Articles

TASA ID: 22108

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”

Fink did not provide any data in the form of statistics, surveys, or studies to support his claims. He simply insisted, without evidence, that in-office work would reduce inflation. So what does the data say?

TASA ID: 13992

There has been a lot of press articles on the Archegos blow-up already, but many important questions have still not been asked.

The Factual Background

Archegos Capital Management is a family office, which manages the money of Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang since 2013. Hwang is a "Tiger Cub", a former PM/Analyst from famous Tiger Management. Hwang was managing $500m of his own money, which he earned through his role as a portfolio manager in the previous decade.

Hwang started as a stock Salesman in early 90's at Hyundai Securities. After a legal battle which started in 2009, Hwang and his firm Tiger Asia Management pleaded guilty in 2012 to insider trading & stock manipulation charges. They settled $44m with the SEC and HKD 45m with the HK Securities and Futures Commission.

Archegos is actually the new name of his old company Tiger Asia Management. The firm is based in New York, since Hwang was banned from trading in Hong-Kong in 2014, as well as other Asian markets in which he specialized.

Archegos held large concentrated bets in a few companies, notably ViacomCBS, Discovery, Baidu, Tencent and Vipshop.

Besides his own stock positions (already large), he also held stocks synthetically through swaps at prime brokers.

The primes didn't know of the extent of his other prime relations and how large the positions were. The overall position was not $10bn, but more than $50bn - rumored to reach $100 bn.

The list of affected primes is increasing. Only JP and Deutsche seem to have escaped that wreckage. JP, because they refused to offer services to Archegos, and Deutsche, because they were quick to offload positions.

TASA ID: 2534

The restaurant industry is not dead.  It just became a temporary tragic victim within a global traumatic condition that threatens its very survival.

There is a difference.

There will be many restaurants that will end up closing permanently due to how they handle the overwhelming challenges now facing them and the industry.  However, there will also ultimately be survivors and some of those survivors will once again thrive as vibrant hospitality operations. They will find a ways to navigate these crippling conditions and make their way back to dry land where they can begin to securely build up their businesses again.

TASA ID: 11532

PREFACE

International franchising has fascinated me for many years.  I still get excited seeing a familiar trademark when driving down a street in New Delhi, Cairo, or Paris.  While traveling outside the United States, my wife and I will frequently play a game seeing who can point to a recognized sign first such as McDonald’s or Gold’s Gym with the same exuberance of children playing car-trip games.  

Much has been written in recent years extolling the virtues of franchising as it exists in the United States.  However, there has been a dearth of information and analysis of the economic impact and potential of franchising, or similar economic expansion systems, in developing countries. Most of what has been written about international franchising has dealt with the legalities pertaining to franchise law, licensing, and trademark and patent law, and their disparities from country to country.  In spite of the scarcity of academic and research analysis, the period between the 1980s and the early-2000s witnessed a dramatic increase in international franchising and similar commercial expansion activity. This has occurred not only in Western Europe but also in Asia, South and Central America, Eastern Europe and, to a more modest extent, Africa and the Middle East. In this article, I attempt to point out some of the benefits and consequences of importing Western (essentially American) franchises and franchising techniques into developing economies.  

TASA ID: 11532

There are references in American history to early business relationships which, while possibly not meeting the current FTC definition, were without a doubt, franchise/licensing relationships. These relationships existed in the selling of wares from town-to-town by peddlers, licenses granted for general stores at military outposts, and certain livestock sales and other goods in which exclusive territorial rights were granted to the "franchisees" by the holder of the rights. Unfortunately, while the relationships are mentioned in the literature, the names of these early franchise founders and the structure of the business arrangement are not. 

Throughout its long history, there have been four constants that have fueled the growth of franchising, the desire to expand, the lack of expansion capital, the need to overcome distance, and managing people from a distant location.

The use of franchising can be traced to the expansion of the church and as an early method of central government control, probably as far back as the Middle Ages. Some have written that it may indeed date back as far as the Roman Empire or earlier and given the necessity of large territorial controls, coupled with the lack of modern transportation and communication at the time, there is reasonable basis for this assumption.