Felix Salmon

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Here’s a type of attention that has escaped most of the financial world in the last few years: resounding praise. And it’s being directed at practitioners of that dullest of financial professions, central banking.

Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, is the FT’s person of the year. Draghi gets the nod for standing against an existential threat with almost Churchillian resolve and rhetoric: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro… And believe me, it will be enough”. The FT calls that July statement a “turning point in the three-year-old crisis”  that “in effect dared financial markets to challenge the ECB’s unlimited firepower”. Draghi has necessarily made the job deeply political: Matt Yglesias compared Draghi’s ECB to a “shadow government” enforcing budget cuts.

Draghi’s peers around the world are also receiving lavish plaudits from just about everybody (except, of course, those US politicians with their subtle threats). Zachary Karabel writes that central bankers are not only being forced to repeatedly save the world, “they are tending to the financial system with greater nimbleness, creativity and maturity than their political counterparts or any other societal actor”. The Economist calls this “the grey man’s burden” and says that today’s central bankers are the “most powerful and daring players in the global economy”.

If you’re looking to put a number on central bankers’ value: The Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien, comparing nominal and potential GDP, found that a team of “superstar” central bankers can be worth a trillion dollars a year. No wonder the UK imported its next central banker. — Ben Walsh  

On to today’s links:

Progress
How the web has changed for the worse in the social networking era – Anil Dash

Liebor
For the first time more than a decade, a big bank may “agree to” criminal charges – Dealbook

Good Luck With That
Your next financial services job may be in St. Louis (or cities like it) – WSJ

Remuneration
The problem with the EU’s cap on bankers’ bonuses: it won’t actually limit pay – Quartz

New Normal
How the return of US manufacturing could fuel innovation – Annie Lowrey
Innovation almost always leads to higher wages, study says – Owen Zidar

Tragic
300 million guns for 300 million Americans: a history of our gun laws – New Yorker

Video
An AIG exec raps about bailouts, desecrates a Jay Z song – Mother Jones
John McAfee: I have only $5 million left and I didn’t kill my neighbor – Quartz

Wonks
10 of the best economics papers of the year – Andres Marroquin

Oxpeckers
The NYT public editor’s badly-aimed attack on the Dealbook conference – Felix

HP
HP’s former CEO blames the board for Autonomy deal – Bloomberg

Boondoggles
Brooklyn’s vaunted, tainted Barclays Center – Norman Oder

Taxmageddon
Why the budget crisis will drag on for months – Matt Yglesias

Infrastructure
White House petition to build a Death Star by 2016 passes 25,000 signatures – Next Web

Yikes
An optimistic trendline suggests it’ll be another two years before unemployment hits 6.5% – Sober Look

Housing
More good news on housing: inventory levels could bottom next year – Calculated Risk

Good Reads
Ravi Shankar and the West’s search for the lost chord – Robert MacMillan

Andrew Martin has a very long, and not particularly illuminating, article about college indebtedness in today’s NYT. The title of the piece is “Colleges’ Debt Falls on Students After Construction Binges”, and it’s almost 3,000 words long, but somehow Martin fails to even hazard a guess as to the degree to which colleges’ debt is falling on students after construction binges. We’re certainly told that it’s happening:

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill…

Higher debt payments and other expenses have contributed to the runaway inflation of college costs, and the impact on students is real and often substantial.

How big are these bills? How substantial is the impact on students? Martin doesn’t hazard a guess: instead, he just says that “the costs are not easy to isolate”. But there are a few hard numbers, far down in the piece:

Outstanding debt at the 224 public universities rated by Moody’s grew to $122 billion in 2011, from $53 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2000. At the 281 private universities rated by Moody’s, debt increased to $83 billion, from $40 billion, in that period. Rather than deplete their endowments, some colleges borrowed to help pay bills after the financial crisis, but most borrowing was for capital projects.

Since 2000, the amount paid in interest and principal has increased 67 percent at public institutions, to $9.3 billion in 2011, and it increased 62 percent at private ones, to $5 billion last year.

Martin doesn’t tell us what this works out at on a per-student basis, so let’s try. According to the Census Bureau (see Table 5), there are 20.4 million students enrolled in US colleges, split between 16.6 million undergrads and 3.8 million graduate students. According to Martin, using numbers from Moody’s, the amount of college-level debt being borne (in part) by those students has gone up by $112 billion, and the annual debt service has gone up by $5.6 billion. (These are numbers Martin could have just printed directly, but for whatever reason he chose not to; instead, you need to back them out of the numbers he cites.)

Students don’t bear all those extra costs: as Martin notes, “in some states, including New York, California and Connecticut, borrowing for public colleges and universities is mostly paid for by taxpayers, so students are not directly responsible for payments on the debt”. But for the sake of argument — and despite the fact that the University of California is the single biggest debtor, with SUNY at number 2 — let’s assume that all the extra costs are borne by students. In that case, we have 20.4 million students paying an extra $5.6 billion per year in interest, which comes to an annual cost of $274 per student.

Remember that $274 is a deliberate over-estimate, since a lot of the extra borrowing that Martin is writing about will get paid out of state budgets rather than out of students’ tuition fees. What’s more, the rise in interest payments coincides with a lot of universities shifting floating-rate debt to fixed-rate debt, which increases the interest payments but makes it them much less prone to rising unexpectedly.

Obviously, the increased costs will be higher at the universities with the most construction activity, and lower at more frugal colleges: the $274 is just an average. And I’m no fan of what Martin calls the Edifice Complex: I’ve been highly critical of capital projects at Harvard and NYU. But if it wants to make the case that students are paying “often substantial” sums as a result, the NYT is going to have to do better than this.

Indeed, if you want to criticize big capital projects, then “students end up paying a large part of the interest expense” is way down the list of good ways to do so. Interest expenses are generally small as a percentage of capital costs, because interest rates are low; what’s more, when you divide them between tens of thousands of students, the per-student cost becomes entirely manageable. The problem is more in the way that these projects force universities to lose a lot of flexibility in terms of their optimal size: it’s much easier to grow than to shrink, even as it’s hard to maintain quality when you’re growing too fast. The result, all too often, is shiny facilities, and a lower-quality education.

There’s a bigger lesson here, too, for the NYT. Martin says that the data underpinning this article was compiled for the NYT by Moody’s, which means that the NYT has access to a full and rich database. So why doesn’t it publish that data? Good data-driven journalism both publishes as much data as possible, and uses the data to drive conclusions, rather than simply dropping numbers into a foreordained article.

What should have happened here was for Martin to take a deep dive into Moody’s data, to try to work out which colleges saw the largest debt-service increase and whether there was any correlation between debt-service increases and tuition increases. Even if he didn’t have the appetite to do that work himself, at least if he published the data then the rest of us could do it. Instead, we just get an article which is very long on anecdote and very short on useful data. It’s a shame.

Margaret Sullivan, the NYT public editor, has mixed feelings about the first DealBook conference, which took place on Wednesday. Her job is to worry about such things, but it’s worth taking her post seriously, because conferences and other live events are one of the few bright spots in the media business-model world right now.

The DealBook conference was in some ways the platonic ideal of the form. It had a banal and meaningless title (Opportunities For Tomorrow), it had a bunch of CEOs (Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Eric Schmidt, Dick Costolo, Indra Nooyi), a series of celebugeeks (Marc Andreessen, Jared Bernstein, Glenn Hubbard, Paul Krugman), and a passel of famous-for-being-rich types (Ray Dalio, David Rubenstein, Stephen Schwarzman). It even had a 15-minute stump speech from Charles Duhigg about his bestselling book. Something for everyone!

Of course, the real reason that conferences succeed or fail isn’t in their programming but rather in their audience: the trick is to get enough boldface names on stage that a lot of important people want to come and mingle with each other. I didn’t go to this conference, but I have colleagues who did, and they were impressed by the quality of the audience. If conferences develop a reputation as a place full of people you want to meet, it pretty much doesn’t matter any more what happens in the panels.

The NYT put a lot of effort into curating the audience for this invitation-only conference: like Davos, you needed an invitation and money before you were allowed in. (Because the Times Center is relatively small, filling it up is the easy bit.) It’s especially important to get a high-quality audience when your conference takes place in New York City, because the on-stage headliners are likely to stay only for their own sessions, rather than mingling with everybody else. And of course, as at all conferences, it gave the audience every opportunity to mingle and network and gossip: having real conversations with interesting people is nearly always better than listening to the interesting conversations of others.

The one thing the audience didn’t particularly come for was for anybody on stage to commit journalism. Conferences can be lucrative brand extensions, for news organizations — the D conferences, in particular, are by all accounts insanely profitable — but it’s rare for them to be particularly newsworthy in and of themselves. For journalists, they’re more of an opportunity to meet a lot of potential sources, and also to get to know those sources a little bit outside the context of formal news interviews. And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you think that access journalism has any value at all.

DealBook in general, and Andrew Ross Sorkin in particular, is a prime example of how access journalism can have real value. His crisis book, for instance, is a genuinely important historical document, and could probably have been written by no one else. The rich and important have power and influence, and if you want to understand that power, and document it, you need access to those people. The conversations that Sorkin has on stage with the likes of Dimon and Blankfein are not exactly the same as the conversations he has with them off the record, for obvious reasons. But they do have value, especially because it can be hard to duck a direct question if you know you’re being live-streamed across the internet.

So what were Sullivan’s problems with this event? Firstly, she doesn’t seem to like access journalism at all:

Here is what the conference did not have going for it: A great deal of distance between sources and those who cover them — something traditionally thought to be a bedrock journalistic idea.

This is far too facile. Carol Loomis has been covering Warren Buffett for half a century, and by Buffett’s own admission they talk pretty much every day. He’s friends with her family, and she with his: there is essentially no distance at all between Loomis and Buffett. But Loomis is a first-rate journalist all the same. Or, if Sullivan wants to stay within the NYT, she need look no further than Gretchen Morgenson, who became so close to her source Josh Rosner that they ended up writing a book together.

I think that Sullivan thinks that the DealBook conference, far from being a smart way of monetizing the NYT brand, was meant to be some kind of public grilling: a live Meet The Press for the Wall Street set. Such an event would certainly be interesting, although it’s hard to see why any potential interviewee would say yes to such a format: while politicians have to be out in front of the public, CEOs do not. And in any case, it’s far from certain that anybody would actually get more value out of watching hard questions than they currently do out of watching relative softballs. Last year, for instance, I moderated a panel where I asked a pretty tough question of NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer; he got a bit flustered and angry, but didn’t really say much of substance, and I can’t say that the audience was particularly well served by that question.

Sullivan’s next beef is even less comprehensible:

More than anything, DealBook is one of those creatures of 21st-century journalism – as much about “brand” as anything else.

Sullivan never explains how this distinguishes 21st-century journalism from 20th-century journalism or even 19th-century journalism; it seems to me that journalism has always been about building brands, and probably always will be. But Sullivan, with her creatures and her scare quotes, clearly thinks there’s something newfangled and distasteful going on here: I would love to see a future post where she explains exactly what that might be. In this post, she just counts logos, which tells us exactly nothing about anything. But she did worry about the fact that the conference was sponsored:

Such sponsorships are another creature of 21st-century newspapering, eroding the sharp line between advertising and editorial content.

Huh? This I just don’t get at all. The editorial content surrounding the conference was clear: there was a DealBook newspaper supplement, and a live blog, and I daresay there might even be a separate article or two somewhere on the NYT website. But all of that content had exactly the same line between editorial and advertising that any other NYT editorial content has. Yes, some of the ads were for BlackBerry, which sponsored the conference and I’m sure got a big package deal. But I don’t see BlackBerry infesting the editorial content anywhere; the BlackBerry product demonstration, for instance, didn’t even get a mention in the live blog.

I suspect that what Sullivan is implying here is that the conference itself is editorial content, and that since Blackberry was on stage during the conference, that makes it seem editorially-endorsed, somehow. That’s a stretch: it’s exactly the same adjacency tactic which drives the age-old model of having advertisements in the newspaper. When the BlackBerry presentation is introduced by the Chief Advertising Officer of nytimes.com, it’s pretty clear which side of the editorial/advertising divide it lies.

Sullivan wraps up her complaints — the things she says “can’t help but make me a little queasy” — thusly:

Given the lunchtime rollout of a new Blackberry device, the overall friendly questioning of prominent newsmakers, the reception afterward – featuring wine, hors d’oeuvres and the incessant rubbing of journalistic and corporate elbows — the word “adversarial” did not come to mind. Nor did the word “watchdog.”

The fact is that Sullivan could pick any NYT story at random, and the chances that she would consider it “adversarial”, or performing any kind of “watchdog” role, would be very low indeed. There are always some stories which fall into that category, of course, but very few. On the front page of the website right now, for instance, is an assiduously-reported piece by Annie Lowrey, one of the presenters at the DealBook conference, headlined “High-Tech Factories Built to Be Engines of Innovation”. There’s not a hint of the adversarial or the watchdog about it, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable, and I’m sure that Sullivan doesn’t feel queasy when she reads it. So why is she holding the DealBook conference to a different standard?

And is Sullivan really going to complain about the fact that a conference, where some attendees paid $1,500 apiece, dared to feature wine and hors d’oeuvres at its reception? Journalists rub elbows with this crowd every day — that’s their job — and it’s utterly commonplace for there to be some kind of wine and food in the vicinity.

Sullivan thinks that the conference debases the NYT’s editorial independence: given that you can’t run a conference without boldface names, she says, “the Times’s indebtedness to these sources lurks in the shadows”. To which I would say: quite the opposite. When you’re running a conference and your sources are right out there, in the open, on stage with you, that’s the limelight, not the shadows. The shadows is what we’re given the other 364 days of the year, when innumerable stories are written on the basis of off-the-record conversations with these exact same sources.

Very few readers suspect, I think, just how much senior executives talk to the press. There’s an ultra-sophisticated way of reading the business press, which generally starts with the dual questions “who is the main source for this story” and “what is that person trying to achieve”. But the overwhelming majority of readers don’t read that way.

Which means that public conferences like this one, where everything is live-streamed and on the record, actually constitute much more transparent journalism than the vast majority of what you read in the paper. Sullivan might not like the fact that if you want senior executive sources to talk to you, it generally helps to be reasonably polite and respectful. But at least at this kind of conference that kind of thing is out in the open, rather than being hidden in the back channels.

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“People are setting to where it suits their book. Libor is what you say it is.”

That’s the ontological musing of the man in charge of RBS’s Libor submissions; it comes from a 2007 phone conversation in a seemingly massive set of documents obtained by Bloomberg. One adviser to the OECD said that this is part of what “has to be the biggest financial fraud of all time”. (It’s a common refrain.)

In June, Barclays paid a record $450 million fine to settle Libor-fixing allegations for what Matt Levine called “biased guessing”. It wasn’t destined to remain a record. Today, we learned that UBS could face a fine of some $1 billion to settle similar charges with US and UK authorities. (RBS is said to be working on its own settlement).

It’s not going to end there. On Tuesday, three men were arrested in London over the Libor probe, including a former UBS trader. Bloomberg reports that the EU could could impose fines equal to 10% of banks’ annual revenue. Nine banks have received subpoenas in a joint investigation by New York and Connecticut AGs over how investors, states and cities have been affected. And Baltimore is already suing a group of big banks over Libor.

British regulators have put forth a sensible plan to fix Libor, but in an appearance this week outgoing BoE governor Mervyn King seemed to suggest that misleading Libor bids may just be inevitable:

We know there will be times when markets will be so thin, liquidity will dry up, that it will simply be impossible for people honestly to report quotes for LIBOR. It just won’t exist. That’s really what happened in September 2007 and September 2008.

King’s preference would be for regulators to come up with a set of Libor-submission principles from which the  “market can choose”. This summer, his successor suggested Libor may have to be abandoned altogether. – Ryan McCarthy

On to today’s links:

Alpha
Steve Cohen, the Lance Armstrong of investing? – Jesse Eisinger
The biggest lie that investors tell themselves: more information helps – Mark Dow

Reversals
One less excuse to not leave your house: Google Maps for the iPhone is back – Verge

EU Mess
Europe takes one big step toward a banking union – Quartz

The Fed
The Fed’s “mandate is strong but the tools are weak” – Grep Ip

Takedowns
A hilarious satirical reading of The Economist’s “The World in 2013″ issue – Mark Leibovich

Crisis Retro
$40 billion in losses and thousands of foreclosures later, Angelo Mozilo has “no regrets about how Countrywide was run” – Bloomberg

Proclamations
The UN has declared 2013 “The International Year of the Quinoa” – United Nations

Says Science
Paper towels > air dryers – Conversable Economist

Facebook
“Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this wall” – Wired

Bubbly
Condoleezza Rice, venture capital advisor – Fortune

Sad Declines
Unions small, now – Matt Zeitlin

Mark Gongloff is not a fan of the idea that corporations are people. Except, that is, when the corporation in question is HSBC: he’s extremely angry at the fact that the UK bank won’t face criminal prosecution as a result of its money-laundering shenanigans.

Gongloff’s take is pretty mainstream: the NYT editorial page said that the decision is “a dark day for the rule of law”, adding that “clearly, the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail”.

But here’s the thing: you can’t jail a bank, or any corporation; a criminal indictment of a corporation is a bit of a peculiar fish at the best of times. Even if the bank survived, which Gongloff thinks is possible but no one knows for sure, there would certainly be massive job losses — and we can be sure that somewhere between 99% and 100% of those job losses would fall on people who had absolutely nothing at all to do with the money laundering that HSBC was getting up to.

What’s more, it’s important to put HSBC’s crimes in context. The United States, in its role as global hegemon and guardian of the world’s only real reserve currency, has unapologetically taken the opportunity to use its economic power to push its geopolitical agenda. For instance, if you’re an Iranian business and you want to do business in dollars, the US is determined to make your life as difficult as possible. The US might have no jurisdiction over Iranian businesses, but it does have jurisdiction over nearly all the important banks in the world, since it’s impossible to be a global bank without having some kind of presence in the US. And — as Argentina is finding out right now in its court case against Elliott Associates — if you want to send dollars around the world, you basically have to send them through the USA.

To put it another way, the laws that HSBC broke were laws designed to bolster the international standing of the US relative to Iran and other countries: they were geopolitically motivated, and the intended target was not the international banking system, with which the State Department has no particular beef, but rather countries the State Department doesn’t like.

In general, the laws have had their intended effect: they have depressed commerce in the relevant countries. But after HSBC has been caught breaking the laws, is there really any point in then pursuing a scorched-earth criminal prosecution against the bank? Remember, the bank was not the real target of the laws in the first place — and what HSBC did was perfectly legal in, say, the UK.

The US certainly has the ability to criminally prosecute HSBC. But doing so would not particularly hurt Iran or any of America’s other state enemies. And the laws which HSBC broke were not laws against bad banking, they were laws against bad states.

Or, to put it another way: the US is the most powerful sovereign nation on the planet. With a flick of its Justice Department finger, it could wipe a globe-spanning bank off the face of the financial system. It has truly awesome power. And every single bank in America is well aware of just how much power the US has in this regard. The question isn’t whether to use that power, it’s why. To do so would be bullying, and capricious, and would punish thousands of innocent individuals, and would destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value, all for the purpose of nothing much in particular. Just because the US can prosecute HSBC doesn’t mean that it should prosecute HSBC. And sometimes, forbearance isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of maturity.

Update: Contra EJ Fagan, this is not an argument against prosecuting individuals at HSBC who broke the law. And in the comments, a lot of people are making the point that HSBC’s crimes centered not on Iran but rather on Mexican drug cartels; again, the laws broken are all part of the US war on drugs. The question here is: do you destroy a bank as collateral damage in that war?

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For the first time, the Fed has explicitly tied its interest rate policy to specific levels of unemployment and inflation. Short-term rates will stay at essentially zero as long as unemployment is above 6.5% and inflation is under 2.5%, the Fed announced today. WaPo’s Neil Irwin says Fed policymakers “unveiled a huge surprise”.

If you’ve been following Chicago Fed president Charles Evans, this policy — a version of which is known as the “Evans Rule” — is familiar. The surprise is that Bernanke delivered almost exactly what Evans advocated: monetary policy that is tied to economic conditions, rather than the Gregorian calendar. Jon Hilsenrath and Brian Blackstone point out that the move comes in the context of increasingly coordinated and unprecedented actions by central bankers around the world; this is certainly the latter, if not the former.

Why the historic shift? Because the economy isn’t growing fast enough, and because unemployment is still too high. As Reuters’ Pedro da Costa and Alister Bull note, the Fed cut its growth expectations for next year, and business investment remains weak. Look at Tim Duy’s bleak picture of the American consumer and you can see why the concern is justified. Rates have been at zero since December 2008, which means that one of the few remaining tools the Fed has is setting expectations.

Mark Thoma points out that after decades of rhetoric aimed at controlling inflation by raising rates, the Fed “has too much credibility on inflation” (and, presumably, not enough on unemployment). Pedro da Costa reports that Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, thinks the Fed’s target is “problematic…because the unemployment rate… is an imperfect measure of progress.” Bernanke’s insistence in his press conference that 6.5% unemployment is a guidepost, “not a target” indicates that he knows the headline unemployment rate doesn’t always tell the full story.

It’s not just Bernanke whose approach has changed. The members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee have been shifting all year. As today’s news demonstrates, the Fed is now “aggressively dovish”. — Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Taxmageddon
It’s now pretty damn clear that businesses are freaking out about the fiscal cliff – WaPo
Think of the children…and increase government spending – Christian Science Monitor

JPMorgan
The SEC was politely chiding JPMorgan about disclosures months before the Whale trade blew up – Bloomberg
The SEC demanded that JP Morgan provide more disclosure about Goldman Sachs’s prop trading – Matt Levine

Hope/Change/Etc.
Actually, the White House is serious about another round of economic stimulus – Sam Stein and Ryan Grim

Inequities
The booming American industry where the gap between CEO and worker pay has doubled in just 10 years – Bloomberg

Leaders
Jamie Dimon will defend your freedom on the beach of the Bay of Pigs if he has too – Huffington Post
China’s fail safe plan to achieve social stability by not wearing ties – Quartz

Pivots
Drivers like mass transit once they give it a try – Atlantic Cities

Tax Arcana
Breaking: the US Treasury does not have to pay taxes – John Carney

Awesome
“As GZA was sitting beside me…”: RZA reviews “Django Unchained” – Huffington Post

Wonks
Mark Carney is talking about NGDP targeting again – FT Alpaville
“The Shrinkage Factor” and how to make a prediction – Farnam Street

Big Brother
Police use the hum of an electrical outlet to timestamp crimes – BBC

The main problem with trying to explain the fiscal cliff, as I see it, is that people get far too caught up in the details — tax deductions, tax hikes, spending cuts, debt ceilings, and the like. Which are all important, but they’re not fundamentally what the austerity bomb is about. Rather, the reason that everybody’s worried about the effects of the fiscal cliff is simple Keynsian mathematics: if we cut spending and raise taxes, that means less economic activity — and a nasty recession, just when we can least afford it.

So this video is my attempt — with a big red dog, and Superman, and Batman — to get back to what really matters, and to try to underscore something quite interesting, which has been lost in the politics, which is that in terms of the deficit, both Obama and Boehner want something very similar. The deficit is big now — about $1.1 trillion — and they both want it to come down by roughly $200 billion, which is much less than what will happen automatically if they do nothing. In that case, the deficit would plunge by a disastrous $500 billion or so.

Deficits are a good thing, in terms of economic stimulus, and taking away a large deficit too quickly is a great way of causing a recession. I do understand that at some point deficits become a bad thing, especially if the bond markets decide that there’s a real question mark over whether all that borrowing can ever be repaid. But we’re not at that point yet. So it falls to Barack Obama and John Boehner to come together to prevent an entirely avoidable recession. They can do it, and they will do it. But we’ll have to suffer a lot of sturm und drang — not to mention gimmicky YouTube videos — before we get there.

There are a lot of very weird aspects to today’s announcement that Berkshire Hathaway has bought back $1.2 billion in stock.

Firstly, the way that the announcement came out seems incredibly shambolic. The stock market opened, and then just a few minutes later trading in Berkshire was halted, pending a news announcement. The announcement was made, and trading resumed, but there’s really no reason why the announcement couldn’t have been made ten minutes earlier, before the market opened.

Secondly, the buyback took long enough: Berkshire first announced that it was thinking of doing such things back in September 2011, saying that it would buy back stock “at prices no higher than a 10% premium over the then-current book value of the shares”. After that there was nothing, until today — when Berkshire, with its very first first significant buyback, managed to break its own self-imposed constraint:

Berkshire Hathaway has purchased 9,200 of its Class A shares at $131,000 per share from the estate of a long-time shareholder. The Board of Directors authorized this purchase coincident with raising the price limit for repurchases to 120% of book value. Berkshire may purchase additional shares in the market or through direct offerings at no more than 120% of book value.

This smells. “The estate of a long-time shareholder” is clearly code for “an old friend of Warren’s”. When that person died, the estate clearly took the decision to liquidate the entire holding, possibly for fiscal-cliff-related reasons. (There’s a good chance that the taxes on estates and capital gains will rise substantially in 2013.) It’s possible that Berkshire was a little bit worried about the effect that the sale would have on the share price, but it’s unlikely: average volume in the stock is more than 56,000 shares per day, so selling 9,200 shares without moving the market much is pretty easy.

So there’s no particularly good reason why Berkshire should step in and make this purchase just to keep the market price smooth, especially when Buffett says he doesn’t pay much attention to short-term stock-price fluctuations anyway. And there’s definitely no good reason why this particular estate sale should be the catalyst for the Berkshire board breaking its own rules, and buying back its stock at levels far in excess of 110% of book value. (Book value is $111,718 per share, which means that the buyback price was just over 117% of book value.)

Finally, there’s no good reason why the buyback should have been done in this highly undemocratic manner. As we have seen, some $7.5 billion in Berkshire A shares change hands every day: Berkshire Hathaway, as a public company, made the decision many years ago that the stock market was the best place for its shares to trade. And yet, when it came to its first-ever stock buyback, Berkshire decided that it didn’t want to go to the stock market after all, and instead just did a bilateral side deal with the estate of a long-time shareholder.

Buybacks are considered a good thing, on the stock market, for three reasons. Firstly, they reduce the number of shares outstanding, which means that the value of the remaining shares goes up: the company is worth the same amount, so the value per share is higher. Secondly, they provide an extra bid in the market, which helps support and drive up the share price. And thirdly, they give shareholders the opportunity to sell their shares back to the company: if they want to sell where the company is buying, they have that option. And options are worth money.

Berkshire, with this buyback, achieved the first of those three reasons, but punted on the other two. It didn’t provide a bid in the market, and it didn’t give its shareholders that lovely marginal option of selling their shares to the company rather than to the traders who are in and out of the market every day. Instead, it decided to give special treatment to a single long-term shareholder.

The whole point of the stock market is that shares are fungible, and that all shareholders are equal. Berkshire has violated that principle today, for no good reason — while also breaking its self-imposed discipline of only buying back shares if the price is below 110% of book value. If you’re going to do a buyback, this is pretty much the worst way to do it.

Update: Apparently I shouldn’t trust Yahoo Finance, and when it reports volumes in BRK-A, it’s actually overstating them by a factor of 100. i.e., when it says 90,800 shares were traded yesterday, in fact that means that 908 shares were traded yesterday. Sorry.

Update 2: Ben Berkowitz correctly points out that this is Berkshire’s second buyback. It previously bought back $67.5 million of its shares from September 2011-December 2011 and disclosed the repurchase in its 10-K.

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Among the many conventional wisdom fixes in the latest reports on the fiscal cliff negotiations: raising the eligibility age for Medicare.

Combine the costs of Medicare with Medicaid expenses for the poor and, as one professor said, you’ve got “pretty much the entire ball game” of US debt. “Government spending on medical expenditures outstripped revenues by $775 billion, which represents 58% of the 2011 Federal deficit,” Robert Dittmar calculated.

But the mention of a raising the Medicare eligibility age has drawn an outcry from economists and policy wonks. For that, you can blame, well, math. Raising the cut-off for Medicare to 67 from 65 would save the US government $5.7 billion in 2014, but would increase total health care costs by $11.4 billion, including higher costs for employers and states. Worse, it could raise premiums by some 3%. And, though the CBO says the move could save the government $148 billion over 10 years, it would have an outsized effect on the less educated, minorities, and the bottom 50%, who, unlike the well-off, have seen almost no increase in life expectancy in the last 30 years. In Duncan Black’s words: “it will cost money, not save money, and also kill people”.

Matt Yglesias calls this “an absurd means of saving the federal government money—akin to raising $12 billion in taxes and then setting half the money on fire. The only people who actually benefit from this shift are health care providers who get to charge higher prices to 65- and 66-year-olds.” Ezra Klein wonders if policymakers have “a kind of elite blindness” to the idea that some people — poorer people, especially — don’t like to work. Making people wait longer for Medicare, he writes, would address exactly none of America’s truly crucial healthcare problems:

It doesn’t modernize the system or bend the cost curve. It doesn’t connect to any coherent theory of health reform, like increasing Medicare’s bargaining power, increasing competition in Medicare, ending fee-for-service medicine, or learning which treatments work and which don’t.

Klein’s preferred age-related approach, from Ezekiel Emanuel, would tie of Medicare eligibility to lifetime earnings. — Ryan McCarthy 

On to today’s links:

Long Reads
E.Coli, antibiotic resistance and heart attacks: Inside the modern beef industry – Kansas City Star

Liebor
Three men arrested in Libor manipulation investigation – Dealbook

Housing
It should really be possible for middle-class families to afford decent-sized houses in places like Brooklyn – Matt Yglesias

Milestones
New Yorkers’ miserable lives reach record length – Mike Bloomberg

Regulations
The unsurprising winners and losers of right-to-work laws – Brad Plumer

Investigations
HSBC will pay a record $1.92 billion to settle charges that it laundered money for Iran and drug cartels – Dealbook
HSBC got the bank equivalent of a stiff speeding ticket – Tim Fernholz

Popular Myths
No, risky mortgage lending didn’t cause the financial crisis – Noah Smith

Oxpeckers
Adventures in absent fact-checking, Buzzfeed edition – The Oatmeal
Why we won’t have tablet-native journalism – Felix

Quotable
MBA expenses: expensive dinners and “traveling to ski resorts over long weekends” – Forbes

Contrarian
Peter Peterson, failure – Dave Weigel

Good Luck With That
Fareed Zakaria’s grand fiscal bargain: end the war on terror – WaPo

Data Points
The alarming decline of Jedi Knights in England and Wales – Guardian

Time to Panic
America’s milk industry is in crisis – WSJ

New Normal
A rising number of active duty soldiers are too obese to serve – WaPo

Blake Gopnik has an excellent piece on the art bubble in the latest Newsweek (where he was sadly laid off last week), which has been met by a predictable rubbishing from Marion Maneker. Both men agree on the symptoms: prices unrelated to quality, and artists who can go from hot to not in a very short amount of time. But they disagree on what those symptoms mean: Gopnik thinks that they mean “today’s contemporary market is due to deflate”, while Maneker sees art-market ups and downs as just part of what happens in any healthily-functioning market, and nothing to get particularly excited about.

The point that I think Maneker misses — and that he consistently misses in his attacks on people who are “complaining about the art market” — is that this particular market is qualitatively different from what you would consider a healthy market to be, not least because the prices are quantitatively completely bonkers. That was the main thrust of my Occupy Art post, and of the pieces by Dave Hickey and Sarah Thornton and Jerry Saltz and Charlie Finch that I linked to: markets, in general, are good and useful things. But sometimes they go crazy, and this is one of those times, and that’s a bad thing, not a good thing.

Collectively, we have managed to spark at least the hint of a debate — or, as Patricia Cohen describes it while quoting a slew of dealers and collectors at Art Basel Miami Beach, a “backlash against the backlash”. (One hint to people talking to the New York Times: saying things like “I’m grateful to Bugatti” is not likely to attract readers to your cause.) Debate is good! But I do still feel that everybody’s talking past each other. For instance: if the critics complain about the prices that some contemporary art is selling for, responding by saying “but other art is cheap”, as gazillionaires Don Rubell and Marc Glimcher do in Cohen’s article, does seem to miss the point.

Similarly, saying “look, some art is going down in value”, as Maneker gleefully did in November, also misses the point. Yes, Damien Hirsts are worth less today than they were in 2008. That was entirely predictable (I called the top of the Hirst market exactly when it happened), and it’s entirely in line with the way in which Hirst has graduated himself out of the art market and into the luxury-goods market. As I said in March, Hirsts have not been a speculative investment since 2008, and the fact that Hirsts are dropping in value does not, to use Maneker’s word, “confound” those of us who have a beef with the upper levels of the contemporary-art market.

Rather, what is uniquely troubling about today’s contemporary art market are two things: absolute values and relative values. Gopnik runs down a list which could have dozens of different names:

A Richard Prince “nurse,” hung amid Picassos and Miros, selling for $6.5 million; a Damien Hirst “medicine cabinet” priced at $4 million; Julie Mehretu squiggles, barely a decade old, for $2.6 million—all for sale at Art Basel, and all with prices so high they are bound to crash-land…

An unproven artist such as Wade Guyton, now showing at the Whitney Museum in New York, can fetch more than a legend of pop art like Richard Artschwager, on view downstairs from Guyton’s work.

These numbers are scarily high in absolute terms, and relative to anything you might want to name: Old Masters, vintage cars, four-bedroom houses. And there’s real delusion behind them. In a passage which didn’t make it into the final version of Gopnik’s article, he writes:

The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value ­­- on the idea that you buy art not because of its price (because of how much others might want to pay for it) but because of some real cultural worth that it represents. “We would not be mistaken for taking Richter’s abstractions as retroactively analogous with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, or Yves Klein,” says the auction text for a glitzy, record-setting abstraction by Gerhard Richter ­- a genius figurative painter whose abstract work could be mistaken for mall-gallery schlock. The auction copy for Koons’s $34 million “Tulips” compares the sculpture to a Brancusi and says that Koons has “tapped into the canon of the history of art by taking flowers as his subject for this still life colossus, introducing ideas of the memento mori as well as romance and beauty.” Yet if these judgments about cultural worth turn out to be wrong, then so is any big price they bolster.

The real forces driving the seven- and eight-figure prices in the contemporary market are not art-historical importance, so much as what Gopnik characterizes as the souk-like atmosphere surrounding both fairs and auction houses — the places where most big-ticket contemporary art is now sold, and places where the act of spending money is more important than the art it’s being spent on. Maneker is absolutely right about this: “Of course it’s not about the art,” he writes. “An auction is an event about the buyers, not the art.” And exactly the same thing can be said about an event like Art Basel Miami Beach — an event where Kelly Crow’s curtain-raiser can include this photo caption:

New York artist Wade Guyton earned a reputation for using a large inkjet printer to create images of the letter ‘U.’

Those “U” panels now sell for upwards of $200,000 apiece, brand new, and one early X painting recently sold for $782,500.

Without art-historical importance, there’s no way that these artworks are going to hold their value for more than a few years. And even with art-historical importance, there’s no reason why they should cost orders of magnitude more than art which genuinely has stood the test of time. As Sean Kelly tells Gopnik, you can buy 10 or 20 Marcel Duchamps for the price of one Jeff Koons, which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

To quote Herb Stein, if something can’t go on forever, it won’t. And as Gopnik says, “someone, someday, will be left holding the bag”. Narrowly, that group of people will be the collectors who are currently spending obscene sums on churned-out artwork: it just doesn’t make sense to drop millions of dollars on a Christopher Wool, say, when no one has a clue how many thousands of the things there are in existence. More broadly, however, the bursting of the bubble is likely to mean a very nasty recession across the whole of the art world, causing serious damage to a slew of curators, gallerists, artists, museum professionals, and other non-rich people. Spectacular busts are born of overconfidence, of the idea that this time is different. And the signs of overconfidence are hard to miss:

Every time you thought the world was ending,” Kelly says, “this market has confounded that prediction.” After 9/11, he asked himself, “Who’s ever going to buy art again?” only to discover that his clients were more eager than ever to nest at home with precious things.

A crash of the market’s biggest players might still bring everyone down, but Kelly feels that today’s art world has probably—probably—become such a broad river, as he puts it, that a whirlpool in one place might not disturb currents elsewhere. (Every gallerist I spoke to insisted that the market for their particular, singularly talented artists was bound to be stable, even if their colleagues were clearly at risk—precisely the kind of bulletproof thinking that’s typical of boom times.) This fall, Kelly almost quadrupled the size of his gallery; our interview ended so he could vet yet another applicant to his growing staff.

Sean Kelly has for decades been one of the most respected gallerists in New York, with a small space showing beautiful, austere work at high-but-not-bonkers prices. His shows are often curated better than those at major museums, and he has neatly sidestepped the trendy in favor of the timeless. Until now. Kelly clearly can’t sustain that modest practice any more: the art market has become a world of “go big or go home”, and Kelly now represents glitzy and trendy artists like Terence Koh and Kehinde Wiley. When even Sean Kelly can no longer resist the gravitational pull exerted by the weight of money chasing shiny objects, and instead sounds like Ben Bernanke circa March 2007, then that’s a sign that the whole art market has become hollow at the core, in a way it never used to be. Like all hollow things, bubbles included, it’s liable to implode at any time.

Greece’s bond buyback has succeeded, after a fashion. There weren’t enough bids by the original deadline of Friday, but then the offer was extended and two things happened. First, Greece’s banks bowed to the inevitable and tendered all of their bonds, rather than just most of them. And second, the Greek government made its most explicit default threat yet:

Stelios Papadopoulos, the head of the Public Debt Management Agency, stated “We have decided to extend the Invitation to offer Designated Securities for exchange to 11 December 2012. Holders that have not tendered so far can still take advantage of the liquidity opportunity offered by the Invitation. Investors should bear in mind that even if Greece accepts all bonds tendered in the Invitation, it will continue to engage with its official sector creditors in considering further steps to put its debt on a sustainable path. Future measures may not involve an opportunity to exit investments in Designated Securities at the levels offered for this buy back.”

In English: you can hold on to your bonds and hope to get paid out in full, if you want — rather than accepting 33 cents on the dollar right now. But be aware: Greece has to do what its official-sector paymasters tell it to do. And if it takes “further steps to put its debt on a sustainable path”, who knows how much money you might end up with when it’s all over. Are you sure you don’t want to just take those 33 cents?

Joseph Cotterill makes a good point: with the Greek banks now having been taken out of their bonds, the low-lying fruit for any future restructuring offer is now gone, which means that in any future restructuring, Greece is going to be dealing with hard-nosed hedge funds rather than complaisant domestic banks. That said, Greece might conceivably now have a nuclear option in its back pocket: the comments to Cotterill’s post are full of speculation that Greece might be able to find a way not to cancel the bonds its buying back. In which case it could use its new supermajority vote to cram down a very bad deal indeed on any holdouts.

All of which is to say that this buyback deal is increasingly feeling a lot like a second default, just months after the first one. It’s good for the optics of Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio, and it doesn’t seem to be triggering any CDS. But it’s a useful lesson for any other European countries (Ireland and Portugal are the obvious next candidates) who are thinking about restructuring their private debts. You don’t necessarily need to do the whole deal at once: especially if you are clever in your use of collective action clauses, you can start with a small and insufficient haircut, and then follow it up with a second restructuring a bit further down the road. If your creditors are largely domestic banks, that could work out much better than socking them with one-off monster losses.

Last week, when the Daily died, I declared that the reason, in part, was that tablet-native journalism was impossible. And I got a lot of rather vehement pushback, including some smart commentary from John Gruber, taking the other side of the argument.

That most existing iPad magazine apps are slow, badly-designed, can’t search, etc. does not mean iPad magazine apps cannot be fast, well-designed, and searchable. Salmon says “This wasn’t The Daily’s fault” but he’s 180 degrees wrong. All of these problems were entirely The Daily’s fault.

All impossible tasks have not been accomplished; but not all tasks that have not yet been accomplished are impossible. When it comes to media, what strikes many as The Daily’s cardinal sin is eschewing the open Web for the closed garden of a subscriber-only iOS app. The idea being that you can’t win without a web-first strategy. But that’s what “everyone” said about social networks too — until Instagram came along and became a sensation with an iPhone-only strategy.

I’ve since talked about this issue at some length, with both David Jacobs of 29th Street Publishing — someone who specializes in developing iPad-native apps — and with Ben Jackson, another one of my critics. And I still think that tablet-native journalism is an idea which isn’t going to take off any time soon.

Gruber’s point, which Jackson also made, is that you can’t tar an entire platform with a few bad apps. Maybe The Daily was bad; maybe lots of Condé Nast apps are bad; maybe the people selling ads on iPad apps are responsible for degrading the experience of using them so as to maximize ad revenues. But in theory, all of these problems can be overcome — and in fact, in practice, many of the problems I cited in my post have already been overcome, at least by one or two publishers. (For instance, the Businessweek app does have search, and the NYT app will let you start reading stories before the whole thing has downloaded.)

Be that as it may be, however, no one’s been able to convince me that there even is such a thing as tablet-native journalism, let alone that it has any chance of really taking off.

Certainly there’s lots of journalism which appears on tablets, and sometimes even exclusively on tablets. The Magazine, from Marco Arment, is the most cited, but one might also point to (what’s left of) Newsweek, where something called Newsweek Global “will be supported by paid subscription” and available on tablets. In both cases, however, the main reason for moving to the tablet seems to be revenue-related: it’s just vastly easier to charge for subscriptions on a tablet than it is on the web, and Newsweek needs to have a subscription product, to prevent itself from being forced to refund all the money it’s already been paid by print subscribers.

And if The Magazine is really the best thing we’ve found so far in the tablet-journalism space, that’s pretty depressing. For one thing, there’s pretty much zero journalism in it; it’s mostly first-person essays by Marco’s friends. And then there’s the fact that it deliberately abjures all the clever things that the iPad can do, opting instead for a very clean and simple interface: what Craig Mod calls “subcompact publishing”.

Subcompact publishing helps in terms of making great writing immersive: there are no distractions, just text (and maybe the occasional link or illustration) on a white background. Once you get lost in the story, the medium becomes invisible, just like all great storytellers should. It’s taking journalism and doing to it much the same thing that Readability does, or Apple’s “Reader” button in Safari. But when all you have is text, the journalism itself isn’t really tablet-native: it doesn’t shape itself to the contours of the medium in the way that radio journalism does to radio, or TV journalism does to TV, or tabloid-magazine journalism does to tabloid magazines. You’re basically left with a high-tech means of reading the kind of thing which could have been written centuries ago.

But Jacobs makes a good point: if you look at these publications at the story level, you’re missing something very important. Jacobs has worked on apps for websites like Gothamist and the Awl, where the content in the app is exactly the same as the free content on the website, but the way that content is presented is different in important ways. Websites need to be fresh and constantly-updated; apps can be a bit more curated. And importantly what’s not there makes a big difference: one of the great things about The Magazine is that each issue is an easily-digestible length.

Marco has a lot of information, from Instapaper, about the stories people like to read on their tablets, and specifically how long the sweet spot is. Each issue of The Magazine, or the Awl’s Weekend Companion, is much shorter than the daunting downloads one might get from The Daily or Wired or Businessweek. These smaller apps are not trying to present everything; they’re acting as real editors, and serving up something much more digestible. In the case of the Awl, the value ($4 per month) is actually in the way that the editors have subtracted a huge amount of the content available on the website. Similarly, Matter publishes just one article at a time, and doesn’t even force you to use its own app: you can call it up online and then read it using Instapaper, if you like.

So my feeling is that insofar as tablet journalism is going to have any success in the foreseeable future, you’re not going to see it in elaborate downloads with glossy production values. Jackson made this point: every time someone demonstrates ability in putting together great, intuitive iOS applications, they tend to be hired (or acqu-hired) very quickly by some big company like Facebook or Google. Radio journalists know how to edit radio shows, and TV producers can put together TV shows, but there are basically no journalists who can produce an iOS app to tell the stories they want to tell, and the coders they might conceivably work with, as part of a team, tend not to work for news-media organizations.

Instead, we’re going to see universal journalism, which can be accessed — and possibly edited — in different ways on different devices. It might be free on the web, for instance, while costing a couple of bucks in the form of a simple iOS app. Maybe it will only be available on iOS, but for business-model reasons, not because it couldn’t work on the web. Or maybe, as in the case of Matter, it will be available in any format you like, for a single flat price.

I’m quite excited about what Ev is doing at Medium, in terms of creating a new and intuitive way of writing online — it’s long past time that we managed to move away from the evil tyranny of Word. And then, once a Medium post has been created, it looks great on any device. That’s the future, I think: write once, look great anywhere. Rather than anything tablet-specific.

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The thing about Too Big to Fail financial firms is that they tend to be Too Big to Fail in several countries at once. Hence, the “shared strategy” laid out in a new joint paper from of the FDIC and the Bank of England that aims to protect taxpayers from paying for the rescue of gigantic multinational corporations.

Even if it’s just a set of principles, any sort of action on cross-border resolution has been a long time coming. As Simon Johnson has pointed out, the IMF has been pushing for at least a decade for some method of unwinding international financial firms.

The new strategy, summarized in this FT op-ed, has some clear improvements over crisis-era handling of TBTF firms. The company’s home regulator would take control of the firm (lucky them), shareholders and unsecured creditors would be forced to take losses (slow clap), and senior management would be removed (rousing applause). Liquidity would be parceled out by regulators to newly spun-off divisions and any taxpayer losses could be recovered from the financial sector — though it’s not quite clear how.

The FDIC-BoE approach — like this 2010 IMF proposal — also calls for something like a Pause button for derivatives contracts; a “stay of termination rights” would temporarily prevent counterparties from being paid out after a TBTF firm fails.

Regulators are taking another welcome step to protect taxpayers from TBTF: enforcing existing regulations on foreign companies. Shahien Nasiripour and Brooke Masters pick up on a recent speech by the Fed’s Daniel Tarullo which suggests regulators may soon force foreign subsidiaries to actually obey local capital requirements. The idea is to keep banks’ subsidiaries from posing a risk to domestic taxpayers. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, apparently isn’t happy about this:

 “If that is the new strategy among regulators, it really throws into question this whole globalisation of these firms,” he said at a conference last week. “It also means each country for themselves. I wouldn’t call it a trade war, but I would certainly call it a high level of protectionism.”

None of this is going to be easy, especially if more than one TBTF firm fails at once. As one former Fed regulator said last year: “Citibank is a $1.8 trillion company, in 171 countries with 550 clearance and settlement systems”. Try resolving that in the middle of a crisis. — Ryan McCarthy

On to today’s links:

Liebor
The EU is expected to accuse multiple banks of fixing LIBOR’s “lesser known cousin” – WSJ

Tax Arcana
Google saves about $2 billion per year using Bermuda tax shelters – Jesse Drucker

Billionaire Whimsy
3 people say Bloomberg is pondering buying the “bisque-colored” FT – NYT

The Singularity
The Robot Economy and the new rentier class – Izabella Kazminska

Hard Landings
China is the world’s new Rust Belt as it faces “decades of de-industrialization” – Forbes
On the other hand, China’s factory output just hit an 8-month high – Reuters

Wonks
Goldman’s top economist talks about the coming US rebound – Joe Weisenthal

Failure
The world’s deadliest road got even worse when the World Bank stepped in – Guardian

Your Retirement Plans
“Work is wage slavery and…retirement is freedom” – Stumbling and Mumbling

Cartography
Where the pirates are – Business Insider

Awesome
Paul Krugman on Isaac Asimov and the promise of social science – Guardian

Wonks
Chinese corruption in a (US) historical context – Tyler Cowen

Old Normal
When the US Army settled labor disputes – Bloomberg

Alpha
“The best-case scenario for bonds is the worst-case scenario for stocks” – Whitebox Advisors

Charts
The labor force is shrinking because of demographics – Calculated Risk

New Normal
“Sperm counts are plummeting across the industrialised world” – Economist

Apple
Apple’s new map system sends travelers to Australian National Park instead of city – Victoria Police News

Revealed
The secret sex of cheese – Molecular Love

As Henry Blodget realizes, the most interesting part of the latest speculation about Bloomberg buying the FT is buried en passant:

Factions within his company have argued that it would be smarter to buy a digital property, pointing to the Web site LinkedIn as an example.

As Blodget also notes, this isn’t really an either/or choice: the price tag for LinkedIn would be so gargantuan that it would make very little difference whether Bloomberg also bought the FT or not. But a billion dollars — the much bandied-about price tag on the FT — is still a large enough sum that anybody paying such a price has to have a pretty clear strategic reason for doing so. And if you’re going to start putting serious money against a strategic vision, then it makes sense to be very clear what that strategy is, and what it isn’t.

The purchase of the FT would basically be a soft-power move. Bloomberg has a stated aim of becoming “the world’s most influential news organization”, and the FT would be a helpful fill-in acquisition on the road to that goal. Bloomberg’s influence started in the financial markets, but the company has become more ambitious than that, so it’s investing other ways of reaching important people who might not have any need or desire to spend $20,000 a year on a Bloomberg terminal. And the investment in news outside the Bloomberg wire is paying off: Bloomberg TV got the first Obama interview after the election, for instance, while Bloomberg Businessweek had that juicy interview with Tim Cook.

Still, the FT is a news product, which would fit within the broader Bloomberg News operation, and wouldn’t really alter the mission or the economics of the company as a whole. Bloomberg makes its money selling terminals to Wall Street, and it sells those terminals as a one-stop shop for everything you need, from the Lebanese yield curve to the flight schedule between Rio de Janeiro and Santiago de Chile. One of the things that Bloomberg subscribers want is high-quality news, and thus was Bloomberg News born: its first job is always to give the terminal subscribers the news they’re demanding.

Buying LinkedIn, by contrast, would involve moving far beyond the terminal and into a much bigger world. Bloomberg’s business has — somewhat amazingly — not yet been disrupted by the internet. To the contrary, Bloomberg has been able to piggyback on the bandwidth revolution, and can now sell terminals in Riyadh as easily as it can in London. But there’s a limit to how many people are willing and able to spend $20,000 a year on an information terminal, especially given how much richness of information can be found on the internet for free. And Bloomberg is running up against that limit. Which means that the company is faced with a choice: either continue to reap the spectacular dividends from the existing franchise, or else try and grow, somehow, beyond the confines of the terminal.

If Bloomberg opts for growth (and there’s no reason why it should, given that it’s not a public company), then it’s easy to see why LinkedIn could be a very smart way of getting there. In the beginning, traders got Bloomberg terminals because of the unrivaled fixed-income analytics. But for many years now the terminal’s killer app has been its messaging product, which alone is worth $20,000 a year to many if not most of Bloomberg’s subscribers.

More than five years ago I was describing Bloomberg as “the world’s first social-networking billionaire”. With apologies for quoting myself:

Bloomberg invented social networking before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. Bloomberg LP was founded in 1981, and Bloomberg saw very early on the huge potential of two-way information flows. Rather than just sending information to his clients, he would allow them to ask specific questions and get immediate answers. Once that was possible, it was relatively easy to allow them to message each other. Long before email really took off, Bloomberg messages were regularly flying all over Wall Street, both within firms and between them.

At the center of it all was an open directory of pretty much everybody on the Street. Everybody had his own page on Bloomberg, could be found very easily, and could communicate equally easily with anybody else on the system, bypassing the phone calls and layers of secretaries which had previously intermediated the conversation. It wasn’t long until a Bloomberg became as necessary as a telephone as a tool for keeping in touch. And even today, long after every firm has opened its systems up to the internet and email, many research notes and messages continue to be sent out on Bloombergs instead.

Since then, however, the social-networking world has exploded, even as the Bloomberg network hasn’t. The astonishing rise of Facebook and LinkedIn show the power of network effects: everybody’s on them because everybody’s on them, while attempts to build smaller, more “exclusive” networks invariably fail. Bloomberg might have been the first social network, but it shunned rather than embraced the open internet, and today it’s in pretty much the same place it was in five years ago: extremely profitable, but with limited growth potential.

The acquisition of LinkedIn would be a clear declaration that Bloomberg had its eye on more than just the people with $20,000/year terminal budgets, and was interested in reaching the professional world more broadly. LinkedIn has not taken off as a messaging medium in the way that Bloomberg did, but in many ways it’s the closest thing there is to Bloomberg Messenger for the rest of us. Bloomberg knows, on a deep institutional level, how professionals network and message each other; LinkedIn has a network which dwarfs Bloomberg’s. The two together could be a formidable combination.

That said, I don’t think LinkedIn would be worth the money, for Bloomberg. If you’re thinking of acquiring a company, the first question to ask is how much it would cost to build something similar yourself. And if Bloomberg wanted to port its network over to the internet, so that it was available to people who don’t subscribe to the terminal, the benefits could be similar while the cost (including any drop in terminal subscriptions) would surely be much lower.

Pricing would be tough; I suspect that Bloomberg would want to charge something reasonably substantial for the service, positioning it somewhere in between LinkedIn, which is free, and the terminal. The trick would be to make it expensive enough that current Bloomberg subscribers wouldn’t need to worry about getting constantly spammed by random nobodies. Maybe that’s not possible: maybe the universe of Bloomberg subscribers is the maximum size that an open network, where everybody is connected to everybody else, can get. At some point, surely, spam starts becoming a problem.

But surely it’s inevitable that Bloomberg’s social network will make its way onto the internet at some point, somehow. When that happens, it will become an immediate and obvious competitor to LinkedIn. And if LinkedIn is worried about that potential competition, maybe it should be receptive to any overtures it receives.

This is a bit odd. Last month, Lettie Teague had lunch with Robert Parker, and asked the questions on everybody’s mind: “Was Parker planning to retire? Did he have a replacement? Was he selling the Wine Advocate?”

Parker told Teague that he had no intention of retiring, nor of selling:

Parker said he has entertained offers to buy his newsletter over the years, including three from “hedge-fund guys,” but so far he has refused them all, in part because he would not relinquish editorial control of the newsletter.

Today, however, Teague is back, this time in the pages of the WSJ. And it seems very much that Parker has sold the Wine Advocate after all — to a shadowy group of investors in Singapore, no less. What’s more, he’s relinquishing that editorial control as well: he’s “turning over editorial oversight to his Singapore-based correspondent, Lisa Perrotti-Brown”.

Nothing about this deal makes any sense, on its face. The new owners are going to start accepting advertising — something which makes sense financially, since those 50,000 subscribers tend to be extremely well-heeled. But at the same time, they’re scrapping the print version of the newsletter,* despite the fact that (a) it’s profitable, and (b) they would surely be able to charge much higher rates for print ads than for online ads.

The new owners also have no experience either in wine or in publishing: Parker says that they’re “young visionaries” in the financial-services and IT fields, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Their vision is, to say the least, a big jump from TWA’s current incarnation:

More than four out of five Wine Advocate subscribers are American, but the new investors are planning an abbreviated Southeast Asian edition aimed at corporate clients like airlines and luxury hotels.

The newsletter also will put more emphasis Asia’s nascent wine industry. Ms. Perrotti-Brown plans to hire a new correspondent likely to be based in China.

“The correspondent will cover wines produced in China, Thailand and other Asian countries,” she said, and will help to produce tasting events, another focus of the new Wine Advocate.

Corporate clients? Chinese wine? Tasting events? These are huge new steps for TWA — and, contra Teague, much bigger steps than the decision to accept advertising. I don’t think there’s any good way of rating Chinese wines: either the scores will be low, thereby annoying the very customers they’re supposed to appeal to, or they will be high, and ruin TWA’s reputation for impartiality among its 40,000 US subscribers. There might come a day when China produces world-class wines, but that day has not yet come, and no one knows that better than Robert Parker and Lisa Perrotti-Brown.

As for tasting events, you can’t run those without having a business relationship with winemakers. Perrotti-Brown tells Teague that “no winery or wine-related business will be allowed to advertise,” but there’s not really any need for them to advertise, if they can simply underwrite a grand wine-tasting event instead. Having your wines featured at a Wine Advocate tasting event is the best marketing any winery can hope for, and they will be very willing to pay top dollar for the privilege.

Parker himself will retain the title of Chairman, and will continue to review his beloved Bordeaux and Rhone wines, but none of this seems like the action of a man who wants to preserve his legacy. Robert Parker is the Wine Advocate — and now he’s handing his baby over to a group of people he won’t even name, but who will probably eviscerate everything he stands for? He told Teague he was presented with “a plan he couldn’t refuse”, but I can’t imagine what that might be. He’s never been a profit-maximizer, but he’s managed to become rich all the same; it’s hard to see how a large check alone would have sealed the deal.

I suspect that in coming days and weeks there will be further shoes to drop; quite possibly, this deal won’t end up closing at all. But if it does, and if TWA does indeed move to Singapore, then that will only serve to accelerate the backlash against Parker’s palate which has been gathering steam for some time now. What’s bad for TWA could be very healthy for the wine industry as a whole: if it is no longer particularly beholden to one man, it can branch out into making more heterogeneous and individualistic wines. The idea that a 95-point wine is always better than an 85-point wine is an idea which deserves to die. And this deal, with luck, might just hasten its demise.

Update: Parker now tweets that he’s not scrapping the print edition after all. And if you were missing a hint of squid in your wine, here’s Adam Lechmere:

Decanter.com understands that agents acting for the critic have been approaching high-net-worth individuals in Asia since the early part of the year.
All those contacted have denied any involvement and refused to speak on record, although one told Decanter.com he was approached by ‘current and former employees of Goldman Sachs’ with a business prospectus for ‘commercialisation of the Parker brand.’