From the abstract, the paper’s argument looks to be entirely different and reaches different conclusions than a Marxian TRPF argument. This paper claims that net profit margins have increased over the past few decades (which is certainly true at least for S&P 500 companies) and that the increase is mostly driven by lower interest expense and lower corporate taxes. If interest rates and tax rates can’t or won’t fall any further, then they won’t provide a tailwind to margins, and so corporate profits will grow much more slowly (not necessarily decline!) over the next few decades.
Marxian economists generally speak of the TRPF as a decline in return on invested capital, which doesn’t come into play in this paper at all AFAICT, but they also have a bad habit of confusing ROIC with profit margins, which is what the paper is all about.
I think Jack Welch deserves a share of the blame as well—if you had to attribute GE’s fall to one thing (which you shouldn’t), it would probably be the funding crisis at GE Capital when they couldn’t roll their commercial paper at the height of the GFC. Jack loved GE Capital because it was the perfect cookie jar to reach into when he needed another penny or two of EPS to hit the Street consensus; just realize a capital gain somewhere in Capital, and voila, you’ve met your number again. But of course the article doesn’t discuss the financial crisis at all, or for that matter anything that happened during Jack’s tenure or the first half of Jeff Immelt’s. Or any non-Energy/now Vernova business lines.
It's an interesting thought experiment for how Jack would handle the financial crises. I don't think it would play out in the same way. Maybe I'm too much of a fan boy, but Jack would have seen the writing on the wall far sooner than Jeff and had more time to pivot.
Maybe so, but I think the actual problem was too much of a black swan. There were certainly executives who voiced concerns about the asset side of Capital’s balance sheet and were vindicated in the crisis; Jack might have listened to them better than Jeff did. But I don’t think anyone really even considered the idea that you wouldn’t be able to find buyers for the commercial paper of a AAA-rated issuer pretty much until it was happening.
That said, there were outside commentators who’d raised questions about GE’s liquidity in the 2000s (notably Bill Gross) which did get Immelt and co. to term out some of GE’s debt. Maybe Jack would have been foresighted enough to do more. But that would have hit earnings (you’d pay a higher interest rate on longer term debt), so it would have been a tough sell, I think.
It’s doubly confusing because the decision protects the weak, helpless institutional investor while leaving the ruthless sharks that are retail clients to fend for themselves.
There is a whole world of securities law that’s hidden behind client attorney privilege that each client uses to protect themselves from the SEC (and DOJ), but basically nothing has been surprising about how the SEC has fumbled in the crypto cases or in what the courts have ruled
and of people familiar with this dimension of yet unchallenged securities case law, this has been one of the criticisms of the SEC:
Nothing the SEC does can accomplish investor protection in the crypto markets.
Nothing the SEC does can accomplish the mission Congress set for it, in the crypto markets.
There are ways to leverage blockchain transparency for real time disclosures far beyond what is seen in the stock market, and investors already have choices in sticking with offerings that leverage onchain transparency better. A concept of government can help standardize this approach to help capital formation.
SEC enforcement on the teams and exchanges will only harm investors in liquidity and price discovery. I would say that the SEC making itself known has improved the quality of crypto offerings, but there is still a far better approach possible.
> There is a whole world of securities law that’s hidden behind client attorney privilege that each client uses to protect themselves from the SEC (and DOJ)
The only point is that the SEC hasn’t done anything unpredictable in which offerings they’ve chosen to go after, despite calling all cryptos securities, nothing surprising about how judges have ruled when taken to trial
It’s based primarily on what the issuers have said
> It also doesn't really matter if a statement is provable in theory or not. Whether or not it's possible to prove that P?=NP, it is either true or it's false and it has always been either true or false, and one of those two programs is correct.
This is a pretty philosophically extremist statement (relying on a hardcore version of Platonism) and with my handle I can’t just let it stand unchallenged. :)
I’m actually somewhat more sympathetic to excluded middle for P?=NP than for some other statements, so let’s start elsewhere. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that the continuum hypothesis is, and always has been, either true or false. We know it’s independent of ZFC, of course, and there are sensible “extra” axioms that would resolve it in opposite directions (e.g. V=L vs. MM). In order to believe that there’s a fact of the matter you need to posit a very well-populated Platonic realm, despite not needing that kind of philosophical commitment to do mathematics.
Well, maybe P?=NP is just simpler than CH. It probably is! But you can imagine a case where it isn’t; e.g. if there exists an algorithm for 3-SAT (call it Algorithm A) which can be proved to be asymptotically optimal, and which runs in O(n^10^100) time if !CH, and exponential time if CH. Then the P?=NP question would be equivalent to CH, and you should have the same beliefs about its truth value. If you’re like me, that means you’re skeptical that it has a well-defined truth value “for all time” at all.
In that case, either of "return false" or "return true" are valid computable functions depending on the domain you're operating in (with CH or without it).
It's the same essentially as a function that returns true if any two lines will eventually intersect. The correct answer depends on whether you're in curved space or not. That the correct answer depends on the domain or axioms doesn't make it non computable.
There's just no case where a constant function isn't computable in the technical sense.
One thing that saddens me about the perceived necessity of new authors going on Twitter, BookTok, etc. to “build an audience” is that it seems to prevent anyone who wants to separate their literary life from their private life from ever again being supported by a publisher. Many authors over the years have felt the need to do this, for personal or professional reasons: J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, James Tiptree Jr., John le Carré, Joe Klein, Isabel Fall. I doubt that all those authors will be considered part of the canon in 100 years, and very possibly none of them will be, but I think the world would be poorer if they’d all been unable to become successful writers.
I don't know. This is sort of arguing that a world in which publishers were gatekeepers/PR agencies/etc. meant that authors could sort of hide behind that front--at the cost of putting their fate in the hands of their publisher.
But I'm not sure how widespread/true that ever was. Authors went on book tours and TV shows all the time to promote their writing. I'm not sure how common the pseudonymous/reclusive successful author ever was.
Ackman’s done a lot less (public) activism over the last few years than he used to. Other than Canadian Pacific I don’t think he’s launched a proxy fight at any of his current portfolio companies, and the CP thing was over a decade ago. He’s certainly heavily involved at Howard Hughes and RBI, but it’s pretty much impossible to go activist on Google.
Also, I don’t know why it would take a lot more people to talk to the company boards than to be passive investors?
I just think it's weird to frame the article around this stuff when Ackman's claim to fame has nothing to do picking stocks. It would be like writing an article on Jane Street's 13f holdings.
I’m not totally sure what you mean by “fully controlled”, but we make the system under test fully deterministic and then choose “save states” to randomly explore from; the upcoming SDK features are intended to give users more control over determining which save states are worth further exploration.
It’s briefly mentioned in a footnote here, but we have a lot of debugging war stories around the hypervisor protocol, many of which could themselves be blog posts. My personal favorite: we expected a certain hyperproperty related to determinism to hold during a refactor of the component on the other end of the hypervisor, but it was only holding some of the time, depending on the values of some parameters that were getting randomized during our testing. We dug in and figured out that, because we were round-robining across proposers of protocol messages into several pipelines, determinism held iff the number of proposers divided the number of pipelines or vice versa, and totally failed if they were coprime! If they had a smaller common factor greater than 1, there would be “partial determinism.” We very rarely ditch a suggested test property instead of trying to make it work, but that time we were defeated by number theory.
I don’t have a real strong view on this specific situation one way or the other but it’s relevant that the appeals courts pretty quickly threw out this suit and allowed Albertsons to pay the dividend.
Marxian economists generally speak of the TRPF as a decline in return on invested capital, which doesn’t come into play in this paper at all AFAICT, but they also have a bad habit of confusing ROIC with profit margins, which is what the paper is all about.
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