Things are not so hot for women in Hollywood right now. We kind of always knew that, of course, but now that Jennifer Lawrence is writing letters about not getting paid as much as her male costars and The New York Times Magazine is writing huge features on how tough it is for women to get anywhere as filmmakers, it’s getting harder to ignore.The thing is, it shouldn’t be ignored—it should be fixed. To help with that, Vimeo is launching Share the Screen, an initiative to help female filmmakers by funding their projects, teaching them the business, and promoting their movies.“From its beginning Vimeo has always stood for the democratization of filmmaking, and of sharing videos, and of gaining access to audiences,” says Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor. “When we see all of the information from the past couple years about just how wide the gender equality gap is in the entertainment industry, lending our support identifying and celebrating female voices made all the sense in the world.”Under the initiative, announced today at the Sundance Film Festival, Vimeo will bankroll at least five projects from women filmmakers this year. It will identify burgeoning directors through its current acquisitions pipeline, the team behind its original series, and the in-house group that handles the platform’s Staff Picks. Staffers also will meet with female filmmakers during Sundance in a bid to find candidates.
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Once Vimeo chooses the filmmakers, it will help promote the films offer them for sale or rental. It’s similar to what the video streaming site has done with original programming like High Maintenance, but with a female focus. Trainor says the amount Vimeo is willing to invest in the programming—be it a series of episodes, a full-length feature, or a short film—is “uncapped,” and five the minimum number of projects it will fund this year.
The idea, of course, is to change the vicious cycle in Hollywood. A recent study, by the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television at San Diego State University, found the number of women directors for top-grossing movies remained at 9 percent from 1998 to 2015. While it’s hard to say exactly why that number remained static, it might have a lot to do with studios’ low confidence in female filmmakers’ bankability—which will never change if women don’t get to make films and prove the studios wrong. That’s what Vimeo hopes to change.
Share the Screen kicks off with Darby Forever, a short from Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant, on February 18. In case you’re wondering why the name doesn’t have the word “female,” “women,” or “lady” in it, it’s because future ventures will finance and support filmmakers of other backgrounds and minorities.
“The ability of the Internet, and Vimeo specifically, to put power in the hands of anyone who wishes to create great video,” Trainer says, “is something that we’re very excited to get behind.”
Research shows diversity is good for business – take your pick from Harvard Business Review, Scientific American,McKinsey & Company and many more. Yet fundamental change in any industry can take time.
We’ve all seen the statistics. Tech investment in women and minorities is lacking, and while Silicon Valley is building a bubble-like paddock for unicorns, outside-the-commercial-box ideas with real social impact can be drowned out by all the eyeballs lighting up with dollar signs and ringing out ‘cha-ching’.
Discussion on diversity in industries was rampant throughout 2015, prompting the establishment of committees and policies, and the promotion of diversity leaders. Some of these efforts merely pay lip service to the cause, but some champions of diversity are taking definitive action.
The change that’s on the horizon is in no small part led by these inspiring individuals. Some are investors cognisant of the homogenous face of the tech industry and actively working to augment it. Others are attempting to change the game completely with new models of investment, while others are driving the diversity debate in the right direction.
Jonathan Haidt writes: Imagine that a major league basketball team is bought by a hedge fund manager who is a firm believer in the value of competition. Not just competition across teams, but competition within teams. He implements a radical new policy: each player’s salary is determined exclusively by the number of points he scores. Crazy, right? Anyone can see that such a policy would ruin teamwork and destroy the team’s ability to compete with more cohesive teams.
Yet this is exactly what is now happening at Sears. Five years ago, Eddie Lampert, the chairman of Sears merged with Kmart, reorganized the company so that each business unit functions like an autonomous company, with its own president, board of directors, and profit-and-loss statement. Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.
The results have been disastrous, in part because Lampert was ideologically committed to the metaphor of the invisible hand and the associated idea that people are purely selfish. Ideology is a lens – it makes some things more visible, others less so. Lampert’s ideology prevented him from seeing that he was destroying the invisible band – the bond that forms around groups that can trust each other and work together toward shared goals. Evolution is a different lens – one that we believe brings unparalleled focus and resolution when examining complex human systems. A brief look through the evolutionary lens would have made it obvious how dysfunctional Lampert’s reorganization was likely to be. Competition and Cooperation
Laoise Casey writes: A miniature army of black trompette mushrooms awaits its fate on a blue cloth as a chef picks over them. One is held up for inspection – a wisp of black velvet with a perfectly furled stem. Another chef – me – selects our best-looking sourdough. Nearby, Robin Gill, head chef and owner of The Dairy restaurant in Clapham, south London, paces while eyeing the pans arranged on the stove. He has cancelled his plans for today. Cancelled, because Alain Ducasse has just sat down for lunch. For Gill, this is “like having the chance to cook for Escoffier” – the grandfather of French cuisine.
The 59-year-old French chef has 23 restaurants in seven countries, including two in London, and a total of 20 Michelin stars. He also runs cookery schools, has written numerous cookbooks, and last year he even devised a menu for the International Space Station (bon app, Tim Peake!). Back in The Dairy kitchen, seven chefs flock around each plate as it leaves the pass. Later, an excited murmur ripples through the kitchen: Ducasse liked it. That night I, the novice, hatch a plan to win an audience with the master.
Alain Ducasse with chef Laoise Casey (Anna Huix)
I’m a chef at the start of my career, and keen to learn about his view of women in the traditionally macho environment of kitchens. Several of Ducasse’s head chefs are female, of whom he speaks very highly: “It has always k been important for me to have women in my restaurants, both front and back of house.” The Michelin-starred Hélène Darroze, head chef at the Connaught in London, trained under him at the Louis XV restaurant in Monaco, and was encouraged by him to begin working in the restaurant kitchen. “Two of my head chefs are female. Laetitia Rouabah at Allard, perpetuates the legacy of Marthe Allard – a ‘mother cook’ who founded the restaurant in 1932 – and brings it up to date aptly. At the helm of Benoit, one of the last authentic Parisian bistros, we have Fabienne Eymard. Both maintain the traditions and bring their touches to those places.”
In 2011, Ducasse established the Femmes en Avenir (Women of the Future) programme in association with the French government to encourage women in the outskirts of Paris to earn a culinary diploma and then into relevant employment. Ducasse points out that cooking itself is a “social ladder” and that regardless of background, “anyone can start as a commis and become a successful chef”.
Provided, that is, that they are willing to work hard enough. “This difficult trade”, as Ducasse calls it, is often portrayed unrealistically in TV shows that claim to reveal the working life of restaurants. “Beyond the glamour, one must not forget that our trade is very demanding,” he says. “But cookery shows can reactivate the desire for young people to be part of this adventure.”
What’s more, Ducasse believes these shows could help combat the current shortage of chefs in the UK: according to reports at the end of last year, there has been a drop in the number of students enrolling in chef courses. If the trend continues, it’s thought there will be a shortfall of 11,000 chefs by 2022.
Hélène Darroze, who trained under Ducasse at Louis XV (Rex Features)
His restaurants are a portfolio of fine dining and bistro cuisine. And the one venture that Ducasse will tell me he has in store for 2016 (“I have many, many plans – too many”) is a bistro, in the Les Halles neighbourhood of Paris.
Time is pressing and his restaurant at the Dorchester beckons. If he hadn’t been a chef, he would have been an explorer and architect, he tells me: “[Now] I get to do all three.” I ask him when he might stop. He smiles… “I guess I will keep doing this for as long as I can.” Before leaving for his restaurant, he invites me to visit and stage (do kitchen work experience) at the Plaza Athénée. Who can say no to the master?
Andrea Wong writes: It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars: Just how much of America’s debt does Saudi Arabia own?
But now that question — unanswered since the 1970s, under an unusual blackout by the U.S. Treasury Department — has come to the fore as Saudi Arabia is pressured by plunging oil prices and costly wars in the Middle East.
In the past year alone, Saudi Arabia burned through about $100 billion of foreign-exchange reserves to plug its biggest budget shortfall in a quarter-century. For the first time, it’s also considering selling a piece of its crown jewel — state oil company Saudi Aramco. The signs of strain are prompting concern over Saudi Arabia’s outsize position in the world’s largest and most important bond market.
A big risk is that the kingdom is selling some of its Treasury holdings, believed to be among the largest in the world, to raise needed dollars. Or could it be buying, looking for a port in the latest financial storm? As a matter of policy, the Treasury has never disclosed the holdings of Saudi Arabia, long a key ally in the volatile Middle East, and instead groups it with 14 other mostly OPEC nations including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria. For more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed breakdown of how much U.S. debt each holds.
“It’s mind-boggling they haven’t undone it,” said Edwin Truman, the former Treasury assistant secretary for international affairs during the late 1990s, and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Because relations were rocky and the U.S. needed their oil, the Treasury “didn’t want to offend OPEC. It’s hard to justify this special treatment for OPEC at this point.”
For its part, the Treasury “aggregates data where more detailed reporting might disclose the positions of individual holders,” spokeswoman Whitney Smith said in an e-mail.
Treasuries range from the $3 million stake held by the island nation of the Seychelles, to the $69.7 billion investment from the oil-producing economy of Norway, and those of China and Japan, which are both in excess of $1 trillion.
Representatives for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, known as SAMA, and the nation’s finance ministry declined to comment.
Apart from the kingdom itself, only a handful of Treasury officials, and those at the Federal Reserve who compile the data on their behalf, have a clear picture of Saudi Arabia’s U.S. debt holdings and whether they’re rising or falling.
For everyone else, it’s a guessing game.
The special arrangement, born out of the 1973 oil shock following the Arab embargo, is just one small concession among many that successive U.S. administrations have made over the years to maintain America’s strategic relationship with the Saudi royal family — and its access to the kingdom’s deep reserves of oil.
The exception extends to 12 other countries in the Treasury’s oil-exporter group, all from the Middle East or Africa. Based on aggregate data released this week, that group has trimmed its stakes by a few billion dollars since March and held $289 billion as of November.
Because its holdings are believed to be the largest, Saudi Arabia’s moves have drawn scrutiny, particularly as other central banks in emerging markets sell Treasuries to raise cash in defense of their currencies.
And events in recent months, from President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal with Iran to Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric who challenged the royal family, underscore just how sensitive U.S.-Saudi relations have become. The longstanding rationale for the alliance has also been undercut by America’s domestic oil boom, which has made it far less dependent on Saudi exports.
Figures from SAMA suggest the kingdom might be reallocating some of its reserves into short-term, liquid assets to help the finance ministry meet budget commitments and defend its 30-year-old currency peg of 3.75 riyals to the dollar.
The central bank has increased foreign currencies and deposits held abroad by 7 percent in the first 11 months of 2015, while at the same time reducing foreign securities, consisting of equities and longer-term debt, by 20 percent.
That cash has become key. Oil’s slump past $30 a barrel, from more than $100 two years ago, has eroded the petrodollar-fueled wealth that quadrupled per-capita income since the late 1980s and provided Saudi Arabia with the largess to offer free health care, gasoline subsidies and routine pay raises to its citizens.
SAMA isn’t a typical central bank because it acts as a quasi-sovereign wealth fund, he said. More clarity by central banks is long overdue — particularly when it comes to the U.S. Treasury.
“In the old days at the Treasury and central banks, transparency wasn’t the word of the day” and politics made special treatment a non-issue, he said. Now, “it’s simply a legacy issue. You want to deal with it sooner or later.”
Jonathan Browning writes: China’s listed firms are in the midst of their biggest-ever overseas shopping spree, taking advantage of a wide and attractive valuation gap between domestic shares and foreign assets.
Haier Group Corp. said last week it will use its publicly-traded arm in Shanghai to acquire General Electric Co.’s home-appliance business for $5.4 billion, pushing outbound deals from the nation’s listed companies to $8.6 billion so far this year. The Chinese stock market rout this month hasn’t slowed the volume of foreign acquisitions, which has already reached one-third of last year’s record tally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Pricey stocks leave ample room for Chinese companies to boost returns by buying more profitable assets overseas for less. With domestic firms valued at more than three times the level in the U.S., what was previously a select group of China’s outbound acquirers is set to widen, helping the nation continue its record dealmaking run.
Rich Valuations
Shanghai and Shenzhen-traded firms announced $25.6 billion of overseas acquisitions and investments last year, up 48 percent from 2014, Bloomberg-compiled data show. Top dealmakers, including Tsinghua University’s investment arm and the owner of China’s fourth-largest airline, are using their listed units to make deals. Smaller firms with less of a track record are also pursuing acquisitions overseas, often using their own stock to fund the purchases.
Shanghai-listed BTG Hotels (Group) Co. last month announced a $1.8 billion agreement to acquire budget lodging chain Homeinns Hotel Group. BTG Hotels, backed by the Beijing city government, is seeking Chinese regulatory approval for a 3.9 billion yuan ($593 million) equity offering to fund part of the purchase.
Including debt, U.S.-traded Homeinns was valued at 22.6 times earnings before interest and taxes, while BTG Hotels trades at 45.2, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. After announcing the transaction Dec. 24, BTG Hotels surged more than 75 percent over the next six trading days.
Stocks in China’s domestic market trade at a median 53.2 times earnings, more than three times the multiple in the U.S. and more than five times that in Hong Kong, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Shandong Delisi agreed to buy 45 percent of Bindaree Beef Pty for A$140 million ($97 million), valuing the Australian meat producer at 24 times EBIT, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The Chinese company trades in Shenzhen at a multiple of 235 times.
“Just like Chinese consumers who shop around the world, Chinese companies are looking overseas for nice bargains,” said Ken Chen, a Shanghai-based analyst at KGI Securities Co. “It resembles what Japanese companies did in the 1980s on the back of the country’s industrialization and a strong yen.”
Bubbles in China’s housing and stock markets leave companies with limited investment options domestically, and the government has encouraged enterprises to “go out” and help promote the yuan’s internationalization, Chen said. The yuan became part of the International Monetary Fund’s basket of reserve currencies in December.
“Chinese like to cut corners and overtake,” said Brian Lin, who manages NT$9.2 billion ($272 million) at Capital Investment Trust Corp. in Taipei. “They like to upgrade themselves fast by buying assets, techniques and patents.”
While A-share firms sometimes struggle to gain regulatory approval for share sales and are required to make early disclosures that may spike deals, they are finding workarounds, UBS’s Lo said. Companies can take out bridge loans that are later repaid through a share placement, or the controlling shareholder can make an acquisition first before a listed unit issues stock to take it over, he said.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission sped up approval for equity offerings in December after five months of slackness following a stock rout. Companies completed $21.9 billion of additional share sales in December, nearly triple the November value. This month’s stock rout has not slowed things down with $14 billion of deals done in three weeks.
In addition, Chinese companies and private-equity funds are eyeing U.S.-listed stocks for arbitrage opportunities. At least 40 U.S.-listed Chinese companies announced buyout bids last year totaling a record $38 billion. Qihoo 360 Technology Co., a developer of mobile-phone security software, received a $9.3 billion going-private offer last month, the biggest of its kind in 2015.
China pulled out all the stops in the third quarter to try to stem a stock rout and prevent the bubble from bursting, setting up a bailout fund of as much as 3 trillion yuan to prop up share prices, people with knowledge of the matter said in July. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index, which rose 1.3 percent Friday, is still down 44 percent from its June high.
Online marketplaces for used cars have been in a renaissance over the last few years with a host of new classified auto sites popping up and grabbing venture capital dollars. One of these startups is Beepi, a nearly two-year-old startup that wants to grab a piece of the $106 billion dollar used car industry.
On Thursday, Beepi revealed that it raised $70 million in new funding in late 2015 led by China’s largest domestic automaker, SAIC Motor Corporation. SAIC makes and sells passenger and commercial vehicles in China as well as auto parts and engines. Outside of manufacturing, the company also provides services including logistics and auto financing.
Instead of merely charging a fee for listings, Beepi visits a seller’s home to inspect the car and certify that its meets certain criteria. Cars must have less than 60,000 miles, be less than six years old, and have had no more than three owners. The startup then helps buyers to set a price and then lists the car for them on Beepi’s site along with on other car sales sites like eBay Motors.
After the car is sold, Beepi arranges for the transfer of title and delivers the car to its new owner. Beepi doesn’t charge a flat fee, but instead takes a cut on sales from buyers.
Beepi faces challenges from rival car sites like eBay Motors and Carmax, both of which have longer track records in used car sales. It also competes with fellow fledgling used car startups including Shift and Carvana.
The company was raising around $300 million in new funding at a rumored $2 billion valuation, up from a previous valuation of $200 million in 2014.
David Broonstroron writes: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he believed that, with effort and good faith on both sides, it would be possible to implement the Minsk agreements on Ukraine in coming months to allow for a lifting of sanctions on Russia.
Kerry said he and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden had met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to help ensure full implementation of the agreements.
“And I believe that, with effort and with bona-fide legitimate intent to solve the problem on both sides, it is possible in these next months to find those Minsk agreements implemented and to get to a place where sanctions can be appropriately, because of the full implementation, removed,” Kerry said.
Sanctions on Russia’s banking, energy and defense sectors, imposed in July 2014, are part of the West’s efforts to pressure Russia to help end the crisis in eastern Ukraine, in which more than 9,000 people have been killed since April 2014.
The United States has repeatedly linked a lifting of the sanctions to full implementation of the Minsk accords, which were agreed last February by Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany after the collapse of a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists.
The terms of the deal provide for a ceasefire, a pull-back of heavy weapons, prisoner exchanges, local elections in rebel-held areas and greater autonomy for these regions.
A U.S. State Department official, citing data from the International Monetary Fund, said this month that EU and U.S. restrictions imposed on Moscow had shaved about 1.5 percent off Russian economic output in 2015.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told Germany’s Bild newspaper this month that the sanctions were “severely harming Russia”, although the fall in global oil prices was having a bigger impact.
A rare note of optimism at Davos this year comes from the trade ministers, who will gather for the first time since the World Trade Organization (WTO) closed the lid on 14 years of increasingly toxic stalemate. About 30 governments will be represented, forming a potential coalition willing to forge new WTO deals and move on from deadlocked talks that grew from a meeting in Doha in 2001. The WTO’s 162 members, meeting last month in Nairobi, agreed to disagree about the Doha round, effectively giving license to any country that wants to get the ball rolling on new reforms.
Tom Miles writes: The Doha round originally aimed to bolster developing countries, but the economic rise of China, India and Brazil, and the deepening negotiating quagmire led to Washington and Brussels losing interest and all but giving up on meeting the demands of Beijing and New Delhi.
None of the “BRIC” economies’ trade ministers will take part in Saturday’s meeting, which is to be hosted by Switzerland.
In the end, the Doha round went out with a whimper rather than a bang, the WTO acknowledging “different views on how to address the negotiations”.
That admission turned the tables on India and others who hoped to veto any move away from Doha, and gave the advantage to the U.S.-led camp who favor new avenues of trade reform.
“(Doha) may be a zombie, but the WTO negotiating arm, in its new dress, is alive and well,” wrote Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute thinktank.
After 14 years of being stuck, nobody is rushing back into grand negotiations, but there is scope for a subset of members to pursue smaller deals in areas that are not covered by the original 1995 WTO rulebook, diplomats say.
“Anybody who has an issue that they are seeking a solution for should start having conversations and testing ideas and reaching out to potential allies and beginning to understand the concerns of opponents,” said U.S. Ambassador to the WTO Michael Punke.
Bringing talks to the WTO could reopen the risk of a veto by Doha die-hards, but trade experts say the alternative — seeing all trading rules being written outside the WTO, in deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership — might be even less palatable.
Goldman Sachs quickly saw the merits of owning its own mortgage firm so that it could bundle ever more lucrative mortgages, although the mortgages were being issued, like Bear Sterns, to people who had no income and no assets.
Criticism of US government leniency on Wall Street legal transgressions is now being covered widely – even by the National Mortgage Professional Magazine. On January 18, the trade publication ran an article about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemning the most recent US government settlement with a “too-big-to-fail” financial firm, in this case Goldman Sachs, for illegal abuse of the mortgage market:
Sen. Warren denounced the agreement, noting that the settlement sum was “barely a fraction of the billions investors lost” while arguing that Goldman Sachs was not properly penalized for its actions.
“That’s not justice – it’s a white flag of surrender,” she wrote. “It’s time to end this farce. These companies think they’re above the law – and too many government officials go along with them. A first step would be to pass the bipartisan Truth in Settlements Act to shine more light on these backroom deals. A second step would be to get government officials who have the backbone to fight back.”
Warren’s comments were echoed by the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
The publication, which is geared toward professionals in the mortgage industry, also tellingly noted, “In announcing the [$5.1 billion] settlement, Goldman Sachs made no admission of guilt or error, and no executive from the New York-based financial giant will face criminal or civil charges.”
As we have noted in this space many times, the seemingly large financial penalties levied on Wall Street firms for illegal activity are not so large, in the context of those firms’ budgets: The fines are generally less than the revenue that the firms generated by engaging in the often fraudulent practices in the first place.
About $2.4 billion of the settlement is in the form of a government penalty. The bank has said that it securitized about $125 billion of home loans between 2005 and 2008, of which about $23 billion eventually soured. The penalty represents about 10 percent of investors’ losses.
Goldman can deduct the rest of the settlement, about $2.7 billion, from its future tax bills, according to a person familiar with the accord. The bank said the settlement will reduce its fourth-quarter profit by about $1.5 billion. It reports earnings next week.
Goldman Sachs is being let off the hook for 90 percent of the investor losses for which it was primarily responsible. Furthermore, as is consistent with past settlements with Wall Street firms by the Department of Justice and other executive agencies, much of the fine is tax-deductible. As BuzzFlash has noted before, this rewards Wall Street financial companies by allowing them to factor in settlements with the government for illegal behavior as nothing more than the cost of doing business.
The former Attorney General Eric Holder has said: I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute – if we do bring a criminal charge – it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.
Apparently, under new Attorney General Loretta Lynch current that legal exemption for too-big-to-fail financial firms and their executives has not changed.
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