4 min read

2019-04-05 Links

Best Article of the year, so far || The purchase of the Cubs

“At no point in the tax-issues memo or in any of the Project North Side-related emails that hit Joe Ricketts’ inbox does anyone express any concerns that the Tribune’s scheme was immoral and legally dubious. The memo does mention that the IRS might take issue with the leveraged partnership, but only to assure the Ricketts that they would not be in danger of an audit, and that the Tribune would like to be indemnified should the Ricketts do anything that triggered a gains tax on the new partnership”

Pay and play

“The reality is that rich, successful people negotiate. (This is one important way in which they get — and stay — rich.) It is an all-day-every-day thing in much of the business world, which is where most rich people get their money.”

Adjacent to the Red Army?

“Even among peers on Wall Street, DE Shaw is still a largely unknown quantity. “They’re really smart, but I’ve never quite understood them,” says one quant hedge fund manager. “They are one of those places where you just don’t know exactly what [it is] they do, except that it is some mix of quantitative and discretionary investing.”"

Paper makes a comeback

“A 31-year-old turnaround expert from Chicago, Mr. Putzstuck always seems to be in motion, even when seated. He had worked on a failed mattress company, a refrigerator recycler and an oil-services company, but never a paper maker.”

No mo omerta

“This new tactic is unlikely to be limited to Mr. Guzmán’s trial. It touches on one of the fundamental rules of mafias the world over, that of omertà, to which occasional exceptions are not allowed. You can’t allow one snitch to go unpunished and then return to normal enforcement. Either snitches are always punished or, if they are not, the rules have been changed. If the world’s largest drug cartel were to begin tolerating snitching, it would lose all credibility in the eyes of associates and rivals — it would be chaos. That the son of a Sinaloa cartel boss has turned state’s witness, leaving both his father’s power and the cartel’s strength intact, means that a new rule has been born.”

Don’t knock it till you try it

“My biggest complaint is that our failure to tax the rich in a reasonably sensible way (by taxing high levels of consumption) will lead us to attempt to tax the rich in a highly inefficient and destructive fashion, say with a tax on capital income, and not even succeed in our objective.”

On a related tax note…What happens to the assets when you die?

“The client had plenty of money, but she couldn’t readily access it because some of the accounts were in her husband’s name alone and financial institutions often freeze single-owner accounts when a person dies”

Bank of Dad Experiences a Run, Exposes College Scandal

“Tobin’s fraud had begun a few years before, when he and some business partners launched a classic pump-and-dump stock scam, in which they fooled investors into paying inflated prices for shares in two companies secretly controlled by Tobin, according to a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

The hunt for the truth in a Turkish outpost

“This case is personal for us at The Post. Khashoggi was our colleague, and my friend for 15 years. To understand how his gruesome murder happened and whether it’s possible to rebuild the U.S.-Saudi relationship, I’ve interviewed more than a dozen knowledgeable American and Saudi sources, who revealed some previously secret details because they hope to establish new rules and accountability that might preserve the relationship. The sources requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.”

When you over insure, IPO style

“Yep, insurance is such a fundamental part of its business plan that it runs its own insurance subsidiary. Clearly not all expenses related to the real world of protecting tech bros from the streets of San Francisco can be arbed away.”

Yahoos meet Navigator, Then Hit Refresh

“By renouncing its venture capital status, it’ll be able to go deeper on riskier bets: If the firm wants to put $1 billion into cryptocurrency or tokens, or buy unlimited shares in public companies or from other investors, it can. And in doing so, the thinking goes, it’ll again make other firms feel like they have one hand tied behind their back.”