Corporate Governance – theMarketSoul ©1999

Thoughts on 2014 – Moral Hazard PLUS – Part 1

Reflections on 2014

As a behaviourally focused economics publication we have been very quiet and inactive during 2014. A year of reflection and introspection, however, we are ready to resume service, with vigour. And what better way to start than with a reflective piece and thoughts on the biggest risk we believe are developing under the surface without warning. Our concluding theme of 2014 is that of moral hazard.

As Margaret Thatcher once said: “There is no society”; we state today that there is ‘No Moral Hazard’; in fact there is only Moral Hazard PLUS.

We believe that there is a strong correlation between QE (Quantitative Easing) and economic moral hazard developing a new strain, mutating like an unseen virus.

QE might have saved the financial system of the developed world, but it it only provided a shot in the arm and acted as a stimulus for sustaining moral hazard.

Economics follow a flow and cyclical pattern, as discussed in our article entitled ‘Information Age Irony‘. These patterns and flows weave themselves into the fabric of our lives and affect individual economies in different ways.

It is important to understand where and how economic cycles develop and flow and how much influence they have on our general economic activities on a day to day basis, but we should not become overly obsessed by them, as they can be short-circuited from time to time by policy and policy-maker’s actions, wherever individually or collectively.

In part 2 of this article we will focus on the revelations of QE and the underlying threat of moral hazard returning on a grander and more catastrophic scale, if it goes unchecked and misunderstood.

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The Inverse Relationship

Inverse Relationships (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

We have always been fascinated by the Inverse Relationship between the Experience Curve and Cost.

Pure logical would dictate that (and indeed a convex demand curve) that as you ‘slide’ down the curve, the price / cost would become lower. Yet in practice, this hardly ever happens? Big Question mark…

Is this because the further we slide down the Experience Curve, the more utilitarian (fancy economic term we used there!) the benefit becomes? Yet, it also adds to the overall risk of the Experience or Value being added.

Is this a counter intuitive argument or are we just getting plain confused by the inverse relationship?

DUO (Photo credit: Fabrizio Aiana (AKA trystan_o))

Learning curves – steep or shallow? (justa90schild.wordpress.com)
Elasticity, slope, scale, and collusion (worthwhile.typepad.com)
Is “Y=C+I” a PPF? (worthwhile.typepad.com)
Running a business (corporatetips.wordpress.com)
Corporate strategy advanced … but left communications behind (jon8332.typepad.com)
Beating the Learn Curve (LearnThis.ca)

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The Future is Collaboration

The future of work and engagement has already begun. That is stating the blatantly obvious, but are we really prepared for it, yet?

Here is a little taster of what we think the future of work will look like for most individual participants in the labour and skills supply market.

The key is that the industrialised ‘factory’ and production line models are now slowly but surely falling apart. The expectation for grown up individuals to turn up 5 days a week and sit at ‘battery hen‘ cubicles and perform tasks a ‘production line’ manager allocates and oversees are numbered.

The slow revolution was unleashed in the third industrial revolution or rather the digital age revolution at least 20 years ago when personal computers become more prevalent. We wrote about this HERE.

The fundamental problem today is that no one has yet effectively resolved the ‘contracting’ and hence TRUST problem of delivery on a large scale. We can do it effectively on the micro level, with freelancers selling there individual skills on small tasks and projects, where the risk of failure or an adverse outcome is mitigated. However, we have not yet evolved far enough up the trust hierarchy to fully outsource mission critical projects to ‘clustered’ skills and solution provider hubs, in remote and distant locations, far removed from the core.

Some of the critical inhibitors are these:

Immigration policies
Commercial legal frameworks
Fiscal constraints

Some of the important contributors are:

Digitisation and speed of the Internet
Platforms where suppliers and demanders of services can be matched
A common global business Lingua Franca

These are only a few of the factors either contributing or detracting from moving the revolution on in significant leaps and bounds.

Therefore, to conclude this first stab at a look at the future world of work, we hypothesis that the future will have large groups (what we will call CLUSTERED SKILLS HUBS) of skills pools bidding for contracts to supply services and solutions to leaner and meaner multinationals in cross border transactions and flows that are worth trillions of dollars annually.

Right now, we can’t see any major G20 sovereign government dealing effectively with this challenge, to ensure that they contribute and facilitate the move towards the new future of COLLABORATION.

What are the most important work skills for the future? (questions1st.wordpress.com)
Makers. The new industrial revolution. Chris Anderson. (regnordman.com)
7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Leaders (wired.com)
Industry 4.0; thinking ahead on the factory of the future (weidmulleruk.wordpress.com)
Small companies state collaborative tools boost productivity (shoretelsky.com)
Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance Awards First Grant to New… (prweb.com)
Video Collaboration in Education: Building a Foundation for the Digital Age (itmodelbook.wordpress.com)
How Technology Is Changing The Way Organizations Learn (forbes.com)
3D printing: museums examine the future (telegraph.co.uk)

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An Ownership Revolution is required

We have been following the G20 ‘get those naughty multinationals in the tax tent’ debates raging for a few months now, with amusement we have to add; here at theMarketSoul and have the following short thought piece to contribute to the debate.

We know the ‘outrage’ really is all about the what the OECD calls the ‘general erosion of the tax base’, which in our opinion is just a distraction for proper structural reforms in the western democracies contributing to the G20 and OECD coffers.

English: The logo of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The real issue is the power of civil society structures, such as multinational corporations, versus nation states. We constantly get an earful on how undemocratic corporations are from a liberal social leftist media and how dangerous unfettered corporate power is.

Yet, multinationals are far more democratic, in both structure and performance, than any sovereign government will ever be. If the corporate governance structure is correctly set up, then every corporate entity has an annual AGM at which point the corporate leaders have to resign, on a rotational basis, depending on individual Articles of Association or Memorandum ofIincorporation provisions (depending in which jurisdiction the corporate entity ‘resides’). How often does a sovereign leader stand down, in comparison and leave it to the popular vote to be re-elected? Certainly not on an annual basis, as is the case for most corporate leaders.

Civitas Foundation for Civil Society logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This leads us to the real thought piece of this article, namely the fact that corporate ownership and access to corporate ownership should really be extended to as wide a base as possible, rather than a few ‘monied’ or opportunist participants in the market.

Legislation around employee share ownership schemes are still very cumbersome and rules, rather than principles driven.

The real revolution we require is not around a new tax base or recapitalizing democratic bankrupt nation states; however we require a revolution of democratic corporate ownership to sweep the length and breadth of the land, in order to spread the risk, add additional wealth creation opportunities (and hence a widened wealth tax base) for smaller, leaner and meaner governments to address. This a cry from civil society to the inner ‘goodness’ of political society to sit up, take serious stock and work on longer-term solutions to the erosion of their tax bases, rather than the usual headline grabbing short-termist market distorting interventions the G20 governments are so infamous.

G20 report warns of global tax chaos (guardian.co.uk)
Can the G20 Make Multinationals Pay Tax? (forbes.com)
G20 report warns of global tax chaos (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
G20 finance plan targets taxes from multinationals (miamiherald.com)
The July Tax Podcast: listen now (taxresearch.org.uk)
US blocks crackdown on tax avoidance by net firms like Google and Amazon (guardian.co.uk)
OECD tax proposals offer G20 ‘once in a century’ chance to fix creaking system (guardian.co.uk)
G20 agrees to fight against international tax evasion by multinational companies (en.mercopress.com)
G20 Ministers Push for More Growth and Jobs (hispanicbusiness.com)
OECD Promises to Stop Tax Evasion (hispanicbusiness.com)

Category: Corporate Governance

Thoughts on 2014 – Moral Hazard PLUS – Part 1

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The Inverse Relationship

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The Future is Collaboration

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An Ownership Revolution is required

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