Current Affairs

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As we gear up for the final show down and hopefully the end of the 2016 election (please, please, please let it end) I write today about the relationship between the markets and politics.  It is apparently THE business angle in the news cycle this week. This is an admitted punt on substantive work and am instead providing you with a host of hyperlinks to nervously check and re-check in between nervously checking and re-checking polling estimates and vote counts.  Please note, I am passing along a compilation of articles, a list that I have not editted to reflect a certain viewpoint.

Historical Accounts of the Relationship between politics and the markets

Call Levels, History of Past Presidential Elections and Their Effect On Stock Market

Merrill Lynch, How Presidential Elections Affect the Markets

ABC, History on how presidential elections affect stock markets

Predictions regarding market reactions to the outcome of the 2016 election

Forbes, Trump Vs. Clinton: How Will The Stock Market React To The Election?

CNBC, Wall Street reacts: Here’s what the markets will do after the election  

The Street, If Hillary Clinton Is Elected President, Here’s What Will Happen to the U.S. Economy

Market Watch, Here are all…

From Hobby Lobby to Chick-fil-A to Indiana’s RFRA to wedding photographers and wedding cake bakers, “faith and business” has been in the headlines quite a bit over the past few years.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to write a series of posts exploring developments in this area of faith and business. I plan three additional posts, looking at faith and business (sometimes called, “faith and work”) initiatives in (1) universities, (2) churches, and (3) businesses. My comments in this series will have a Christian focus, as that is my faith and is the area with which I am most familiar, but I welcome comments from any faith tradition.

Based on what I have seen around the country, many universities, churches, and businesses seem to be increasing their focus on the integration of faith and business. For some, this is a terrifying development. For others it is long overdue. I submit that both sides should attempt to engage in perspective-taking and nuanced discussion in an attempt to reach common ground.

As someone who prioritizes his faith, I also want to share my personal thoughts on the area of “faith and business” in this introductory post. First, some Christians…

General Electric (GE)  and Baker Hughes (BHI) announced on Monday, October 31st, a proposed merger to combine their oil and gas operations.  GE and Baker Hughes will form a partnership, which will own a publicly-traded company.   GE shareholders will own 62.5% of the “new” partnership, while Baker Hughes shareholders will own 37.5% and receive a one-time cash dividend of $17.50 per share.  The new company will have 9 board of director seats:  5 from GE and 4 from Baker Hughes.  GE CEO Jeff Immelt will be the chairman of the new company and Lorenzo Simonelli,  CEO of GE Oil & Gas, will be CEO. Baker Hughes CEO Martin Craighead will be vice chairman.

Reuters is describing the business synergies between the two companies as leveraging GE’s oilfield equipment manufacturing (“supplying blowout preventers, pumps and compressors used in exploration and production”) and data process services with Baker Hughes’ expertise in ” horizontal drilling, chemicals used to frack and other services key to oil production.”

Baker Hughes had previously proposed a merger with Halliburton (HAL), which failed in May, 2016, after the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block the merger. Early analysis suggests that the proposed GE & Baker Hughes will pass regulatory scrutiny because of the limited business overlap of GE and Baker Hughes.

As I plan to tell my corporations students later today: this is real life!  A high-profile, late-semester merger of two public companies is a wonderful gift.  The proposed GE/Baker Hughes merger illustrates, in real life, concepts we have been discussing (or will be soon) like partnerships, the proxy process, special shareholder meetings, SEC filings, abstain or disclose rules, and, of course, mergers.

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting will be held Tuesday, January 3 – Saturday, January 7, 2017, in San Francisco.  Readers of this blog who may be interested in programs associated with the AALS Section on Socio-Economics & the Society of Socio-Economics should click on the following link for the complete relevant schedule: 

Download Socio-Economic AALS Participants + Descriptions 161018

Specifically, I’d like to highlight the following programs:

On Wednesday, Jan. 4:

9:50 – 10:50 AM Concurrent Sessions:

  1. The Future of Corporate Governance:
    How Do We Get From Here to Where We Need to Go?
    andre cummings (Indiana Tech)                            Steven Ramirez (Loyola – Chicago)
    Lynne Dallas (San Diego) – Co-Moderator        Janis Sarra (British Columbia)
    Kent Greenfield (Boston College)                        Faith Stevelman (New York)
    Daniel Greenwood (Hofstra)                                 Kellye Testy (Dean, Washington)
    Kristin Johnson (Seton Hall)                                 Cheryl Wade (St. John’s ) Co-Moderator
    Lyman Johnson (Washington and Lee)
  2. Socio-Economics and Whistle-Blowers
    William Black (Missouri – KC)                                 Benjamin Edwards (Barry)
    June Carbone (Minnesota) – Moderator             Marcia Narine (St. Thomas)

1:45 – 2:45 PM Concurrent Sessions:

1. What is a Corporation?
Robert Ashford (Syracuse) Moderator                             Stefan Padfield (Akron)
Tamara Belinfanti (New York)                                             Sabeel Rahman (Brooklyn)
Daniel Greenwood (Hofstra)

On Thursday, Jan. …

Last week, I explained that the “War on Coal” Is Really A Competition Issue, with cheap natural gas prices as a major reason coal production and use have declined. Beyond the impact of natural gas on coal jobs, technology is also an issue. Technology is making mining more efficient, but it is making the market harder for coal miners. Following is a chart I created from Energy Information Administration data that shows coal production and employment statistics for 2013 and 2014.

Coal Production Data

  2014 2013 Percent Change
Coal-Producing Number of Mines Production Number of Mines Production Number of Mines Production
State and Region1
             
Appalachia Total 804 266,979 877 269,672 -8.3 -1
— Underground 292 193,434 339 188,090 -13.9 2.8
— Surface 512 73,545 538 81,582 -4.8 -9.9
Powder River Basin (surface) 16 418,156 16 407,567 – 2.6

Coal-Related Employment Data

Coal-Producing Underground Surface Total Underground Surface Total Underground Surface Total
State and Region
                   
Appalachia Total 32,545 12,141 44,686 35,740 14,115 49,855 -8.9 -14 -10.4
Powder River Basin – 6,592 6,592 – 6,635 6,635 – -0.6 -0.6

The data show the coal-production and…

Today I used Wells Fargo as a teaching tool in Business Associations. Using this video from the end of September, I discussed the role of the independent directors, the New York Stock Exchange Listing Standards, the importance of the controversy over separate chair and CEO, 8Ks, and other governance principles. This video discussing ex-CEO Stumpf’s “retirement” allowed me to discuss the importance of succession planning, reputational issues, clawbacks and accountability, and potential SEC and DOJ investigations. This video lends itself nicely to a discussion of executive compensation. Finally, this video provides a preview for our discussion next week on whistleblowers, compliance, and the board’s Caremark duties.

Regular readers of this blog know that in my prior life I served as a deputy general counsel and compliance officer for a Fortune 500 Company. Next week when I am out from under all of the midterms I am grading, I will post a more substantive post on the Wells Fargo debacle. I have a lot to say and I imagine that there will be more fodder to come in the next few weeks. In the meantime, check out this related post by co-blogger Anne Tucker.

The Trump-Pence campaign has adopted a common West Virginia criticism of U.S. energy policy under the Obama administration that is known as the “war on coal.” This phrase is used to describe the current administration’s support for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (via the proposed Clean Power Plan) and other environmental protections that relate to consumption of fossil fuels, especially coal.  In the vice presidential debate Republican Mike Pence repeated the phrase several times, asserting that the EPA was killing coal jobs, especially in places like West Virginia and Kentucky.  The problem is that regardless of the EPA’s goals, it is not environmental regulation that is coal’s main challenge.  It is price. 

As Charlie Patton, president of West Virginia-based Appalachian Power explained, “Forget the clean power plan. You cannot build a coal plant that meets existing regulation today that can compete with $5 gas. It just cannot happen.”  Cheap natural gas, made available by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in shale formations, has led to a significant increase in natural gas-fired electric power generation, most of which replaced coal as the fuel of choice. The shale gas boom, which started approximately in 2008, can…

The Wells Fargo headlines–fresh from a congressional testimony, a spiraling stock price, and a CEO with $41M less dollars to his name— raise the question of whether this is a case study of corporate governance effectiveness or inefficiency. That the wrong doing (opening an estimated 2M unauthorized customer accounts to manipulate sales figures) was eventually unearthed, employees fired and bonus pay revoked may give some folks confidence in the oversight and accountability structures set up by corporate governance. Michael Hiltzit at the LA Times writes a scathing review of the CEO and the Board of Directors failed oversight on this issue.  

The implicit defense raised by Stumpf’s defenders is that the consumer ripoff at the center of the scandal was, in context, trivial — look at how much Wells Fargo has grown under this management. But that’s a reductionist argument. One reason that the scandal looks trivial is that no major executive has been disciplined; so how big could it be? This only underscores the downside of letting executives off scot-free — it makes major failings look minor. The answer is to start threatening the bosses with losing their jobs, or going to jail, and they’ll start to

…

As law professor, most of my students are Millennials. What does that mean?  Well, Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their book Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, published in 1991, defined Millennials as those born between 1982 and 2004. I’ll go with that.  As one who is firmly part of Generation X (the age group and not the band, though that would be cool), I’m curious. It seems that some people think so.  I don’t think Gen Xers think of themselves as such very often. 

What made me think of this?  A political ad from NextGen Climate, funded by hedge fund billionaire/environmental activist Tom Steyer, apparently seeks to generate more support for Hillary Clinton by targeting Gary Johnson. The ad is below.  The ad begins: “Thinking about voting for Gary Johnson? In case you missed it, climate change will cost millennials over $8 billion if no one does anything about it.”

 That’s just weird to me.  I know it’s trying to motivate that age group of voters, but I am not sure many Millennials would think of themselves as such.  That is — does it resonate at all to have this ad targeted at them…

In January 2015, I wrote about a resolution to take a break from e-mails on Saturdays.

That resolution failed, quickly.

Since then, I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with e-mail.

On one hand, I get a lot of positive feedback from students and colleagues about my responsiveness. On the other hand, constantly checking and responding to e-mails seems to cut against productivity on other (often more important) tasks.

Five or six weeks ago, I started drafting this post, hoping to share it after at least one week of only checking my e-mail two times a day (11am and 4pm). Then I changed the goal to three times a day (11am, 4pm, and 9pm and then 5am, 11am, 4pm). Efforts to limit e-mail in that rigid way failed, even though very little of what I do requires a response in less than 24 hours. On the positive side, I have been relatively good, recently, at not checking my e-mail when I am at home and my children are awake. 

A few days ago, I read Andrew Sullivan’s Piece in the New York Magazine on “Distraction Sickness.” His piece is long, but worth reading. A short excerpt…