1/ A thread on subsidies and the unfortunate need for it until a total financial and economic restructuring has been completed. (Disclaimer: 40-tweet thread ahead)

2/ 17th of October 2019 , Lebanon witnesses the start of a revolution, people took to the streets to express their anger and frustration towards a political class they deemed corrupt and inept at governing.

3/ Little did they know the depth of the hole this class had put them in, little did they know the real scope of the squandered funds they oversaw.

4/ None of them even thought for a second, that a systemic looting was happening under their nose, one that used their own life savings.

The road to restructuring will be long and hard, whenever the country actually takes it.

5/ We know that we will need to muster all the assets we have, tangible and abstract. We know we will have to sacrifice a lot more.

But we also know that a total collapse due to the retraction of subsidies might make the situation irrecoverable, and cause unimaginable pain.

CTFN's #ICYMI weekend edition: #Merger and deal activity are expected to be robust in 2021, and regulator scrutiny is expected to be rigorous.

(thread) #antitrust #investming #stocks

In the meantime, key changes will occur under the new #Biden administration at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that is anticipated to weigh heavily on big pharma deals, @dalter28 wrote

#FTC #antitrust #MnA

Further for one big pharma deal, Surani Fernando wrote that while @AstraZeneca's $39 billion bid for @AlexionPharma has drawn a number of critics, a strategic build-out of immunology may prove an important rationale for the deal

#mergers #healthcare $ALXN $AZN

On @Google's acquisition of @Fitbit: the @acccgovau rejected #Google's offer of behavioral remedies this week, though a former ACCC official walked CTFN through how the parties might handle the review

#HeyGoogle #ACCC

The Russian regulatory process for Nova Resources' proposed buyout of Kaz Minerals is unlikely to exceed the standard timeline, CTFN's @CamerinoValeria reported

#shareholders #mergers #mining

Are you excited for our December episode of Kairos?
This time we're exploring 🤹🏽‍♂‍Financial stability 🤹🏽‍♂‍

#‍Financialstability

Missed the trailer? Quick recap:
👨🏽Maran, 48, Public Sector Bank Employee
❓Retire or be financially responsible
👴🏽ailing father
👩🏽‍🎓✈️daughter wants to study abroad
✅⏲️Right time for VRS?

Make guilt-free decisions about your future with a customised ithought #financialplan!

💧=🦸🏽
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Make a power move in your forties!
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But Maran is worried about his family😟😟😟
Who will take care of his father?
How will his daughter manage her #education expenses?
Can his wife repay his home #loan?
There's one thing that can lay Maran's financial worries to rest...

If you don't have firsthand experience with how traditional financial institutions (pensions, corporate treasuries etc) administratively permission the moving of assets, it's hard to understand why it's still very difficult for an institution to own bitcoin. Here's why: /1

2/ I worked at an endowment for 4 years, so I'll use the example I'm most familiar with. The Uchicago endowment had $8b and a staff of ~24 when I was there. The head of the endowment is the CIO, but he can't move money or assets by himself.

3/ when he wants to transfer cash or assets (let's say to invest endowment cash in to a VC fund), it follows a carefully controlled process to avoid theft or malfeasance.

4/ the cash itself sits with a custodian. The endowment must transmit and verify instructions to the custodian in a specific way to authorize its transfer. This is typically something like a document signed by multiple parties at the endowment and a phone confirmation.

5/ This process is not all that secure given the dollar amounts in question, but it works because of the financial infrastructure plumbing. Wire transfers are reversible (short-term), and they effectively use "whitelisting."

This is from 1995 and is an ODI working paper, its insightful because it still references the impact of the SAPs on the rural economic ecosystem https://t.co/tSQo281qVW However, I have an issue with the mindset revealed by the author's framing and evaluation.

Savings is a complicated subject among the informal economic ecosystem's actors, and I want to discuss it further here. Even the formal first world economy is conflicted about savings. Note that its considered valuable for devt here in this snippet.

Yet, until the year 2020 and its pandemic shock to the whole system, the dominant narrative of economic growth relied on consumption, which in turn was a mindset that decried the massive savings seen among consumers in emerging markets like India & China.

The real blockage, it seems to me, is that the informal ecosystem's value flows (disaggregated into goods, services, people, info & knowledge, currency or value equivalent) are air-gapped from teh formal economy's money. The two ecosystems are not well integrated enough for flow

Coming back to the thorny issue of savings in the context of the informal economic ecosystem - the volatile economic ecosystem to be honest, which these days is creeping into the margins of the allegedly formal system etc. there is an inherent conflict between two "systems" here