Streetwise Professor

When I was growing up, network TV was pretty much all there was, and summer was the time of re-runs.  The Trump-Russia collusion obsessives remind me of those old days, because currently they are re-running–and re-running–the Trump Tower meeting. This is in essence a re-run of a re-run, because this was a story about a year ago, when it was recounting events of a year before that–July, 2016.

So why do the Trumpophobes keep returning to this story, like a dog returning to its vomit?  Well, for one thing, the fact that they have to keep flogging this is proof positive that there have been absolutely no material developments on the collusion front, so they have to go back to this subject, presumably to barf it back up again so they have something to tide them through future lean times on the collusion beat.

That is, the necessity of recycling old news is proof positive that there is no new news.

It’s also incredibly amusing that they don’t recognize that the Trump Tower story not only does nothing to move the impeachment or indictment needle–it actually contradicts the collusion meme, and for a bonus implicates their beloved Hillary in a far more nefarious plot.

As I said from the time the story first broke: if the Trump campaign was hot to pursue over-the-transom offers of dirt on Hillary from marginal Russian figures, it could not have previously been a  party to a quid pro quo arrangement with Putin et al whereby the Russians hacked the Dems in exchange for some future benefit in the remote chance (as believed by everyone–including the Russians at the time) Trump won.  So if you believe the Trump Tower meeting matters, as a matter of logic you must acknowledge that allegations of a pre-existing agreement are false.  (Yes, I know–expecting logic from this lot is delusional!)

Moreover, the Trump team got nothing.  The promises of dirt were just bait to get a meeting for the Russians to yammer on about the Magnitsky Act and Bill Browder.  So at most the Trump team was guilty of bad intent.  But if getting dirt on the opposition from Russians is bad–or  even illegal–then Hillary and the Democrats are far more guilty than Trump.  They spent a large sum of money to hire Steele to gather dirt on Trump from Russian sources (still undisclosed–assuming they even exist).  Further, they actually received information, and shopped it around, with Steele eventually leaking to friendly journalists before the election.  And even worse, the Steele dossier was vectored to the FBI in an attempt to spark a counterintelligence operation, and perhaps criminal action, against Trump.  And even worse than that, in the spirit of reruns, the dossier was the centerpiece of an effort to kneecap the incoming president.

(Given the connections between the Russian in the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Fusion GPS–and hence Steele–there is also the possibility that the meeting was a setup.  I could speculate on who would have an interest in such a setup,  and the ability to set it in motion.  I leave that as an assignment for the class.)

Compare all that to a meeting that came to naught, and you must conclude that if the Trump Tower meeting was beyond the pale, the actions of the Hillary campaign were beyond the bounds of the Milky Way.  There was bad intent (by the Trumpophobe standards implicit in the hyperventilating about the Trump Tower meeting), and the intentions were realized (whereas that was not the case in the Trump Tower meeting).

Proverbs 26:11 reads: “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” I’m not a Bible quoter, as a rule, but in this case the proverb fits too well to pass up.  By repeatedly returning to the subject of the Trump Tower meeting, the Trumpohobe fools repeat their folly.  Over and over again.

Today on Twitter Elon Musk floated the possibility of taking Tesla private.  Perhaps coincidentally, it was revealed that the Saudis have accumulated a stake in Tesla worth a couple of billion.  Adding two and two, many have leaped to the conclusion that the Saudis will be in essence the private equity firm behind the deal, perhaps as part of some futuristic hedge against the end of oil.

As with all things Elon, look for the con.  Case in point.  He hyped the Tesla takeover of Solar City as the creation of a visionary vertically integrated clean energy company.  I saw it as a way of preventing an embarrassing bankruptcy of Solar City, and of bailing out Musk relatives using Tesla shareholder money.  The wind-down of Solar City’s business pretty much has proven me correct.  And  all talk of the visionary vertical integration strategy has ceased.  Indeed, the lack of discussion of the solar business reminds me of the old expression “don’t speak ill of the dead.”

So what’s the angle here?  I conjecture as follows.  Tesla is still losing money hand over fist.  It is burning less cash–but only because it has slashed expenses and capex–which puts a crimp in its growth plans.  And “burning less” is a relative statement–it is still a world class incendiary.

In the past Elon has fed the cash machine with stock and bond sales.  But he has publicly stated repeatedly that no future capital raises will be necessary.  It is clear, however, that such promises are not credible.  He has also promised that profits are just around the corner.  But that promise is also hardly credible, especially after serial failures to deliver on past promises.

This puts Elon in a bind.  He needs money, but a capital raise would (a) hammer is already tottering reputation, and (b) more seriously, create a huge risk of shareholder lawsuits and an SEC securities fraud case.

Further, it is clear that Elon finds many aspects of running a public company distasteful.  He particularly hates analysts (stock analysts, not psychiatrists, though maybe he hates them too!) who question his judgment, his statements, and sometimes his sanity.

He also hates short sellers.

So how to escape these problems? Easy–go private! Especially if the world’s deepest pockets are behind it.  No need for a public capital raise.  No more pesky outsiders questioning his competence, strategy, or behavior.  No more short selling a-holes.

The trifecta.

Of course, maybe Elon is just attempting to goose the stock price and inflict some pain on the shorts.  But if this is the case, he is digging his securities fraud hole deeper.

As for the Saudi angle.  A big bet on Tesla would be a rather foolhardy way to hedge against the end of oil.  It is a hedge rife with idiosyncratic risks–Tesla’s mercurial CEO being just one of them.  A more diversified strategy–investing in battery technology, and cobalt mines, and the like–would make more sense.

It will be entertaining to watch this spectacle unfold.  The one thing I can be sure of is that the story that Elon tells will not be the true story.  So look for the angle, and watch for the con.  My conjecture is plausible, but it is not the only possible scenario.  But whatever scenario plays out, it is likely to be as crooked as a dog’s leg.

Imagine my great surprise at reading a Bloomberg piece titled: “Blockchain, Once Seen as a Corporate Cure-All, Suffers Slowdown.”

That was sarcasm, by the way.  I’ve long and publicly expressed my skepticism that blockchain will have revolutionary effects, at least in the near to medium term.  In my public speaking on the topic, I’ve explored the implications of three basic observations.  First, that blockchain is basically a way of sharing/communicating information, which can in turn be put to various uses.  Second, there alternative ways of sharing/communicating information, with different costs and benefits.  And third, it is necessary to distinguish between sharing information within an organization and between organizations.

Much of the hype about blockchain relates to the potential benefits of more efficient sharing and validation of information.  But this does not address the issue of whether blockchain does this more efficiently than alternative means of sharing/communicating/validating.  As in all institutional/technology issues, a comparison of alternatives is necessary.  This comparison has been sadly lacking in public discussions of the potential for blockchain, beyond incantations about blockchain eliminating the need for trusted third parties which is (a) often untrue (in part because trusted parties may be required to enter information into a blockchain, and (b) is not necessarily a feature, because trusted third parties may be able to operate more efficiently than consensus based systems employed on a blockchain.

The most developed implementation of blockchain (Bitcoin) involves very large cost to solve a particular problem that (a) is unique to cryptocurrency, and (b) is not necessarily important in other contexts–namely, the double spend problem in crypto.  Maybe blockchain is the best way to solve that particular problem (which itself begs the question of whether cryptocurrency`is an efficient solution to any economic problem), but that doesn’t mean that it will be a more efficient way of solving the myriad types of opportunism, fraud, and deceit that plague other kinds of transactions.  Double spend is not the alpha and omega of transactional challenges.  Indeed, it might be one of the most trivial.

Thinking in Williamsonian transaction cost terms, where the transaction is the unit of analysis, transactions are highly diverse.  Different kinds of transactions are vulnerable to different kinds of information and opportunism problems, meaning that customized blockchain approaches are likely necessary.  One likely cause for the waning enthusiasm mentioned in the Bloomberg article is that people are coming to the recognition that customization is not easy, and it may not be worth the candle, compared to other ways of addressing the same issues.  Relatedly, customization makes it harder to exploit scale economies, and recognition of this is likely to be making initially enthusiastic commercial users less keen on the idea: that is, it may be possible to use blockchain in many settings, but it may not be cost-effective to do so.

The siloed vs. cooperative divide is also likely to be extremely important, and the Bloomberg article mentions that issue a couple of times.  The blockchain initiatives that do seem to have been implemented, at least to some degree, as with Maersk in container shipping or Cargill with turkeys, are intra-firm endeavors that do not require coordination and cooperation across firms, and can exploit the governance structure that a firm has in place.  Many of the other proposed uses–for instance, in trade finance, or in commodity trading, both of which require myriad parties in a single transaction to communicate information among one another–are inherently multilateral.

This creates all sorts of challenges.  How can commercial rivals cooperate?  How are the gains from cooperation divided?–this is a problem even when participants supply complementary services, such as a trading firm, banks providing trade finance, and the buyer and seller of a commodity.  As oil unitization has shown, battles over dividing the gains from cooperation can dissipate much of those gains.  Who gets to see what information?  Who makes the rules?  How?  How are they enforced? What is the governance structure?  How is free riding prevented?  Who pays?

Ironically, where the gains from cooperation are seemingly biggest–where there are large numbers of potential participants–is exactly where the problems of coordination, negotiation, and agreement are likely to be most daunting.

I’ve drawn the analogy between these cooperative blockchain endeavors and commodity exchanges, which (as I showed in a 1995 JLS paper) were formed primarily as ways to reduce transactions costs via cooperative rule making and enforcement.  The old paper shows that exchanges faced serious obstacles in achieving the gains from cooperation, and often failed to do so.  Don’t expect blockchain to be any different, especially given the greater complexity of the transactional problems that it is being proposed as a fix.

Thus, I am not surprised to read things like this:

“The expectation was we’d quickly find use cases,” Magnus Haglind, Nasdaq’s senior vice president and head of product management for market technology, said in an interview. “But introducing new technologies requires broad collaboration with industry participants, and it all takes time.”

or this:

Most blockchains also can’t yet handle a large volume of transactions — a must-have for major corporations. And they only shine in certain types of use cases, typically where companies collaborate on projects. But because different businesses have to share the same blockchain, it can be a challenge to agree on technology and how to adopt it.

One of my favorite illustrations of the hype outstripping the reality is the endeavor launched with much fanfare in the cotton market, where IBM and The Seam announced an endeavor to use the blockchain to revolutionize the cotton supply chain.   It’s been almost two years, and after the initial press releases, it’s devilish hard to find any mention of the project, let alone any indication that it will go into operation anytime soon.

Read the Bloomberg article and you’ll have a better understanding of R3’s announcement of an IPO–and that they might have missed their opportunity.

In 2017 and a little before, Blockchain was a brand new shiny hammer.  People have been looking everywhere for nails to pound with it, and spending a lot of money in the effort.  But they’re finding that many transactional problems aren’t nails, that there are other hammers that might do the job better, and there are other problems that require many parties to agree on just how the hammer is to be used and by whom.  Given this, it is not surprising that the euphoria is fading fast.  The main question that remains is in what shrunken domain will blockchain actually be employed, and when.  My guess is that the domain will be relatively small, and the time until employment will be pretty long.