Weekend reading

1. Talk about likely Cheshire cats and Uber edition, as the company prepares for its IPO,

Excluding certain one-time items, including the sale of some of its businesses, Uber’s losses for the quarter rose 88 percent from the previous year, to $842 million. The losses were a result of Uber’s increasing its spending as it tries to outmuscle competitors, many of which have intensified their efforts to add riders and drivers. Uber has responded by offering bigger incentives and more promotions to fend off rivals like DoorDash, Lyft and other ride-hailing and food-delivery services... Some of the company’s losses have been overshadowed by its explosive growth. In 2018, Uber increased its total bookings — what it charges customers for rides and food delivery — to $50 billion, up 45 percent from 2017. Net revenue was $11.3 billion, a 43 percent increase... But Uber’s profit margins have declined as it cut prices to match competitors and spent money on expanding its food-delivery business, Uber Eats. The margins are also smaller on Uber Eats orders because the company pays commissions to restaurants as well as delivery drivers.

Despite this the company is valued at $70 bn, with investment bankers suggesting even $120 bn.

More likely this is a pricing of Uber than its valuation. When asked about Uber's astronomical 'valuation', valuation guru Aswath Damodaran had this to say,

Pricing. It’s a pricing issue. The reason people pay $60 Billion for Uber is because they think that when it goes public it will be worth $100 Billion. There doesn’t need to be a fundamental rationale for value. All you need in the pricing game is someone else willing to pay a higher price for the company. As long as momentum is on their side, it’ll keep pushing the pricing up. It’s got very little to do with fundamentals, and everything to do with “is there somebody else out there who will pay me a higher price for this company”.

Btw, Aswath Damodaran values Uber at between $25 bn and $35 bn. 

Ahem!

2. So Amazon has pulled the plug on its Queens second head quarters which promised 25000 new jobs and $3bn in local tax concessions. What does it say about modern capitalism that its favourite corporate brand is forced to abandon its plans to establish its second headquarters in a city which is perhaps the capital of modern capitalism?

Now what happens to the vast trove of data that Amazon has accumulated about cities during the bidding process?

3. Special economic zones (SEZs) come in several forms, and there is little to suggest that, in general, they offer value for money. Consider this about 'opportunity zones' in the US, 

Based on recommendations from state governments, the United States Treasury has designated more than 8,700 eligible census tracts in urban, suburban and rural areas across the country. The opportunity funds are the vehicles for investing in these zones. The idea is that investors get federal tax breaks, while the neighborhoods get new businesses and upgraded properties, like apartment buildings, retail shops and hotels... Opportunity funds let investors postpone federal taxes on recent capital gains until the end of 2026; they can also reduce the taxable portion of those gains by as much as 15 percent, after seven years. Further, investors can eliminate taxes on additional gains from investing in the fund itself, if they hold the investment for 10 years. So, if you have investments that have appreciated, you can defer capital gains taxes by selling the investment and reinvesting the money into an opportunity fund within six months. Almost any sort of capital gain qualifies, whether from the sale of stocks or mutual funds, or other investments, including the sale of real estate or a business. Just the gains on an investment — rather than the entire proceeds of a sale — must be reinvested in the opportunity fund.

But the zones, notified last year, are already there are serious question marks about whether many of the notified zones deserved to get any fiscal concessions since they were already gentrifying. 

4. Leveraged loans, borrowings by those with relatively high debt, which has more than doubled to over $1 trillion since 2010, have for some time been signalling red. 

Highly leveraged loan deals (when debt is more than five times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) account for about half of new US corporate debt. That growth is partly a result of securitisation. Roughly half of investor demand today comes from packaging loans into collateralised loan obligations, or CLOs, and slicing them into different tranches of risk. Rising demand has shifted the balance of power from investors to borrowers, and contributed to a watering down of covenants embedded in loan agreements that traditionally protect investors. According to Moody’s, about 25 per cent of the leveraged loan market was considered “covenant-lite” before the global financial crisis. Now that figure is 80 per cent. The implications in a downturn could be severe. Covenant-lite lending is like swimming without the ability to spot seals (where there are seals, there are sharks looking to feed). Stricter covenants improve transparency and help investors identify underlying problems with borrowers; now some covenants are so weak that nothing short of insolvency will trigger a default. If problems finally show up, investors will stampede out of the asset class, creating a systemic liquidity crunch... Leveraged loans probably won’t spark the next recession, but they will almost certainly deepen it, because they are an important source of corporate funding for deals and share buybacks.

5. The debate about the merits and distortions associated with universal basic income (UBI) is likely an endless one. And it is also an activity that is likely to keep academics busy for generations. The present stage of evidence generation is focused on its efficacy, and given the need to tease out general equilibrium effects, this is the likely agenda for at least the coming decade. The evidence is likely, as is mostly the case with such problems, to be mixed. The next stage of debate will move to what is the right amount, then what is the right amount for a particular context, and so on.

Echoing this, a new paper for UBI in advanced countries finds,

A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, non-elderly, non-disabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions.

6. It is a well-known fact that infrastructure contractors bid aggressively to bag the contract since they are confident that they can come back and renegotiate the contract. There is a massive body of literature on this. The latest addition is on the renegotiations in power generation contracts in India. 

7. What if users of Facebook were shut off from accessing the social media site? An RCT evaluation of the welfare effects of US Facebook users show,

Using a suite of outcomes from both surveys and direct measurement, we show that Facebook deactivation (i) reduced online activity, including other social media, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment.

8. Finally nice article by Pilita Clark bemoaning the disappearance of (now politically incorrect) bluntness in offices, and the mistaking of bluntness for unacceptable behaviour.