this would be a massive sea change in american-style capitalism. though whether it's genuine and going to lead to actual differences in behaviour is quiet debatable. as the article concludes, quoting Andy Green from Center for American Progress, “We need to see the details to see if they put their money where their mouth is.”
"The change amounts to a call to reform capitalism in a time in which rising populism and concern about climate change have led politicians and shareholder activists to demand that companies consider their impact on the world beyond their balance sheets.
It is a significant departure from the bedrock belief that businesses serve the owners of their capital — a philosophy championed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and which has driven corporate America for decades."
"trade wars are good, and easy to win" 2018 March 2
"Never said China was going to be easy" 2019 August 15
it's all about geopoliltics
“The recent escalation in US-China tensions reinforces our view that trade and geopolitical frictions have become the key driver of the global economy and markets,” BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said earlier this week.
startling perspectives, given the West's hope for China opening up to liberalism, and China's history of squashing dissent
“Beating them to a pulp is not enough,” one person said about protesters on Tuesday, echoing an increasingly common sentiment on Weibo. “They must be beaten to death. Just send a few tanks over to clean them up.”
“The five-star flag has 1.4 billion guardians,” CCTV wrote indignantly to its 87 million followers on Weibo. “Repost! ‘I am a guardian of the flag!’ ”
It was reposted by more than 10 million people, including Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong martial arts film star.
profit motive destroys long-term value and favours capital over labour
"For the first time, the nonfinancial corporate business sector now consistently spends more on acquiring financial assets than on capital development."
"Rising out of the economic stagnation of the 1970s, shareholder primacy theory refocused corporate management’s understanding of economic value as financial return to shareholders. This theory tilts business decision-making towards returning money quickly and predictably to investors rather than building long-term corporate capabilities, reduces investment in research and innovation, and undervalues American workers’ contribution to production."
moving beyond the profit motive
"The signs of this new post-supply side era are all around us. Witness the rise of the B-corporations, which balance purpose and profit, and the growth of investing based on environmental, social and governance factors."
AlphaStock fully exploits the interrelationship among stocks, and
opens a door for solving the “black box” problem of using deep learning models in financial markets. The back-testing and simulation experiments over U.S. and Chinese stock markets showed that
AlphaStock performed much better than other competing strategies. Interestingly, AlphaStock suggests buying stocks with high long-term growth, low volatility, high intrinsic value, and being
undervalued recently.
deep reinforcement learning algorithms to automatically generate consistently profitable, robust, uncorrelated trading signals in any general financial market.
sharpes 3-5
In the boom years of globalisation, Hong Kong was always said to be the epitome of a commercial city whose citizens cared little for politics, as long as they could buy, sell and shop. But, across the world, the period when economic concerns always seemed to override politics is over. Once again, Hong Kong is at the forefront of a new era.
Very interesting point made at the end, doing something quick and easy, that makes you feel like you're doing something useful, may come at the expense of actually doing something useful.
"Having an anxious reaction, and living to tell the tale, is actually an important part of learning to live with one’s brain. Rather than issuing trigger warnings, universities can best serve students by facilitating access to effective and proven treatments for P.T.S.D. and other mental health problems... if you feel you need a trigger warning, maybe what you really need is better medical care"
"If voting were universal, parties would not benefit from whipping their bases into a frenzy. Instead, they would need to court swing voters, pushing policies towards the centre. That centre, however, would sit to the left of its current position, putting the brunt of the adjustment on Republicans."
"if you want to improve society then we need to be able to pursue long-term goals which are beyond profitability"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."
In Senegal, West Africa, TM was taught to everyone--wards, guards, staff, inmates--at 30 of the 34 federal prisons (about 90% total of the federal inmates). Virtually all 30 of wardens at the TM prisons reported overnight (literally overnight) and very drastic, drops in prison violence the weekend the program started, and subsequent measures were consistent with the overnight drops.