily lives. Goldman ultimately helped 1MDB sell more than $6 billion in bonds to investors, earning about $600 million in fees.

It is hard to believe that a deal like this, an that too one which was bagged without any competitive bidding and on nomination, and especially one which earned the firm $600 million in fees, did not involve not just the knowledge but the active support of the top leadership. Btw, if this were government, it would be impossible to not have loud public demands for resignations and the like.

6. Finally Paul Romer makes good suggestions about the role of governments in the promotion of innovation,

First, government needs to take a more active role in creating scientific infrastructure... Congress can help without any additional spending by letting recipients of research grants use those funds to support open-source projects, which make their blueprints publicly available... Take Python, the open-source programming language that has become the language of choice for software developers in the fields of artificial intelligence and data science. Programmers have used Python to power innovation in everything from the detection of gravity waves (resulting in last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics) to reducing the cost of developing new drugs... Second, Congress should look for opportunities to extend scientific transparency to the private sector. It could draw on the principles that guided the design of our patent system; the law protects a private right to charge for the use of a discovery, but mandates public disclosure of its details so others can learn from it. To see how this could work, consider hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas. Regulators in North Dakota forced firms to disclose how much water and sand they used to frack each well and how much oil it produced. This let a different firm drilling a well nearby select a better mixture for its well. Over time, the entire industry optimized the mix used in various geological conditions and substantially reduced costs.