At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.
Here are the twelve stores that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will order them simply by month.
January: Brick and mortar retail. A bankruptcy court judge offered Lambert, the man behind the chief institutional owner of Sears, another chance at avoiding the liquidation of that august institution. (Update -- Lambert would get that chance, but wouldn't make it stick. By end of year liquidation was well advanced.)
February: Space exploration for profit. The Dutch organization, Mars One, entered bankruptcy. Why do I elevate that fact to the unutterable prestige suggested by putting it on this list? Because it suggests the narrowness of the line that now separates reasonable business plans from fantasy/fraud. Mars One had planned to create the first human settlement on Mars. Or it was just pretending to plan for such a settlement in order to bilk starry-eyed investors. Your call.
March: Consolidation of entertainment/content. Disney acquires (much of) Murdoch's empire creating an unprecedented global 'content powerhouse' where Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, and baby Yoda test the idea of synergy.
April: Economic sanctions as war short of war. US announcement re: Iran tightened sanctions against that country, sanctions that either are or are not designed to produce regime change. It would become ever more difficult to tell what the end game of this trade war is, as the year proceeded.
May: Brexit and a broader unraveling of the EU. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Theresa May, announced her resignation. Brexit on the one hand and analogous anti-eurozone pressures in other nations in the group has been a bright thread running through the whole of the year, but May's resignation, appropriately occurring in the month that shares her surname, will do for the iconology of it. May had been an advocate of remaining in the EU, until the referendum. After the vote came out the other way, she became an opponent of any second referendum, and an advocate of implementing that decision. She thought she could ride this political tiger but eventually it threw her off its back.
June: Aerospace Consolidation. United Technologies, a conglomerate headquartered in Hartford, CT, known for jet engines and elevators, merged with Raytheon, the producer of guided missiles and other gee-whiz stuff, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Southern New England leads the world in aerospace -- which is appropriate, since Robert Goddard was born in Worcester.
July: East Africa. The alpha belongs to the brave. There is money to be made selling tech in East Africa. Airtel Africa reported this month its profit number from the first quarter of 2019 which, it turns out, is more than twice the number from 1Q 2018. Airtel Africa is backed by Softbank, Warburg Pincus, and Temasek.
August: Currency Manipulation. A report from the IMF effectively (though with polite indirection) denies that the People's Republic of China has been manipulating its currency over the past year. The indirection is polite because the US Treasury takes the contrary view. The IMF sees the value of the yuan as pulled down by market pressures, the central bank is allowing the slide those pressures suggest. The US Treasury sees the drop in the yuan as a dirty trick.
September: Retail Gun/Ammo Sales. Walmart announces that it will no longer sell ammunition for handguns or for certain assault weapons in its stores. This is a modest step forward for those who would want to stigmatize the whole industry, in the manner in which the tobacco industry was successfully stigmatized by the end of the last century. (Though tobacco, it is well to note, remains profitable.)
October: Anti-Terrorism Admonitions to 'Follow the Money.' A global and anti-money-laundering body, the FATF, is taking action against Pakistan, through which a lot of dirty terrorist $ $ is funneled. The Financial Action Task Force, established in 1989, received an expanded mandate from the member nations in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. Pakistan is on what is known as the FATF Grey List. This is not as severe an action as membership on the Black List with North Korea and Iran, but it does render difficult the receipt of various sorts of multilateral assistance, and it hurts the credit rating from agencies such as S&P or Moodys. Pakistan has been on the Grey List for some time -- it had hoped to escape that status, but at a meeting in mid October, the FATF extended its stay there.
November: Private Equity. An astute article in the Financial Times observes that the value of stakes in private equity funds has exploded this year. In the twittersphere, this raises a debate over whether there is actually a "liquidity discount" rather than a premium.
December: Saudi Aramco's IPO. This turned out to be a long and a more complicated project than desired. The Saudi bigwigs were working all year to pull it off. But in the end, they did get the market demand necessary to validate their valuation. As an ironic twist, I will note that the IPO occurred on the same day that Time announced its Person of the Year. Why is this irony? Because the POTY was a young climate-change activist known for her demands that the industrial world shift immediately away from dependence on fossil fuels. The investors in this IPO were registering their belief that the world will continue to burn fossil fuels for some time yet.
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