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FT.com / Media - Cultivating patience a virtue for Informa about 22 hours ago
- Peter Rigby, chief executive of publishing group Informa
- As an entrepreneur with hopes to add scale to his business, he’s keen to make acquisitions. Shareholders are more wary about expansion.
- 9 more annotations...
- - Shareholders have expressed frustration that Informa’s board has turned down two bids – at 630p a share from Springer in 2006 and at 450p from a private equity consortium in 2008. The shares have fallen from highs of 525p in 2007 to Wednesday’s close of 320½p
  - “I am struggling to see as a shareholder how they are acting in my interest. We would rather they were selling the company than trying to buy something.”
  - But the Informa management remain desperate to grow.
  - Springer, which has since been bought by EQT, the private equity arm of Sweden’s Wallenberg family, together with the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, has about €2.16bn (£1.9bn) of debt, equal to eight times its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. A combination with Informa is expected.
  - despite Mr Rigby’s desire to grow, calls for Informa to make disposals this year are mounting.
  - Pre-tax profits fell almost 50 per cent to £32.2m in the six months to June
    . Revenue rose 1 per cent to £636.3m.
  - The consensus forecast for next year is that profits will be flat and revenue will also be flat or down about 1 per cent.
  - Informa’s most attractive business remains its academic publishing division, which contributes more than a third of group operating profits.
  - “This is the division which buyers would really like, but it is also the bit that Informa doesn’t want to sell.
Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already? « The Scholarly Kitchen on 2010-01-05
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Unlearnt lessons of the Great Depression on 2010-01-04
TLS Books of the Year 2009 by Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Nagel, et al on 2009-12-20
- THOMAS NAGEL
  
  János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is
  a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly
  democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving,
  maintaining, and exercising power. This is a particularly acute form of the
  moral problem of ends and means. The book discusses the philosophical
  background in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and others, and examines a
  number of recent examples from European politics. Kis is a philosopher, but
  his political experience includes negotiating the transfer of power in
  Hungary in 1989, as leader of the primary dissident party, the Free
  Democrats.
  
  Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent
  Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came
  into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before
  the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over
  Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of
  life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and
  other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the
  immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA,
  which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural
  selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He
  examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical
  explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence
  offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis
  of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who
  believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his
  careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche - Whimsley on 2009-12-17
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Innumerate bankers were ripe for a reckoning on 2009-12-16
- All business people know that you can carry on for a while if you make no profits, but that if you run out of cash you are toast. Bankers, as providers of cash to others, understand this well. They just do not believe it applies to their own business.
- they are not conscious of making cash decisions, of the sort that other businesses face daily. Even a dividend cut – one of the ultimate cash choices – will usually be discussed in terms of capital preservation and ratio management. But of course they frequently make decisions with cash consequences, and about five years ago they began to spray cash around like drunken sailors. The recipients were employees, in the form of bonuses, and to a lesser but still significant extent shareholders, in the form of dividends.
- 3 more annotations...
- - The existence of bonuses reflected the nature of financial businesses, where labour always represented a major cost, while revenues were volatile. It therefore became essential to make labour costs variable
  - any industry that pays out in cash colossal accounting profits that are largely imaginary will go bust quickly. Not only has the industry – and by extension societies that depend on it – been spending money that is no longer there, it has been giving away money that it only imagined it had in the first place. Worse, it seems to want to do it all again.
    What were the sources of this imaginary wealth? First, spreads on credit that took no account of default probabilities (bankers have been doing this for centuries, but not on this scale). Second, unrealised mark-to-market profits on the trading book, especially in illiquid instruments. Third, profits conjured up by taking the net present value of streams of income stretching into the future, on derivative issuance for example. In the last two of these the bank was not receiving any income, merely “booking revenues”. How could they pay this non-existent wealth out in cash to their employees? Because they had no measure of cash flow to tell them they were idiots, and because everyone else was doing it. Paying out 50 per cent of revenues to staff had become the rule, even when the “revenues” did not actually consist of money.
  - ny industry that pays out in cash colossal accounting profits that are largely imaginary will go bust quickly. Not only has the industry – and by extension societies that depend on it – been spending money that is no longer there, it has been giving away money that it only imagined it had in the first place. Worse, it seems to want to do it all again.
    What were the sources of this imaginary wealth? First, spreads on credit that took no account of default probabilities (bankers have been doing this for centuries, but not on this scale). Second, unrealised mark-to-market profits on the trading book, especially in illiquid instruments. Third, profits conjured up by taking the net present value of streams of income stretching into the future, on derivative issuance for example. In the last two of these the bank was not receiving any income, merely “booking revenues”. How could they pay this non-existent wealth out in cash to their employees? Because they had no measure of cash flow to tell them they were idiots, and because everyone else was doing it. Paying out 50 per cent of revenues to staff had become the rule, even when the “revenues” did not actually consist of money.
New Statesman - The end of a dream on 2009-12-13
- It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point - after many unfortunate detours - will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves. At the end of the decade, opinion-formers in Britain, the United States and continental Europe still imagine that the normal pattern of historical development leads eventually to an idealised version of western society, just as Francis Fukuyama forecast 20 years ago.
- the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century - neoliberalism just as much as communism - are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.
- 3 more annotations...
- - Religion is resurgent in many parts of the world, not least emerging powers such as Brazil and China, but for the secular intelligentsia this is just an unfortunate lag, a temporary setback in humanity's slow march to join them on the sunlit uplands of reason. The hysterical stridency of evangelical atheism - one of the most characteristic phenomena of the Noughties - is symptomatic of a pervasive cognitive dissonance.
  - Unreality is the defining feature of the ideas that have been in vogue over the past decade. The grandiose delusions with which the new century began have not been abandoned. Instead, they have been shrunk to a size at which they can still be maintained.
  - The intellectual default of politicians cannot be remedied by returning to the ideologies of the past. It is shared by much of the public, and comes from a chronic inability to engage with reality. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn the delusive fancies on which so many policies are based. A run on sterling in the event of a hung parliament after the next general election; the cataclysmic defeat that will follow Barack Obama's decision to reinforce inevitable failure in Afghanistan; a spiral in oil prices after a flare-up over Iran; the collapse of the dollar as the world finally loses patience with American solipsism - any one of these eventualities, together with others that cannot be foreseen, could be a catalyst for rethinking
FT.com / UK / Politics & policy - Poorest half of UK owns just 9% of wealth on 2009-12-10
- The wealthiest 10 per cent own 44 per cent of the country’s personal assets and were nearly five times more wealthy than the bottom half.
- The disparity in wealth across the nation far outstrips that of income, for which detailed figures have been available for many years.
- 4 more annotations...
- - Physical assets are the main asset for the poor, housing for those in the middle, and pensions are most important for the wealthiest 10 per cent. Financial assets increase in importance as wealth rises.
  - at the start of the slump most people had little in the way of savings, were largely ignoring pensions and often had significant debts.
  - the mean net financial wealth looks a reasonably healthy £40,000 but the median amount is just £5,200
  - households are roughly evenly split between those who own their home outright, those buying with a mortgage and those renting
FT.com / Lex / Technology, media & telecoms - EQT / Springer on 2009-12-10
- now that EQT has its prize, a follow-on bid for Informa may await.
Jonathan Benthall reviews Reason Faith and Revolution by Terry Eagleton and selection of other books - TLS on 2009-12-09

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