industryterm:finance

  • China’s Racing to the Top in Income Inequality - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-23/china-s-racing-to-the-top-in-income-inequality

    By Anjani Trivedi, September 23, 2018 - During China’s greatest period of economic growth, fed by widespread industrialization that lifted millions out of poverty, inequality has also increased — at the fastest pace and to the highest level in the world. It may get worse.

    China’s Gini coefficient, 1 a widely used measure of income dispersion across a population, has risen more steeply over the last decade than in any other country, according to an International Monetary Fund working paper. Some inequality is to be expected with industrialization, but in China it’s happened at a staggering pace. One of the main drivers, the research found, is growing differences in education levels and skill premiums.

    In education, China is among the most unequal societies. Demand for highly skilled workers soared with rapid technological change. Access to secondary and higher-level education has blossomed since 1980. Last year, around 8 million students graduated from Chinese universities, 10 times more than two decades ago and double the number at U.S. universities. But the gap in tertiary education completion rose even more, comparing rural to urban areas and richer to poorer people. In the relatively deprived southern autonomous region of Guangxi, for example, around 19 percent of the college-age population is enrolled in tertiary education. In Shanghai, the comparable figure is 70 percent.

    The Rich Get Smarter

    The percentage of people enrolled in a tertiary institution out of the whole college-age population varies widely across provinces depending on income levels

    China’s capital-accumulation boom has been backed by state subsidies that encourage technological advances. Many R&D handouts are based, in turn, on employees’ educational qualifications.

    Take the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Innovation Company program. Access to its incentives include stipulations that research and development spending amount to 6 percent of sales for companies with less than 50 million yuan ($7.3 million) revenue; that at least 30 percent of employees have a college degree; and that 10 percent of the staff be involved in R&D. Plenty of big names have taken advantage of such policies, including the likes of Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., the surveillance giant that we wrote about here.

    Other measures to bring home so-called sea turtles — qualified Chinese people living overseas — have deepened the divide. Under Beijing’s Thousand Talents program, launched a decade ago, returnees can get a 2 million-yuan research grant and a personal reward of more than 500,000 yuan, along with benefits. That program had attracted more than 7,000 Chinese scientists and engineers as of November 2017. Local governments, including Shenzhen, also have housing policies aimed at luring talent.

    On top of the influx of expertise, it’s harder for people to find good jobs as the population generally becomes better-educated. To be sure, inequality does diminish as workers change industries, for example from agriculture to sectors that add more value. But that hasn’t happened as fast, in part because of pro-farmer policies and the dibao system that guarantees rural incomes.

    Beijing is now trying to reduce the income-tax burden, adding a potentially powerful tool to address inequality. The working paper’s authors say this is especially the case in China, given the “limited role” fiscal policy has played in “moderating income inequality in China to date.”

    Under tax reforms announced last month by the finance ministry, for example, the greatest benefit accrues to about 20 million people who earn more than 100,000 yuan a year — just 3 percent of the total workforce — according to a Bernstein analysis. With a higher percentage of salary earners in Tier 1 and 2 cities, the gains there will be disproportionate.

    Deepening Divide

    The government also plans to introduce a household allowance for children’s and higher education next year. Spending on education, culture and recreation accounts for 11 percent of household consumption in China.

    Urbanization and an aging population no doubt have added to inequality. By 2008, China had slowed the growth of inequality from previous decades. Since then, however, the government has started running out of measures and now faces the challenge of deleveraging its financial system as the economy slows. As a trade war worsens and Beijing pushes its technological edge, the balancing act will get tougher. Alongside the recent income-tax breaks, the government also announced more stringent social-security collection from companies to fund pensions.

    In an ideal world, Beijing would balance the books sufficiently to slash taxes for the poorest people. Yet for funding, it’s having to turn to the very companies that are supposed to drive the “Made in China 2025” program, reducing their effectiveness. The latest change in social-security collection could cut machinery, industrial and telecom companies’ net profits by 11 percent to 15 percent, according to CLSA.

    The IMF paper suggests the most effective policies to reduce inequality are those “with the largest effect coming from social-protection spending and redistribution” of income. But as Beijing’s push-and-pull gets tougher, the policy avenue will narrow. As Thomas Piketty’s work has found, wealth accumulated in the past grows faster than output and wages. In doing so, “The past devours the future.”

  • Inquiries Into Reckless Loans to Taxi Drivers Ordered by State Attorney General and Mayor - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/nyregion/nyc-taxi-medallion-loans-attorney-general.html

    May 20, 2019 - The investigations come after The New York Times found that thousands of drivers were crushed under debt they could not repay.

    The New York attorney general’s office said Monday it had opened an inquiry into more than a decade of lending practices that left thousands of immigrant taxi drivers in crushing debt, while Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered a separate investigation into the brokers who helped arrange the loans.

    The efforts marked the government’s first steps toward addressing a crisis that has engulfed the city’s yellow cab industry. They came a day after The New York Times published a two-part investigation revealing that a handful of taxi industry leaders artificially inflated the price of a medallion — the coveted permit that allows a driver to own and operate a cab — and made hundreds of millions of dollars by issuing reckless loans to low-income buyers.

    The investigation also found that regulators at every level of government ignored warning signs, and the city fed the frenzy by selling medallions and promoting them in ads as being “better than the stock market.”

    The price of a medallion rose to more than $1 million before crashing in late 2014, which left borrowers with debt they had little hope of repaying. More than 950 medallion owners have filed for bankruptcy, and thousands more are struggling to stay afloat.

    The findings also drew a quick response from other elected officials. The chairman of the Assembly’s banking committee, Kenneth Zebrowski, a Democrat, said his committee would hold a hearing on the issue; the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, said he was drafting legislation; and several other officials in New York and Albany called for the government to pressure lenders to soften loan terms.

    The biggest threat to the industry leaders appeared to be the inquiry by the attorney general, Letitia James, which will aim to determine if the lenders engaged in any illegal activity.

    “Our office is beginning an inquiry into the disturbing reports regarding the lending and business practices that may have created the taxi medallion crisis,” an office spokeswoman said in a statement. “These allegations are serious and must be thoroughly scrutinized.”

    Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said through a spokesman that he supported the inquiry. “If any of these businesses or lenders did something wrong, they deserve to be held fully accountable,” the spokesman said in a statement.

    Lenders did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, they denied wrongdoing, saying regulators had approved all of their practices and some borrowers had made poor decisions and assumed too much debt. Lenders blamed the crisis on the city for allowing ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft to enter without regulation, which they said led medallion values to plummet.

    Mr. de Blasio said the city’s investigation will focus on the brokers who arranged the loans for drivers and sometimes lent money themselves.

    “The 45-day review will identify and penalize brokers who have taken advantage of buyers and misled city authorities,” the mayor said in a statement. “The review will set down strict new rules that prevent broker practices that hurt hard-working drivers.”

    Four of the city’s biggest taxi brokers did not respond to requests for comment.

    Bhairavi Desai, founder of the Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents drivers and independent owners, said the city should not get to investigate the business practices because it was complicit in many of them.

    The government has already closed or merged all of the nonprofit credit unions that were involved in the industry, saying they participated in “unsafe and unsound banking practices.” At least one credit union leader, Alan Kaufman, the former chief executive of Melrose Credit Union, a major medallion lender, is facing civil charges.

    The other lenders in the industry include Medallion Financial, a specialty finance company; some major banks, including Capital One and Signature Bank; and several loosely regulated taxi fleet owners and brokers who entered the lending business.

    At City Hall, officials said Monday they were focused on how to help the roughly 4,000 drivers who bought medallions during the bubble, as well as thousands of longtime owners who were encouraged to refinance their loans to take out more money during that period.

    One city councilman, Mark Levine, said he was drafting a bill that would allow the city to buy medallion loans from lenders and then forgive much of the debt owed by the borrowers. He said lenders likely would agree because they are eager to exit the business. But he added that his bill would force lenders to sell at discounted prices.

    “The city made hundreds of millions by pumping up sales of wildly overpriced medallions — as late as 2014 when it was clear that these assets were poised to decline,” said Mr. Levine, a Democrat. “We have an obligation now to find some way to offer relief to the driver-owners whose lives have been ruined.”

    Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, proposed a similar solution in a letter to the mayor. He said the city should convene the lenders and pressure them to partially forgive loans.

    “These lenders too often dealt in bad faith with a group of hard-working, unsuspecting workers who deserved much better and have yet to receive any measure of justice,” wrote Mr. Stringer, who added that the state should close a loophole that allowed the lenders to classify their loans as business deals, which have looser regulations.

    Last November, amid a spate of suicides by taxi drivers, including three medallion owners with overwhelming debt, the Council created a task force to study the taxi industry.

    On Monday, a spokesman for the speaker, Mr. Johnson, said that members of the task force would be appointed very soon. He also criticized the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the city agency that sold the medallions.

    “We will explore every tool we have to ensure that moving forward, the T.L.C. protects medallion owners and drivers from predatory actors including lenders, medallion brokers, and fleet managers,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.

    Another councilman, Ritchie Torres, who heads the Council’s oversight committee, disclosed Monday for the first time that he had been trying to launch his own probe since last year, but had been stymied by the taxi commission. “The T.L.C. hasn’t just been asleep at the wheel, they have been actively stonewalling,” he said.

    A T.L.C. spokesman declined to comment.

    In Albany, several lawmakers also said they were researching potential bills.

    One of them, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou of Manhattan, a member of the committee on banks, said she hoped to pass legislation before the end of the year. She said the state agencies involved in the crisis, including the Department of Financial Services, should be examined.

    “My world has been shaken right now, to be honest,” Ms. Niou said.

    Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter on the Metro Desk. Previously, he covered state government for the Houston Chronicle and for The Seattle Times. @brianmrosenthal

    #USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

  • Why Hong Kong cannot copy Singapore’s approach to public housing | South China Morning Post
    https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/3008807/why-hong-kong-cannot-copy-singapores-approach-public-housing


    Le peinurie de logements sociaux à Hong Kong est le fruit de la version néolibérale du colonialisme. L’état de Singapour a resolu le problème en imposant l’achat d’appartements sociaux et en confisquant contre dédommagement des territoires privés.

    The technocratic, highly autonomous and competent Singaporean state took on the role of providing affordable housing on a near universal basis, subsidising home ownership for the vast majority. The development of public housing was effectively land reform and wealth redistribution on a scale unimaginable today in neoliberal Hong Kong, despite the superficial similarities in this sphere between the two cities.

    The state’s autonomy meant it was not subordinate to, or captured by, the interests of social groups, from big business and labour to landowners, property developers or finance. This is not to say the government rode roughshod over these groups, but it did mean it could plan and make decisions for the long-term good of the country, without having to cater too much to well-organised interests. Most citizens accepted this setup as they could see improvements all around, not least in their housing conditions.

    But to tackle the problem comprehensively, the HDB took on responsibility for all aspects of housing, including planning, development, design, building and maintenance. The initial priority was to create properly planned population centres outside the city centre but within easy reach. Between 1960 and 1965, the HDB surpassed its target by building more than 50,000 flats. HDB estates were later also developed with other considerations in mind, such as state industrialisation objectives, the avoidance of ethnic enclaves, and asset inflation.

    On the issue of land, ensuring there was enough for public housing meant repealing the 1920 Land Acquisition Ordinance and enacting the Land Acquisition Act (LAA) in 1966. This allowed the state to acquire land for any public purpose or work of public benefit, or for any residential, commercial, or industrial purpose. A subsequent amendment to the LAA in 1973 allowed officials to acquire private land in exchange for compensation below market value. The acquisitions were seldom challenged in the courts.

    Such draconian rules greatly facilitated housing and industrialisation programmes. State ownership of land rose from 31 per cent in 1949 to 44 per cent in 1960, and 76 per cent by 1985. Land reclamation did play a part in this change, along with the transfer of British military space. But to ensure a perpetual supply, Lee’s government also passed legislation to ensure the leases on state-owned land would not exceed 99 years.

    These methods are unthinkable in contemporary Hong Kong. While legally possible, the compulsory acquisition of private land for public housing is rare and generally eschewed. Although Hong Kong law allows the Land Development Corporation (LDC) to take space away from private owners at market prices, the efficacy of this law is limited. The LDC has to demonstrate there is no “undue detriment” to the interests of landowners, which is often difficult.

    Land reform almost always requires landowners’ interests be subordinate to those of the state, and especially those of the landless. This is not the case in Hong Kong.

    Lastly, to ensure the affordability of public housing, the Singapore government designed its policies to explicitly favour home ownership. The units set aside for this purpose were initially priced such that buying was a more attractive option than renting HDB homes.

    In 1968 the Singapore government went further. It increased the amount of money Singaporeans had to contribute to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) so that citizens could then use these savings to finance home purchases. The CPF was established in 1955 as a pension plan, with employees putting in 5 per cent of their monthly salary.

    The revamped CPF required monthly contributions of 6 per cent from the employee, and 6 per cent from employers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 16 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively. This demanded sacrifice on the part of citizens since it ate into their daily spending.

    Such stringent mandatory savings plans would be unlikely to garner much support in Hong Kong. Many would perceive them as paternalistic and would not accept the lower take-home pay they entail.

    In 2017, two decades after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, only about 36 per cent of households were in public housing and 49 per cent owned their homes.

    Unlike Singapore, where financing is facilitated by affordable public housing prices and CPF savings, ownership of public flats in Hong Kong is not supported by government policy to the same degree. A successful applicant for a flat in Hong Kong under the Home Ownership Scheme does not own the property until he or she pays a land premium determined by the market value. On acquiring the flat, the applicant pays to the government only the cost of its construction.

    Neither Singapore’s past experience nor its present circumstances suggest it should be a model for Hong Kong. While the public housing programme was hugely successful in its first 50 years, some Singaporeans now raise questions about the long-term viability of a policy based (implicitly at least) on perpetually rising flat values. Having put much of their CPF savings into securing a home, many Singaporeans today are worried about the prospect of declining values on their ageing HDB properties.

    Given how unique and context-specific Singapore’s success in public housing was, it is questionable whether it can be grafted onto contemporary Hong Kong’s context – unless its society and politics were to mimic Singapore’s, and how likely or desirable is that for Hong Kong? ■

    Lee Hsin is a PhD student at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Donald Low is a senior lecturer and professor of practice in public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and is director of its Leadership and Public Policy Programme

    #Hong_Kong #Chine #Singapour #logement #immobilier #capitalisme

  • What is Q DAO and #usdq StableCoin? Fully Explained
    https://hackernoon.com/what-is-q-dao-and-usdq-stablecoin-fully-explained-4435b2f53f54?source=rs

    Stablecoins have advanced as a new iteration on cryptocurrencies, enabling to address such issues as high volatility and interactions with legacy financial systems.Today I’m sharing the interview with Slava Mikhalkin — IT Manager and #blockchain architect in PLATINUM ENGINEERING, who helped deploy dozens of DLT-based success stories. Smart contracts Slava’s team develops quickly turn into industry best practices. He shares his opinion about USDQ, a unique fully decentralized stablecoin for easy Bitcoin collateralization. Slava is certain that blockchain will disrupt finance as we know it. He goes raw on USDQ’s inner working, telling it all.So, let’s look into real-life use cases for Q DAO.Slava Mikhalkin — IT Manager and blockchain architect in PLATINUM ENGINEERING. Leveraging +15Y developer track (...)

    #cryptocurrency #stable-coin #qdao

  • The Future of #finance and #blockchain Technologies used for SMEs Financing
    https://hackernoon.com/the-future-of-finance-and-blockchain-technologies-used-for-smes-financin

    tozex.ioDREAM, FINANCE & SUCCEEDDespite playing a major role in the economy, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) still suffer from a deep funding shortfall. Traditional finance does not offer appropriate answer to small and mid-cap market. Access to finance appears to be the largest challenge for SMEs.The combination of non-reliable public information and complex share transferability mechanisms doesn’t attract investors because of the illiquid nature of investments. Investors are looking for safe corporate values ​​and sufficient liquidity to swap shares. For SMEs, time to market is often a major milestone. Financing deadlines must follow the rhythm of strategic companies’ decisions.SMEs had so far only few financing tools at their disposal until the emergence of #token based (...)

    #cryptoasset #ico

  • 5 Ways #blockchain is Transforming #ecommerce
    https://hackernoon.com/5-ways-blockchain-is-transforming-ecommerce-b90b4dd61f1c?source=rss----3

    A typical eCommerce marketplace has witnessed its fair share of transitions and evolutions. With all these alterations underway — this domain has gone on to become one of the most lucrative sectors of the 21st Century.So, what’s next on the plate for a traditional eCommerce business?The answer is relatively simple and straight-forward — BLOCKCHAIN.Blockchain has been enjoying a good run in the financial industry for quite some time now. According to a recent Statista Report, the global blockchain market is expected to see a surge of more than 400% by 2021.As blockchain is inching closer to the real sectors of the economy — An increasing number of people have now started talking about other possible use-cases of blockchain apart from finance, especially in the most lucrative domain of them all —  (...)

    #entrepreneurship #startup #bitcoin

  • Problems with #blockchain Technology
    https://hackernoon.com/problems-with-blockchain-technology-d614ea123279?source=rss----3a8144eab

    Niggling Problems with Blockchain TechnologyBlockchain technology has become one of the biggest buzzwords not only in the field of finance but also in technology. Blockchain proponents believe that the technology will revolutionize financial services as it functions without a central authority. The technology also stores data in a tamper-proof way which is an additional advantage of the technology. It is believed that the emerging blockchain technology will be beneficial for a number of industries beyond finance and technology, particularly for the industries which have to keep a huge trail of paper records such as healthcare, law, and real estate.Though there are numerous benefits of the blockchain technology slow transaction speed and lack of standardization have slowed down the (...)

    #challenges-in-blockchain #blockchain-technology

  • From Warm Intro to $107M: Qwil’s Step-By-Step Fundraising Journey
    https://hackernoon.com/from-warm-intro-to-107m-qwils-step-by-step-fundraising-journey-412315450

    It’s a near-universal pain point for freelancers: the unpredictable cash flow cycle. It’s common to wait 30-plus days to be paid after completing a job, and sometimes, it’s just too long.Qwil, says its co-founder and CEO, Johnny Reinsch, was born out of his own experience as an independent contractor with a high-value client that paid him late. “I was about to overdraw my bank account the day before my payment was due,” he says. “I tracked down the finance person and got the money just in time, but I was like, ‘why does it have to work this way?’”As a self-described “recovering M&A lawyer” and a former exec at bitcoin wallet Xapo, he knew that it didn’t.Enter Qwil — a fintech company with a mission to “empower freelancers with instant, convenient access to credit.” For businesses, it’s a way to (...)

    #entrepreneurship #founders #startup #loans #venture-capital

  • How Software #security Vulnerabilities Work And What You Can Do To Stay Safe
    https://hackernoon.com/how-software-security-vulnerabilities-work-and-what-you-can-do-to-stay-s

    Most crucial aspects of our life including our finance, identity, and healthcare now depend on code. Software security is now a critical aspect for not just companies, but individuals as well.In the latest circumstances, we see that software security concepts should be understood at least on a basic level by anyone who is using modern software products and services. And for any developer that works on designing, creating or maintaining these products and services, a comprehensive understanding of security vulnerabilities and security best practices is a must to avoid security breaches that may now cost much more than ever.Most of the time, security vulnerabilities seem to us far and unfamiliar; they are potential issues to us that are not entirely tangible; thus easy to neglect. (...)

    #cybersecurity #hacking #software-development #software-engineering

  • Why there is still no full-fledged Internet of Value?
    https://hackernoon.com/why-there-is-still-no-full-fledged-internet-of-value-eecc58889a56?source

    Despite the emergence of new technologies (both information — data transfer — and financial — blockchain and cryptocurrencies), the world of modern finance is still characterized by isolated networks for creating, storing, transmitting and exchanging values. But why, having entered the era of fast, easy, effective and cheap information exchange (the internet), have we still not entered the era of the Internet of Value? What’s the problem, and is there any new technology that could contribute to its solution?Over the past two decades, we have witnessed the explosive development of information processing and transmission technologies that have revolutionized many aspects of human life, including the economy, as well as our daily lives. At the same time, however, technology for transferring value (...)

    #decentralization #internet-of-value #network #layer-2 #layer-3

  • How #blockchain Can Fix the Problem of Insider Trading
    https://hackernoon.com/how-blockchain-can-fix-the-problem-of-insider-trading-c8153a50055?source

    Insider trading may sound bad. But where the law is concerned, it’s the letter that counts.In the 2016 Supreme Court case Salman v. United States, the Court cleared up some fuzzy loopholes in previous wording around the rules of insider trading. And the rules seem to leave room for creative use of blockchain investing platforms.On the heels of the Salman decision, several questions about the boundaries of insider trading have been cleared up. But an important one remains, and it’s one that leaves a lot of room for collaborative investing on the blockchain.Salman Solidified Insider Trading ParametersThe Salman decision found a grocer named Bassam Salman guilty of knowingly trading on confidential information and profiting upwards of $1.5 million after acting on an insider tip from his (...)

    #fintech #supreme-court #finance #insider-trading

  • Robert Reich: Here’s everything you need to know about the new economy – Alternet.org
    https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/robert-reich-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-economy

    The biggest economic story of our times isn’t about supply and demand. It’s about institutions and politics. It’s about power.

    The median annual earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers in 1979, in today’s dollars, was $43,680. The median earnings in 2018 was $45,708. If between 1979 and 2018, the American economy almost tripled in size, so where did the gains go? Most went to the top.

    Now this is broadly known, but there is less certainty about why.

    1. The Conventional View

    Conventional wisdom attributes the widening economic divide to globalization and technological change – the “inevitable” result of the invisible hand of the so-called “free market.”

    Simply put, as the American economy merged with the rest of the globe, American workers had to compete with foreign workers willing to toil for a fraction of American wages. And as technology advanced, American workers also had to compete with software and robots that were cheaper to employ than Americans.

    So, according to this conventional view, the only realistic way to raise the wages of most Americans is to give them more and better education and job training, so they can become more competitive. They can thereby overcome the so-called “skills gap” that keeps them from taking the jobs of the future – jobs and opportunities generated by new technologies.

    2. A Deeper View of the American Political Economy

    The conventional story isn’t completely wrong, and education and training are important. But the conventional view leaves out some of the largest and most important changes, and therefore overlooks the most important solutions.

    To understand what really happened, it’s critical to understand that there is no “free market” in nature. The term “free market” suggests outcomes are objectively fair and that any “intervention” in the free market is somehow “unnatural.” But in reality, markets cannot exist without people constructing them. Markets depend on rules, and rules come out of legislatures, executive agencies, and courts. The biggest political change over the last four decades is the overwhelming dominance of big money in politics – influencing what those rules are to be.

    3. The Decline of Countervailing Power

    Now, go back to the first three decades after World War II – a period that coupled the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen with the creation of the largest middle class the world has ever witnessed. The great economic thinker John Kenneth Galbraith asked at the time: Why is capitalism working so well for so many?

    His answer was as surprising as it was obvious: American capitalism contained hidden pools of what he called “countervailing power” that offset the power of large corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy: labor unions, state and local banks, farm cooperatives, and small retail chains, for example. All of these sources of countervailing power had been fostered by the New Deal. They balanced the American economic system.

    But since the late 1970s, these sources of countervailing power have been decimated, leading to an unbalanced system and producing widening economic inequality and stagnating wages. The result has become a vicious cycle in which big money – emanating from big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy – determine the rules of the economic game, and those rules generate more money at the top.

    Consider, for example, the ever-expanding tax cuts or loopholes for large corporations, the financial sector, and the wealthy. Contrast them with increases in payroll taxes for average workers.

    Or look at the bank and corporate bailouts but little or no help for homeowners caught in the downdraft of the Great Recession.

    Finally, look at the increasing barriers to labor unions, such as the proliferation of so-called “right-to-work” laws and the simultaneous erosion of antitrust and the emergence of large concentrations of corporate power.

    The public knows the game is rigged, which is why almost all the political energy is now anti-establishment. This is a big reason why Trump won the 2016 election. Authoritarian populists through history have used anger and directed it at racial and ethnic minorities and foreigners.

    It’s also a big reason why the only alternative to authoritarian populism is progressive populism – countervailing the moneyed interests with a democracy that reorganizes the market to benefit the many rather than a small group at the top.

    How do we build a new countervailing power and move toward a new progressive economics?

    4. Economics and Political Power

    The choice isn’t between a free market and government. The question is who has the power to organize the market, and for whom.

    Stagnant wages, job insecurity, widening inequality, and mounting wealth at the top are the result of political choices. The system is rigged and must be un-rigged.

    Conventional economics posits that the most important goals are efficiency and economic growth. But policies can be “efficient” by making the rich even wealthier as long as no one else is worse off – and that won’t remedy what’s happened. Economic growth is meaningless if the gains from growth keep going to the top and nothing trickles down.

    Stop assuming that all that’s needed is better education and job training. Sure, Americans need access to better schools and skills, but the basic problem isn’t simply a “skills gap.” It’s a market that’s organized to push more income and wealth toward the top, rather than distribute it broadly.

    Stop aiming to “redistribute” from richer to poorer after the market has distributed income. Instead, change the organization of the market so that a fair pre-distribution occurs inside it.

    Stop thinking that the goal is only to create more jobs. America’s real jobs crisis is a scarcity of good jobs.

    The American economy cannot generate widespread prosperity without a large and growing middle class whose spending fuels the economy.

    5. Building a Multi-racial, Multi-ethnic, Coalition of the Middle Class, Working Class, and Poor.

    Don’t let the moneyed interests divide and conquer along racial and gender lines. Racism and sexism are very real issues within our economic system, and they are often exploited to keep us from realizing the power we can have when we stand together. All are disempowered by the moneyed interests, and all have a stake in rebuilding countervailing power.

    6. Offering a Compelling Set of Ideas about What Should be Done with Countervailing Power.

    For example:

    — A guaranteed basic income so no one is impoverished,

    — A guaranteed job so everyone can get ahead,

    — A progressive wealth tax to pay for these and other basics,

    — Stronger unions so workers have more bargaining power,

    — New forms of corporate organization so workers have more voice,

    – A Green New Deal so workers can get better jobs while fighting climate change.

    — Reinvigorated antitrust so concentrations of economic power are broken up,

    — Election finance reforms to get big money out of politics and end the revolving door,

    — Voting reforms so votes cannot be suppressed.

    7. Building the leadership for this new countervailing power.

    You can help lead the way. You can be a leader of this movement. How?

    For one, you can run for office – in your community, say, city council or school board. Or run for state office. Or even national office.

    Don’t be intimidated by politics. We need good people to run. And don’t worry that you’ll be beholden to a handful of rich donors. These days, smaller donors are more active than ever.

    So, what’s the secret? Tell it like it is and be yourself. And then, as I’ve said, talk about economics in terms of political power and understand the 7 principles. Build countervailing power through a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition. And offer a compelling set of ideas about what can and should be done.

    But you don’t need to hold formal office to be a leader.

    You can be a leader by organizing and mobilizing people: Your co-workers – to form a union. Your friends and neighbors – to push for better roads and schools, and fairer local taxes. People at your church or synagogue or mosque – to demand better treatment of the poor, the elderly, children, immigrants. You can link your group up with other groups pursuing similar ends, and create a movement. That’s how we got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. How we got marriage equality. It’s how we get good people elected.

    The key to organizing and mobilizing is creating a leadership team, and then reaching out systematically to others, giving them tasks and responsibilities, starting small and gaining a few victories so people can feel their power, and then growing from there.

    You’ll need to be patient and steadfast. Keep people together and focused. And be careful not to burn out. Organizing and mobilizing is hard, but once organized and mobilized, there’s no end to what people can accomplish.

    You can also be a leader by uncovering critical information, fighting lies, spreading the truth. Core responsibilities of leadership are revealing the facts about widening inequalities of income, wealth, and political power – and uncovering their consequences.

    A century ago they were called “muckrakers.” More recently, investigative reporters. I’m talking about courageous journalists who speak truth to power.

    But this form of leadership isn’t limited to reporters. It includes whistleblowers, who alert the public to abuses of power. And here courage is also required because when you blow the whistle on the powerful, the powerful sometimes strike back.

    This form of leadership also includes researchers, who dig up new sources of data and analyze them in ways that enlighten and motivate.

    In other words, there isn’t just one path to leadership. Whether you seek formal authority by running and gaining public office, or you organize and mobilize people into being effective advocates, or you discover and spread the truth – you are creating and developing countervailing power to spread the gains of the economy and strengthen our democracy.

    These are worthy and noble objectives. They are worth your time. They can be worth a lifetime.

    #Robert_Reich #Politique_USA #Economie #Indignez_vous

  • The best #blockchain apps will be when the user doesn’t know it’s a blockchain app
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    On my startup journey, there’s something I’ve been saying to those in the startup space that resonates with them:“The best blockchain apps will be when the user doesn’t even know it’s a blockchain app”.Now before getting upset, let me clarify. I’m a big believer in blockchain solutions and applications (as many of my friends that have suffered through my numerous diatribes would attest). The possibilities that blockchain and Web 3.0 can introduce are incredibly exciting and there are many people and organizations making this vision a reality (for one of my personal favorites, follow Kevin Owocki — Founder of Gitcoin).But still when people hear this line, they take solace in it. Generally, I’ve found they take solace in it for two reasons:They believe that I’m saying this to downplay the effect (...)

    #politics #social-enterprise #web3 #campaign-finance

  • Balancing Openness & Safety in DeFi: Mitigating Front Running on #bancor
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    Open financial networks on the #ethereum #blockchain must deal with the risk of exposing users to an array of abusive practices. While decentralized finance or “DeFi” instruments offer huge advantages over legacy financial systems, namely by eliminating rent-seeking intermediaries and bringing new levels of transparency to token markets, network designers should seek to strike a balance between openness and user safety. After all, if DeFi solutions become rife with abuse and are only safe for the most advanced users, they will undermine the very openness that DeFi projects seek to promote.One such attempt to exploit the design of DeFi architectures is the abusive practice known as front running, which occurs when malicious actors steal money from users by stepping in front of pending (...)

    #bitcoin #eos

  • Why Managing Crypto Assets Is Different From Fiat
    https://hackernoon.com/why-managing-crypto-assets-is-different-from-fiat-85a2c5d33bab?source=rs

    The skills required to be a successful CFO in traditional finance are certainly important, but successful crypto CFOs have an entirely new set of skills to develop.While there is some overlap between traditional CFO skills and those needed for crypto companies, the simple truth is that blockchain technology is too transformative for CFOs to not update their knowledge.Here are seven ways that managing crypto assets differs from managing fiat:Transactions are more difficult to trackFiat: Understanding exactly who sent or received a transaction is simple. The beneficiary and bank are clearly identified. If a transaction for $10,000 was sent to ABC Construction, it’s automatically labelled by the bank and there’s no guesswork required.Crypto: Imagine if instead of seeing “ABC Construction,” (...)

    #bitcoin

  • Understanding the Terminology in Your Employee #equity Offer
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    Illustration by David HuangNo one — with the possible exception of finance experts — looks at their equity package and thinks, “Yep, makes sense.”To help clarify, we’ve put together a short glossary of terms you’re likely to see in your offer, along with literal — and more practical — definitions.1. Four-year monthly vestYou thought you were getting that fat 0.1% equity stake the moment you signed? Think again, friend. You’re going to receive it piecemeal, on a regular schedule referred to as a “vesting schedule.” Think of it as your company’s layaway plan for paying out your equity grant.Literal Definition: You will receive a fraction of your equity package each month, and if you’re still working there in four years, you will have your entire package.Practical Definition: You’re probably not going to earn (...)

    #startup #equity-terminology #employee-equity-offer #equity-offer

  • #ethereum Falls Back to Earth. Can it Re-ascend?
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    A Long Way Down from the Ethereal RealmOverviewEthereum’s fall from grace this year is a poorly guarded secret within the broader crypto and finance communities. The decline in Initial Coin Offerings’ popularity is one obvious factor, but of pertinence has been Ethereum’s proven inability to process transactions across its network in an efficient manner. In this post, I explore Ethereum transaction costs using data made available via Google Bigquery. This writeup assumes a basic understanding of the mechanics of proof-of-work blockchains (the core innovation upon which Ethereum and Bitcoin are based) and SQL. The ease with which one can track recent scalability inefficiencies across the Ethereum network offers a compelling test case in favor of #blockchain’s promise of facilitating a more (...)

    #falling-ethereum #ethereum-analysis #crypto-review

  • Your old bank’s best chance is to go quantum
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    Your Old Bank’s Best Chance lies in going QuantumPeaking into a possible next-gen financial services phenomenon and how blindly adapting to DLTs without proofing them may be a fiascoCutting corners leveraged businesses since the beginning of trade. He who offers it cheaper and faster leverages on its own efficiency to overcome its competitors.The surge of decentralized technologies have done just that.Whenever there is a tight turn, whoever is on the road may either slow down to keep on a regulated drive or opt out for a faster way by cutting the corner of the curve.The illusion of a long straight line disarmed traditional industries, namely finance, rather incompetent, unprepared and disbelieving in recent developments, as if the democratization of access to money and its management was (...)

    #finance-and-banking #blockchain #fintech #disruption #future

  • #ai to Transform The Financial Services: Six Examples
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    Artificial Intelligence is not a new kid on the block, but rather an integral part of a growing number of industries. Forward-thinking executive managers and business owners actively explore new AI use in finance and other areas to get a competitive edge on the market.First used mostly in computer science, AI now has advanced to the most important areas of our life, e.g.:TransportationEducationHealth careFinancial services.The rise of AI in the financial industry shows how fast it’s gaining traction, even in traditionally conservative areas, and how quickly it’s changing the business landscape. Here are just some of the most popular examples of AI in finance.1. AI and Credit DecisionsArtificial Intelligence provides a faster, more accurate assessment of a potential borrower, at less cost, (...)

    #artificial-intelligence #fintech #financial-services #banking

  • How to Hodl #crypto and Earn Compound Interest
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    Applying the Power of Compound Interest to CryptoAlbert Einstein once said that he considered compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. This quote has become a universal truth in the finance world. The medium-to-long term upside of compound interest has significant implications for investors. This financial tool is now available to crypto investors, providing them with the ability to earn compound interest in #bitcoin with services like the BlockFi Interest Account. But how does it all work?How Does Compound Interest Work?Compound interest is one of the most powerful financial tools for individuals and businesses to ensure long-term financial stability. The key is patience. Generally speaking, products offering compound interest look at returns over one, five, or even (...)

    #ethereum #cryptocurrency #compound-interest

  • For #energy, It’s Digitization Before Decentralization
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    Roughly 10 years ago the vision of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system was published, marking the launch of #bitcoin and the foundation of #blockchain. While an explosion of new startups have enamored the cryptocurrency craze, the energy sector has envisioned leveraging blockchain for reasons similar to that of finance — transparency, trust, and automation. I’d like to highlight a few observations (and debunk a myth or two) now that blockchain hype is subsiding and new distributed energy solutions remain scarce.The youth is starting to changeMany have speculated the crypto-revolution in finance will naturally come for other industries like energy. However, what finance had that energy did not is a disruption moment from mobile and digital — a trend that forced incumbent monopolies to rethink (...)

    #distributed-systems #distributed-ledgers

  • The Mystery of the Exiled Billionaire Whistle-Blower - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-exiled-billionaire-whistleblower.html

    From a penthouse on Central Park, Guo Wengui has exposed a phenomenal web of corruption in China’s ruling elite — if, that is, he’s telling the truth.

    By Lauren Hilgers, Jan. 10, 2018

    阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

    On a recent Saturday afternoon, an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui was holding forth in his New York apartment, sipping tea while an assistant lingered quietly just outside the door, slipping in occasionally to keep Guo’s glass cup perfectly full. The tycoon’s Twitter account had been suspended again — it was the fifth or sixth time, by Guo’s count — and he blamed the Communist Party of China. “It’s not normal!” he said, about this cycle of blocking and reinstating. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need anyone.”

    Guo’s New York apartment is a 9,000-square-foot residence along Central Park that he bought for $67.5 million in 2015. He sat in a Victorian-style chair, his back to a pair of west-facing windows, the sunset casting craggy shadows. A black-and-white painting of an angry-looking monkey hung on the wall to Guo’s right, a hat bearing a star-and-wreath Soviet insignia on its head and a cigarette hanging from its lips. Guo had arrived dressed entirely in black, except for two silver stripes on each lapel. “I have the best houses,” he told me. Guo had picked his apartment for its location, its three sprawling balconies and the meticulously tiled floor in the entryway. He has the best apartment in London, he said; the biggest apartment in Hong Kong. His yacht is docked along the Hudson River. He is comfortable and, anyway, Guo likes to say that as a Buddhist, he wants for nothing. If it were down to his own needs alone, he would have kept his profile low. But he has a higher purpose. He is going to save China.

    Guo pitches himself as a former insider, a man who knows the secrets of a government that tightly controls the flow of information. A man who, in 2017, did the unthinkable — tearing open the veil of secrecy that has long surrounded China’s political elite, lobbing accusations about corruption, extramarital affairs and murder plots over Facebook and Twitter. His YouTube videos and tweets have drawn in farmers and shopkeepers, democracy activists, writers and businesspeople. In China, people have been arrested for chatting about Guo online and distributing T-shirts with one of his slogans printed on the front (“This is only the beginning!”). In New York, Guo has split a community of dissidents and democracy activists down the middle. Some support him. Others believe that Guo himself is a government spy.

    Nothing in Guo’s story is as straightforward as he would like it to seem. Guo is 47 years old, or 48, or 49. Although he has captured the attention of publications like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the articles that have run about him have offered only hazy details about his life. This is because his biography varies so widely from one source to the next. Maybe his name isn’t even Guo Wengui. It could be Guo Wugui. There are reports that in Hong Kong, Guo occasionally goes by the name Guo Haoyun.

    When pressed, Guo claims a record of unblemished integrity in his business dealings, both in real estate and in finance (when it comes to his personal life, he strikes a more careful balance between virility and dedication to his family). “I never took a square of land from the government,” he said. “I didn’t take a penny of investment from the banks.” If you accept favors, he said, people will try to exploit your weaknesses. So, Guo claims, he opted to take no money and have no weaknesses.

    Yet when Guo left China in 2014, he fled in anticipation of corruption charges. A former business partner had been detained just days before, and his political patron would be detained a few days afterward. In 2015, articles about corruption in Guo’s business dealings — stories that he claims are largely fabrications — started appearing in the media. He was accused of defrauding business partners and colluding with corrupt officials. To hear Guo tell it, his political and business opponents used a national corruption campaign as a cover for a personal vendetta.

    Whatever prompted Guo to take action, his campaign came during an important year for China’s president, Xi Jinping. In October, the Communist Party of China (C.P.C.) convened its 19th National Congress, a twice-a-decade event that sets the contours of political power for the next five years. The country is in the throes of a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign, and Xi has overseen a crackdown on dissidents and human rights activists while increasing investment in censorship and surveillance. Guo has become a thorn in China’s side at the precise moment the country is working to expand its influence, and its censorship program, overseas.

    In November 2017, the Tiananmen Square activist Wang Dan warned of the growing influence of the C.P.C. on university campuses in the United States. His own attempts to hold “China salons” on college campuses had largely been blocked by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association — a group with ties to China’s government. Around the same time, the academic publisher Springer Nature agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles on Tibet, Taiwan and China’s political elite. Reports emerged last year that China is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly to purchase ads on Facebook (a service that is blocked within China’s borders). In Australia, concerns about China’s growing influence led to a ban on foreign political donations.

    “That’s why I’m telling the United States they should really be careful,” Guo said. China’s influence is spreading, he says, and he believes his own efforts to change China will have global consequences. “Like in an American movie,” he told me with unflinching self-confidence. “In the last minutes, we will save the world.”

    Propaganda, censorship and rewritten histories have long been specialties of authoritarian nations. The aim, as famously explained by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, is to confuse: to breed a combination of cynicism and gullibility. Propaganda can leave people in doubt of all news sources, suspicious of their neighbors, picking and choosing at random what pieces of information to believe. Without a political reality grounded in facts, people are left unmoored, building their world on whatever foundation — imaginary or otherwise — they might choose.

    The tight grip that the C.P.C. keeps on information may be nothing new, but China’s leadership has been working hard to update the way it censors and broadcasts. People in China distrusted print and television media long before U.S. politicians started throwing around accusations of “fake news.” In 2016, President Xi Jinping was explicit about the arrangement, informing the country’s media that it should be “surnamed Party.” Likewise, while the West has only recently begun to grapple with government-sponsored commenters on social media, China’s government has been manipulating online conversations for over a decade.

    “They create all kinds of confusion,” said Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning American novelist born in China’s Liaoning Province, and a vocal supporter of Guo. “You don’t know what information you have and whether it’s right. You don’t know who are the informers, who are the agents.”

    Online, the C.P.C. controls information by blocking websites, monitoring content and employing an army of commenters widely known as the 50-cent party. The name was used as early as 2004, when a municipal government in Hunan Province hired a number of online commenters, offering a stipend of 600 yuan, or about $72. Since then, the 50-cent party has spread. In 2016, researchers from Harvard, Stanford and the University of California-San Diego estimated that these paid commenters generated 448 million social-media comments annually. The posts, researchers found, were conflict averse, cheerleading for the party rather than defending it. Their aim seemed not to be engaging in argument but rather distracting the public and redirecting attention from sensitive issues.

    In early 2017, Guo issued his first salvos against China’s ruling elite through more traditional channels. He contacted a handful of Chinese-language media outlets based in the United States. He gave interviews to the Long Island-based publication Mingjing News and to Voice of America — a live event that was cut short by producers, leading to speculation that V.O.A. had caved to Chinese government pressure. He called The New York Times and spoke with reporters at The Wall Street Journal. It did not take long, however, before the billionaire turned to direct appeals through social media. The accusations he made were explosive — he attacked Wang Qishan, Xi Jinping’s corruption czar, and Meng Jianzhu, the secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, another prominent player in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. He talked about Wang’s mistresses, his business interests and conflicts within the party.

    In one YouTube video, released on Aug. 4, Guo addressed the tension between Wang and another anti-corruption official named Zhang Huawei. He recounted having dinner with Zhang when “he called Wang Qishan’s secretary and gave him orders,” Guo said. “Think about what Wang had to suffer in silence back then. They slept with the same women, and Zhang knew everything about Wang.” In addition, Guo said, Zhang knew about Wang’s corrupt business dealings. When Zhang Huawei was placed under official investigation in April, Guo claimed, it was a result of a grudge.

    “Everyone in China is a slave,” Guo said in the video. “With the exception of the nobility.”

    To those who believe Guo’s claims, they expose a depth of corruption that would surprise even the most jaded opponent of the C.P.C. “The corruption is on such a scale,” Ha Jin said. “Who could imagine that the czar of anti-corruption would himself be corrupt? It is extraordinary.”

    Retaliation came quickly. A barrage of counteraccusations began pouring out against Guo, most published in the pages of the state-run Chinese media. Warrants for his arrest were issued on charges of corruption, bribery and even rape. China asked Interpol to issue a red notice calling for Guo’s arrest and extradition. He was running out of money, it was reported. In September, Guo recorded a video during which he received what he said was a phone call from his fifth brother: Two of Guo’s former employees had been detained, and their family members were threatening suicide. “My Twitter followers are so important they are like heaven to me,” Guo said. But, he declared, he could not ignore the well-being of his family and his employees. “I cannot finish the show as I had planned,” he said. Later, Guo told his followers in a video that he was planning to divorce his wife, in order to shield her from the backlash against him.

    Guo quickly resumed posting videos and encouraging his followers. His accusations continued to accumulate throughout 2017, and he recently started his own YouTube channel (and has yet to divorce his wife). His YouTube videos are released according to no particular schedule, sometimes several days in a row, some weeks not at all. He has developed a casual, talkative style. In some, Guo is running on a treadmill or still sweating after a workout. He has demonstrated cooking techniques and played with a tiny, fluffy dog, a gift from his daughter. He invites his viewers into a world of luxury and offers them a mix of secrets, gossip and insider knowledge.

    Wang Qishan, Guo has claimed, is hiding the money he secretly earned in the Hainan-based conglomerate HNA Group, a company with an estimated $35 billion worth of investments in the United States. (HNA Group denies any ties to Wang and is suing Guo.) He accused Wang of carrying on an affair with the actress Fan Bingbing. (Fan is reportedly suing Guo for defamation.) He told stories of petty arguments among officials and claimed that Chinese officials sabotaged Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014 en route to Beijing, in order to cover up an organ-harvesting scheme. Most of Guo’s accusations have proved nearly impossible to verify.

    “This guy is just covered in question marks,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna who specializes in Chinese governance.

    The questions that cover Guo have posed a problem for both the United States government and the Western journalists who, in trying to write about him, have found themselves buffeted by the currents of propaganda, misinformation and the tight-lipped code of the C.P.C. elite. His claims have also divided a group of exiled dissidents and democracy activists — people who might seem like Guo’s natural allies. For the most part, the democracy activists who flee China have been chased from their country for protesting the government or promoting human rights, not because of corruption charges. They tell stories of personal persecution, not insider tales of bribery, sex and money. And perhaps as a consequence, few exiled activists command as large an audience as Guo. “I will believe him,” Ha Jin said, “until one of his serious accusations is proved to be false.”

    Pei, the professor, warns not to take any of Guo’s accusations at face value. The reaction from the C.P.C. has been so extreme, however, that Pei believes Guo must know something. “He must mean something to the government,” he said. “They must be really bothered by this billionaire.” In May, Chinese officials visited Guo on visas that did not allow them to conduct official business, causing a confrontation with the F.B.I. A few weeks later, according to The Washington Times, China’s calls for Guo’s extradition led to a White House showdown, during which Jeff Sessions threatened to resign if Guo was sent back to China.

    Guo has a history of cultivating relationships with the politically influential, and the trend has continued in New York. He famously bought 5,000 copies of a book by Cherie Blair, Tony Blair’s wife. (“It was to give to my employees,” Guo told me. “I often gave my employees books to read.”) Guo has also cultivated a special relationship with Steve Bannon, whom he says he has met with a handful of times, although the two have no financial relationship. Not long after one of their meetings, Bannon appeared on Breitbart Radio and called China “an enemy of incalculable power.”

    Despite Guo’s high-powered supporters and his army of online followers, one important mark of believability has continued to elude him. Western news organizations have struggled to find evidence that would corroborate Guo’s claims. When his claims appear in print, they are carefully hedged — delivered with none of his signature charm and bombast. “Why do you need more evidence?” Guo complained in his apartment. “I can give them evidence, no problem. But while they’re out spending time investigating, I’m waiting around to get killed!”

    The details of Guo’s life may be impossible to verify, but the broad strokes confirm a picture of a man whose fortunes have risen and fallen with the political climate in China. To hear Guo tell it, he was born in Jilin Province, in a mining town where his parents were sent during the Cultural Revolution. “There were foreigners there,” Guo says in a video recorded on what he claims is his birthday. (Guo was born on Feb. 2, or May 10, or sometime in June.) “They had the most advanced machinery. People wore popular clothing.” Guo, as a result, was not ignorant of the world. He was, however, extremely poor. “Sometimes we didn’t even have firewood,” he says. “So we burned the wet twigs from the mountains — the smoke was so thick.” Guo emphasizes this history: He came from hardship. He pulled himself up.

    The story continues into Guo’s pre-teenage years, when he moved back to his hometown in Shandong Province. He met his wife and married her when he was only 15, she 14. They moved to Heilongjiang, where they started a small manufacturing operation, taking advantage of the early days of China’s economic rise, and then to Henan. Guo got his start in real estate in a city called Zhengzhou, where he founded the Zhengzhou Yuda Property Company and built the tallest building the city had seen so far, the Yuda International Trade Center. According to Guo, he was only 25 when he made this first deal.

    The string of businesses and properties that Guo developed provide some of the confirmable scaffolding of his life. No one disputes that Guo went on to start both the Beijing Morgan Investment Company and Beijing Zenith Holdings. Morgan Investment was responsible for building a cluster of office towers called the Pangu Plaza, the tallest of which has a wavy top that loosely resembles a dragon, or perhaps a precarious cone of soft-serve ice cream. Guo is in agreement with the Chinese media that in buying the property for Pangu Plaza, he clashed with the deputy mayor of Beijing. The dispute ended when Guo turned in a lengthy sex tape capturing the deputy mayor in bed with his mistress.

    There are other details in Guo’s biography, however, that vary from one source to the next. Guo says that he never took government loans; Caixin, a Beijing-based publication, quoted “sources close to the matter” in a 2015 article claiming that Guo took out 28 loans totaling 588 million yuan, or about $89 million. Guo, according to Caixin, eventually defaulted. At some point in this story — the timeline varies — Guo became friends with the vice minister of China’s Ministry of State Security, Ma Jian. The M.S.S. is China’s answer to the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. combined. It spies on civilians and foreigners alike, conducting operations domestically and internationally, amassing information on diplomats, businessmen and even the members of the C.P.C. Describing Ma, Guo leans back in his chair and mimes smoking a cigarette. “Ma Jian! He was fat and his skin was tan.” According to Guo, Ma sat like this during their first meeting, listening to Guo’s side of a dispute. Then Ma told him to trust the country. “Trust the law,” he told Guo. “We will treat you fairly.” The older master of spycraft and the young businessman struck up a friendship that would become a cornerstone in Guo’s claims of insider knowledge, and also possibly the reason for the businessman’s downfall in China.

    Following the construction of Pangu Plaza in Beijing, Guo’s life story becomes increasingly hard to parse. He started a securities business with a man named Li You. After a falling-out, Li was detained by the authorities. Guo’s company accused Li and his company of insider trading. According to the 2015 article in Caixin, Li then penned a letter to the authorities accusing Guo of “wrongdoing.”

    As this dispute was going on, China’s anti-​corruption operation was building a case against Ma Jian. In Guo’s telling, Ma had long been rumored to be collecting intelligence on China’s leaders. As the anti-corruption campaign gained speed and officials like Wang Qishan gained power, Ma’s well of intelligence started to look like a threat. It was Guo’s relationship with Ma, the tycoon maintains, that made officials nervous. Ma was detained by the authorities in January 2015, shortly after Guo fled the country. Soon after Ma’s detention, accounts began appearing in China’s state-run media claiming that Ma had six Beijing villas, six mistresses and at least two illegitimate sons. In a 2015 article that ran in the party-run newspaper The China Daily, the writer added another detail: “The investigation also found that Ma had acted as an umbrella for the business ventures of Guo Wengui, a tycoon from Henan Province.”

    In the mix of spies, corrupt business dealings, mistresses and sex scandals, Guo has one more unbelievable story to tell about his past. It is one reason, he says, that he was mentally prepared to confront the leaders of the Communist Party. It happened nearly 29 years ago, in the aftermath of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square. According to Guo, he had donated money to the students protesting in the square, and so a group of local police officers came to find him at his home. An overzealous officer fired off a shot at Guo’s wife — at which point Guo’s younger brother jumped in front of the bullet, suffering a fatal wound. “That was when I started my plan,” he said. “If your brother had been killed in front of your eyes, would you just forget it?” Never mind the fact that it would take 28 years for him to take any public stand against the party that caused his brother’s death. Never mind that the leadership had changed. “I’m not saying everyone in the Communist Party is bad,” he said. “The system is bad. So what I need to oppose is the system.”

    On an unusually warm Saturday afternoon in Flushing, Queens, a group of around 30 of Guo’s supporters gathered for a barbecue in Kissena Park. They laid out a spread of vegetables and skewers of shrimp and squid. Some children toddled through the crowd, chewing on hot dogs and rolling around an unopened can of Coke. The adults fussed with a loudspeaker and a banner that featured the name that Guo goes by in English, Miles Kwok. “Miles Kwok, NY loves U,” it said, a heart standing in for the word “loves.” “Democracy, Justice, Liberty for China.” Someone else had carried in a life-size cutout of the billionaire.

    The revelers decided to hold the event in the park partly for the available grills but also partly because the square in front of Guo’s penthouse had turned dangerous. A few weeks earlier, some older women had been out supporting Guo when a group of Chinese men holding flags and banners showed up. At one point, the men wrapped the women in a protest banner and hit them. The park was a safer option. And the protesters had learned from Guo — it wasn’t a live audience they were hoping for. The group would be filming the protest and posting it on social media. Halfway through, Guo would call in on someone’s cellphone, and the crowd would cheer.

    Despite this show of support, Guo’s claims have divided China’s exiled dissidents to such an extent that on a single day near the end of September, two dueling meetings of pro-democracy activists were held in New York, one supporting Guo, the other casting doubt on his motivations. (“They are jealous of me,” Guo said of his detractors. “They think: Why is he so handsome? Why are so many people listening to him?”) Some of Guo’s claims are verifiably untrue — he claimed in an interview with Vice that he paid $82 million for his apartment — and others seem comically aggrandized. (Guo says he never wears the same pair of underwear twice.) But the repercussions he is facing are real.

    In December, Guo’s brother was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for destroying accounting records. The lawsuits filed against Guo for defamation are piling up, and Guo has claimed to be amassing a “war chest” of $150 million to cover his legal expenses. In September, a new set of claims against Guo were made in a 49-page document circulated by a former business rival. For Ha Jin, Guo’s significance runs deeper than his soap-opera tales of scandal and corruption. “The grand propaganda scheme is to suppress and control all the voices,” Jin said. “Now everybody knows that you can create your own voice. You can have your own show. That fact alone is historical.” In the future, Jin predicts, there will be more rebels like Guo. “There is something very primitive about this, realizing that this is a man, a regular citizen who can confront state power.”

    Ho Pin, the founder of Long Island’s Mingjing News, echoed Jin. Mingjing’s reporters felt that covering Guo was imperative, no matter the haziness of the information. “In China, the political elite that Guo was attacking had platforms of their own,” Ho said. “They have the opportunity, the power and the ability to use all the government’s apparatus to refute and oppose Guo Wengui. So our most important job is to allow Guo Wengui’s insider knowledge reach the fair, open-minded people in China.” Still, people like Pei urge caution when dealing with Guo’s claims. Even Guo’s escape raises questions. Few others have slipped through the net of China’s anti-corruption drive. “How could he get so lucky?” Pei asked. “He must have been tipped off long before.”

    At the barbecue, a supporter named Ye Rong tucked one of his children under his arm and acknowledged that Guo’s past life is riddled with holes. There was always the possibility that Guo used to be a thug, but Ye didn’t think it mattered. The rules of the conflict had been set by the Communist Party. “You need all kinds of people to oppose the Chinese government,” Ye said. “We need intellectuals; we also need thugs.”

    Guo, of course, has his own opinions about his legacy. He warned of dark times for Americans and for the world, if he doesn’t succeed in his mission to change China. “I am trying to help,” he told me. “I am not joking with you.” He continued: “I will change China within the next three years. If I don’t change it, I won’t be able to survive.”
    Correction: Jan. 12, 2018

    An earlier version of this article misidentified the name of the province where the Chinese government hired online commenters in 2004. It is Hunan Province, not Henan.

    #Chine #politique #corruption #tireurs_d_alarme

  • Meet Francis Malofiy, the Philadelphia Lawyer Who Sued Led Zeppelin
    https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin

    Francis Malofiy may be the most hated man in the Philadelphia legal community. He may also be on the cusp of getting the last laugh on rock’s golden gods.

    #droit_d_auteur #musique #plagiat

    • @sandburg Voillà

      Meet Francis Malofiy, the Philadelphia Lawyer Who Sued Led Zeppelin
      https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin

      People Laughed When This Philly Lawyer Sued Led Zeppelin. Nobody’s Laughing Now.

      Francis Malofiy may be the most hated man in the Philadelphia legal community. He may also be on the cusp of getting the last laugh on rock’s golden gods.

      By Jonathan Valania· 2/11/2019


      Philadelphia-area attorney Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.

      The fact that Philadelphia barrister Francis Alexander Malofiy, Esquire, is suing Led Zeppelin over the authorship of “Stairway to Heaven” is, by any objective measure, only the fourth most interesting thing about him. Unfortunately for the reader, and the purposes of this story, the first, second and third most interesting things about Malofiy are bound and gagged in nondisclosure agreements, those legalistic dungeons where the First Amendment goes to die. So let’s start with number four and work our way backward.

      At the risk of stating the obvious, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let the record show that “Stairway to Heaven” is arguably the most famous song in all of rock-and-roll, perhaps in all of popular music. It’s also one of the most lucrative — it’s estimated that the song has netted north of $500 million in sales and royalties since its 1971 release. Malofiy’s lawsuit, cheekily printed in the same druidic font used for the liner notes of the album Led Zeppelin IV, alleges that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant — Zep’s elegantly wasted guitarist/producer/central songwriter and leonine, leather-lunged lead singer, respectively — stole the iconic descending acoustic-guitar arpeggios of the first two minutes of “Stairway” from “Taurus,” a song with a strikingly similar chord pattern by a long-forgotten ’60s band called Spirit. At the conclusion of a stormy, headline-grabbing trial in 2016 that peaked with testimony from Page and Plant, the jury decided in Zep’s favor.

      When the copyright infringement suit was first filed in Philadelphia by Malofiy (pronounced “MAL-uh-fee”) on behalf of the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust — which represents the estate of Randy “California” Wolfe, the now-deceased member of Spirit who wrote “Taurus” — people laughed. Mostly at Malofiy. The breathless wall-to-wall media coverage the trial garnered often painted him as a loose-cannon legal beagle, one part Charlie Sheen, one part Johnnie Cochran. “Everybody kind of dismissed me as this brash young lawyer who didn’t really understand copyright law,” he says, well into the wee hours one night back in December, sitting behind a desk stacked four feet high with legal files in the dank, subterranean bunker that is his office.

      Hidden behind an unmarked door on the basement floor of a nondescript office building in Media, the law firm of Francis Alexander LLC is a pretty punk-rock operation. The neighbors are an anger management counselor and a medical marijuana dispensary. “I think of us as pirates sinking big ships,” Malofiy, who’s 41, brags. Given the sheer number of death threats he says he’s received from apoplectic Zep fans, the fact that mysterious cars seem to follow him in the night, and his claim to have found GPS trackers stuck to the bottom of his car, the precise location of his offices remains a closely guarded secret. Failing that, he has a license to carry, and most days, he leaves the house packing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson.

      While most lawyers are sleeping, Malofiy is working through the night to defeat them, often until sunrise, fueled by an ever-present bottle of grape-flavored Fast Twitch as he chain-chews Wrigley’s Spearmint gum and huffs a never-ending string of Marlboro menthols. We’ve been talking on the record for going on eight hours, and Malofiy shows no signs of fading; in fact, he’s just announced the arrival of his third wind.

      He has a pretty good ‘fuck you’ attitude that comes from an inner confidence. He might have had a little too much early on,” attorney Jim Beasley Jr. says of Malofiy. “If you piss the judge off with your pirate act, the judge can make it difficult for you. Sometimes you could avoid all that by not swinging your pirate sword around.

      Talk turns to the distinctly pro-Zep tenor of the media coverage of the “Stairway” trial. “I was a punch line for jokes,” he says, spitting his gum into a yellow Post-it and banking it into the trash for, like, the 42nd time. Nobody’s laughing now, least of all Page and Plant. Nor, for that matter, is Usher. Back in October, at the conclusion of a dogged seven-year legal battle marked by a bruising string of dismissals and sanctions, Malofiy won a $44 million verdict — one of the largest in Pennsylvania in 2018 — for a Philadelphia songwriter named Daniel Marino who sued his co-writers after being cut out of the songwriting credits and royalties for the song “Bad Girl” from the R&B heartthrob’s 2004 breakout album, Confessions, which sold more than 10 million copies.

      Also, in late September of last year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Malofiy’s appeal of the 2016 “Stairway to Heaven” verdict and ordered a new trial on the grounds that the court “abused its discretion” when the judge refused to allow Malofiy to play a recording of “Taurus” for the jury. (Members were only allowed to hear an acoustic-guitar rendition played from sheet music.) The retrial is expected to begin in the next year, and Page and Plant, along with bassist John Paul Jones, are again anticipated to take the stand. Copyright experts say Led Zeppelin — which has a long history of ripping off the ancient riffs and carnal incantations of wizened Delta bluesmen and only giving credit when caught — should be worried.

      Malofiy, who calls Zep “the greatest cover band in all of history,” will go to trial armed with reams of expert testimony pinpointing the damning similarities between the two songs — not just the nearly identical and atypical chord pattern, but the shared melodic figurations, choice of key and distinctive voicings. He’ll also show the jury that Page and Plant had ample opportunity to hear “Taurus” when Zep opened for Spirit on their first American tour in 1968, two years before they wrote and recorded “Stairway.”

      “Most big companies rely on the concept of wearing you down, forcing you to do so much work it literally drives you broke,” says Glen Kulik, a heavy-hitter L.A.-based copyright lawyer who signed on as Malofiy’s local counsel when the Zep case was moved to federal court in California. “If you have any chance of standing up to them, it’s going to require an incredible amount of persistence, confidence, and quite a bit of skill as well, and Francis has all those things in spades.” And Kulik would know, having successfully argued a landmark copyright infringement case before the Supreme Court in 2014 that paved the way for the Zeppelin suit.


      Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.

      Ultimately, Malofiy doesn’t have to prove Led Zeppelin stole Spirit’s song; he just has to convince a jury that’s what happened. Assuming the trial goes forward — and that this time, he’s allowed to play recordings of both songs for the jury — there will be blood. Because contrary to his hard-won rep as a bull in the china shop of civil litigation, Malofiy possesses a switchblade-sharp legal mind, an inexhaustible work ethic, and a relentless, rock-ribbed resolve to absorb more punches than his opponents can throw. He’s a ruthlessly effective courtroom tactician with a collection of six-, seven- and eight-figure verdicts, not to mention the scalps of opposing counsel who underestimated his prowess. “I don’t plink pigeons; I hunt lions and tigers and bears,” he says. The big game he’s targeted in the past decade include deep-pocketed transnational corporations like Volvo (an epic seven-year case that ended in an undisclosed settlement) and Hertz (against whom he won a $100,000 verdict).

      In the arena of civil litigation, where the odds are increasingly stacked against plaintiffs, Malofiy claims to have never lost a jury trial, and that appears to be true. “I have lost twice — in the Zeppelin case and a lawsuit against Volvo — but got both decisions reversed on appeals,” he says, unsheathing a fresh stick of Wrigley’s. “Now, the same people that were asking me for years why I’m doing it are asking me how I did it.”

      If Malofiy prevails in the coming “Stairway” retrial, he’ll completely shatter the Tolkien-esque legend of the song’s immaculate conception — that it was birthed nearly in toto during a mystical retreat at a remote Welsh mountain cottage called Bron-yr-aur, to which many a starry-eyed Zep disciple has made a pilgrimage once upon a midnight clear when the forests echo with laughter. It will be like proving that da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa, that Michelangelo didn’t sculpt David. Barring a last-minute settlement, many legal and copyright experts predict that Malofiy may well emerge victorious, and credit for the most famous rock song in the world will pass from the self-appointed Golden Gods of Led Zeppelin to some obscure, long-forgotten (and not even very good) West Coast psych band, along with tens of millions in royalties, effectively rewriting the sacred history of rock-and-roll. And the man who will have pulled off this fairly miraculous feat of judicial jujitsu is the enfant terrible of Philadelphia jurisprudence.

      Malofiy hates wearing a suit and tie. Outside the courtroom, he dresses like a rock star masquerading as a lawyer: a crushable black trilby perched at a jaunty angle atop a blue bandana, a collarless black and orange leather Harley jacket, and a pair of beat-to-fuck brown Wesco boots, unlaced. “I’m always in jeans and boots when I meet new clients,” he says. “I warn them up front: ‘If you want a fancy lawyer in a suit, you should go elsewhere.’”

      The barrier to entry for new clients at Francis Alexander LLC is steep, because Malofiy doesn’t take on new cases so much as he adopts new causes. A case has to register on a deeply personal level if he’s going to eat, sleep, and fight to the death for it for the next five to seven years.

      “Lawyers have an ethical responsibility to advocate zealously for their clients,” says attorney Max Kennerly, who’s worked with Malofiy on a number of cases. “But frankly, in this business, a lot of lawyers play the odds and just do a ‘good enough’ job on a bunch of cases. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose. Francis really throws himself into his cases.”

      After 10 years of struggle, things finally seem to be breaking Malofiy’s way. Fat checks from cases settled long ago are rolling in, alleviating some fairly crippling cash-flow issues, and big cases just keep falling out of the sky — more than his two-lawyer outfit can field. They need to staff up, stat. Malofiy wants to hire some young bucks fresh out of law school — preferably Temple — as force multipliers in his quest to hold the powerful accountable on behalf of the powerless. “Most kids in law school right now will never see the inside of a courtroom,” he says. “Law schools don’t want to teach you how to change the system; they want to load you up with debt so you have to go do grunt work for some corporate law firm that specializes in maintaining the status quo.”


      Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.

      Malofiy doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t do social media. He doesn’t trawl the watering holes of the rich and powerful. He doesn’t even have a business card. Thanks to the notoriety and name recognition that came with the Zeppelin trial, new clients chase him. He just got off the phone with a Brooklyn puppet maker who wants him to sue the band Fall Out Boy for alleged misuse of two llamas — Frosty and Royal Tea — that it created. Right now, he’s on a conference call with a trio of British songwriters who want Malofiy to sue the Weeknd for allegedly lifting a key section of their song “I Need to Love” for a track called “A Lonely Night” on his 2016 Starboy album, which has sold more than three million copies to date.

      “Why are you guys calling me?” he asks.

      “We’re looking for an honest person fighting for ordinary working people,” says Billy Smith, one of the Brit songwriters in question. Malofiy clearly likes the sound of that. After thinking it over for a few moments, he tells them he’ll take their case and gives them his standard new-client spiel. “I can’t promise we’ll win, but I can promise I won’t turn yellow when things turn bad. I won’t put my tail between my legs and run,” he says. “If there is any bad news, you will hear it from me first.”

      His teeth have been bothering him for days, and near the end of the call, one of his dental caps comes loose. He spits it out, and it skitters across his desk before he traps it under his palm. Most lawyers would be mortified. Malofiy thinks it’s hilarious. “I got teeth like you people,” he says to the Brits. Everybody laughs.

      Many people mistake Malofiy’s unconventionality as a design flaw when it’s actually a feature. “I think that’s an incredibly important part of what makes him so good as an attorney,” says A.J. Fluehr, 33, Malofiy’s right-hand man, co-counsel and, though eight years his boss’s junior, voice of reason. “Because he’s so unorthodox, I believe it causes a lot of other attorneys to underestimate him and think, ‘Oh, he’s not serious; he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ All of sudden, there’s a massively serious case against them.”

      Even some of the defense lawyers who’ve done battle with Malofiy begrudgingly acknowledge his chops. “I’ve known Francis for four years now. He is difficult to deal with but a fierce advocate for his clients and his cause,” says Rudolph “Skip” DiMassa, a partner at Duane Morris. “Calling him ‘abrasive’ would be putting it mildly. But he wears it like a badge of honor that he is not like all the other lawyers in town.”

      When I read that and similar assessments from other lawyers back to Malofiy, he chalks them up to blowback for the heresy of Robin Hooding a corrupt status quo. “I have a target on my back because I sue big corporations, politicians, big law firms. Hell, I sued DA Seth Williams,” he says one night at the Irish Pub, as he’s nursing a screwdriver he’ll chase with a root beer. “When you start stepping on toes and suing the wrong people and get a few million shifted from those who have it to those who don’t — that’s where the change happens; that’s where you make a difference. And there is a price you have to pay for that.”

      According to family lore, Francis Malofiy’s maternal grandfather was murdered by Nazis in occupied Greece; his great-grandmother had to cut the body down from a tree and carry it home on the back of a mule. Concurrently, his paternal grandfather was murdered by Nazis in Ukraine, while his father and grandmother were frog-marched to camps in Germany. Some things can never be forgotten or forgiven. That’s why Malofiy is always kicking against the pricks. A slight child, he was often bullied at school, and after a brief experiment with turning the other cheek, he started fighting back. Hard. He recalls the day that a bully was picking on a girl half his size; young Francis cold-cocked him and threw him into a closet door. The kid had to be taken out on a stretcher. After that, the bullies moved on to easier prey. “I was always fighting for the little guy, even back then,” he says.

      In the third grade, friends turned him on to Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, indelibly imprinting the spandexed bikers-and-strippers aesthetic of ’80s hair-metal onto his psyche. He started channeling the energy he once put into beating back bullies into beating the drums. One day in the sixth grade, he came home to tell his dad about a band all the kids were into: “The Led Zeppelins.”

      “He said, ‘No, son, it’s just Led Zeppelin.’”

      “No, I’m pretty sure it’s the Led Zeppelins.”

      So his father, who’d seen the band at the Electric Factory, drove Francis to the record store at the Granite Run Mall, where the clerks set him straight. His father bought the four-cassette Zep box set that had just come out. On the way home, Malofiy heard “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time, and before the song even ended, it was official: Led Zeppelin was his favorite band. When he was in high school, his drum teacher gently broke the news that Zep didn’t exactly, um, write all their own music — that key parts of their iconic songs had been cherry-picked from old, obscure blues recordings. “I said, ‘C’mon, don’t talk shit about Jimmy Page!’” Malofiy recalls. Then his teacher played him the Willie Dixon-penned Muddy Waters track “You Need Love” — which is what “Whole Lotta Love” was called before Zep hijacked the lyrics and the riff and Frankensteined them into the gloriously scuzzy heavy-metal Viking porno movie for the ears we’ve come to know and love. It was hard for Francis to process, and even harder when he was tipped to the uncanny similarity between Spirit’s “Taurus” and “Stairway.” Still, the spell Zep cast over him remained unbroken.


      Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.

      As a young teenager, he built go-karts, dirt bikes and small-block Chevys. To make spending money for guitars and records, he started buying beater cars, fixing them up, and flipping them for quadruple what he paid for them. He almost didn’t graduate from high school because he’d played hooky too many times, to go fishing or work on cars or play guitar. When he finally got his high-school diploma, he raced home from school to show his mother in his Chevy S-10 lowrider. Tearing ass on the backcountry roads of Media, he blew past a cop who immediately lit up his cherry top and gave pursuit. Soon, one cop car became two, then three, until there were five cars tailing him.

      Much to his parents’ dismay, his run-ins with the law became common. They were never for anything all that serious, just the usual teen-rebel monkeyshines: fighting, speeding, the occasional high-speed car chase. He got a big wake-up call in 1998 when his beloved Uncle Nick — a.k.a. Nicholas “The Greek” Vasiliades — was handed a life sentence for running a high-volume meth lab in a warehouse in Manayunk that supplied the drug networks of the Pagans and the Mafia, as well as for his 50-gun arsenal of illegal weaponry. Malofiy was devastated. “I was going down a bad path,” he says. “My uncle pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re smart enough to do it the right way. You need to step away.’”

      Malofiy took the warning to heart and focused on getting a college education, graduating from Penn State in 2000 with a degree in finance. After college, he went back home to Media and his true loves: cars, girls and heavy metal. With a revolving cast of musicians, he formed multiple go-nowhere suburban hard-rock bands with cringe-y names like Prada G and Sluts ’n Slayers. Unimpressed, his parents urged him to enroll in law school. Eventually he relented, forging this pact: He would go to law school if he: a) could do whatever he wanted with the unfinished basement of his parents’ home (i.e., build a high-end recording-studio-cum-man-cave tricked out with a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom); and b) nobody hassled him about having long hair, rocking out and chasing girls. Deal. Malofiy took the LSATs and scored just south of 160 — hardly off the charts, but good enough to get into Temple, where he found himself drawn to copyright law.

      He graduated from law school in December of 2007 and took the bar exam the following July. On the night of August 16, 2008, he stopped into the Liberty Bar at 22nd and Market with his then-girlfriend. It was crowded, but they found a table in the back. After ordering drinks, they started getting static from a group of three young men in ball caps and white t-shirts. “Three drunken jerkoffs, white privilege out the ass,” says Malofiy. According to Malofiy’s testimony, the trio mocked his bandana and called him “cunt,” “pussy” and a “dirty spic.” (It was summer; Malofiy was tan.) According to Malofiy, at some point the men apologized and the situation seemed defused, but then one of them grabbed Malofiy’s girlfriend’s ass. “I said, ‘That’s it. Follow me out,’ and made for the door,” Malofiy says, but he was blocked by a member of the group. As they stood chest-to-chest, Malofiy says, the man struck him twice. Finally, Malofiy, who boxed in college, unloaded with a right cross that landed squarely on the guy’s left cheekbone, shattering the glass still clenched in Malofiy’s fist.

      The man suffered a deep gash in his cheek that would require 150 stitches and reconstructive surgery. Malofiy nearly severed the tendons in his thumb. Bleeding profusely, he had his girlfriend drive him to the emergency room at Penn Presby to get stitched up and then to Central Detectives to file a criminal complaint.

      Two months later, in October, notice came in the mail that he had passed the bar. His mother was ecstatic and insisted on driving him to the Pittsburgh office of the Prothonotary of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania immediately to obtain his law license rather than wait two weeks for the formal ceremony. When they got home the next day, Malofiy got a call from Central Detectives, who said they had a “body warrant” for his arrest on aggravated assault and related charges stemming from the Liberty Bar fight. The next day, he turned himself in and spent a night in jail awaiting a bail hearing. Had he not gone to Pittsburgh at his mother’s behest, it’s unlikely he’d have gotten his law license with a felony arrest on his record.

      Malofiy’s first case as a newly minted lawyer would involve defending a client staring down decades in prison if convicted: himself. Heeding the maxim that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client, Malofiy hired Sam Stretton, one of the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the city. Malofiy took the stand and delivered an impassioned defense of his actions. “He had already hit me twice, blocked my exit-way,” he testified. “I was scared for my safety and my girlfriend’s safety, and his friends had just yelled ‘Fight!’ and came up to me with fists drawn. I thought I had no other option.” The jury found him not guilty on all charges.

      “Welcome to Hogwarts,” Malofiy jokes as he shows me around the vast oak and stained-glass room that houses the law library at the Beasley Firm, possibly the most fearsome and feared personal-injury law firm in the city, where he worked, in an of-counsel capacity, from 2012 to 2014.

      Fresh out of law school and still wet behind the ears, Malofiy showed up one day in search of mentoring. Granted an audience with Jim Beasley Jr., one of the most successful plaintiff’s attorney in the city, Malofiy ended up with a promise of rent-free office space, the phone extension 666, and a commitment to help finance some of the highly ambitious cases he was mounting — a product-liability suit against Volvo, and a breach-of-contract suit, against a marble manufacturer that had screwed his client out of an ownership share, that resulted in a $4.2 million verdict — not to mention the Usher case. “Jim was like, ‘I keep getting calls from defense lawyers saying That kid’s the fucking devil, so you must be doing something right,’” Malofiy recalls.

      During Malofiy’s tenure at Beasley, he took out a controversial full-page ad in this magazine that depicted him crashing through a courtroom in a hot rod, looking every bit James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Many members of Philadelphia’s uptight, buttoned-down legal community thought it was disrespectful. “Everyone was outraged, but I thought it was funny,” says Beasley. “He has a pretty good ‘fuck you’ attitude that comes from an inner confidence. He might have had a little too much of that early on, but I think he’s throttled back a bit. So many of a judge’s decisions are ties and jump-balls that are not reversible, and if you piss the judge off with your pirate act, the judge can make it difficult for you. Sometimes you could avoid all that by not swinging your pirate sword around.”

      Malofiy has learned this the hard way. In 2015, a three-judge panel voted to suspend his license to practice law in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for improper conduct in the Usher case — despite the fact that the special prosecutor recommended what amounted to a slap on the wrist: a reprimand.

      “It’s highly unusual that they would disregard the disciplinary recommendations of the special prosecutor after he has heard the facts,” says Stretton. The matter is currently on appeal before the Third Circuit.

      At Malofiy’s insistence, I’ve been tailing him for the better part of a month: from a big-dollar NDA’d settlement in a judge’s quarters, to a Port Richmond dive bar called Chuckles, to a Bucks County gun shop where he plunked down $1,729 for a handsome Benelli shotgun (a gift for his right-hand man Fluehr), to a back-alley strip bar in Center City and the disused factory under the Commodore Barry Bridge that he’s purchased and plans to renovate into office space, living quarters and a beer garden. I watched him hide his $82,000 Land Rover from the repo man (“It’s all a misunderstanding”) and then, days later, saw a pile of white letter-size envelopes stacked on his desk, each containing what looked to be thousands in cash. What I have come to learn is this: When you write about lawyers, there is so much you can’t write about lawyers.

      Malofiy slowly, methodically and unflinchingly parceled out the most personal details of his backstory — the good, the bad and the ugly — as I incrementally earned his trust. But always on his timetable, not mine. It could be exasperating, but by the end, I discovered the method to his madness: He’d been pacing his revelations as he would a trial presentation. And now we’re reaching the crescendo of his closing argument — the big reveal.


      Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.

      It’s a few clicks shy of midnight at Malofiy’s house in Media on a Sunday night shortly before Christmas. In the morning, he’s jetting off to an auction in London to bid on the Helios recording console that captured “Stairway to Heaven” for the ages. (Malofiy, true to form, won’t confirm that he won or lost the auction.) Though he’s been locked in a nasty four-year legal fight with Led Zeppelin, they’re still his favorite band.

      Malofiy called to insist that I come to his house tonight. “Why? What for?” I demanded. He said he wanted to show me something I could only see there. I begged off, explaining that this article was due in the morning and I already had more than I could use. But he insisted, promising it would be worth my while. He doesn’t disappoint. He tells me to open the freezer. There’s a bottle of Tito’s vodka, an ice tray, and half a lemon on a plate with a yellow plastic knife. “That’s the lemon Robert Plant squeezed into his tea when we deposed him in London back in 2016,” he claims. This is deeply ironic and, if you’re acquainted with the role lemons play in Plant’s legend, cosmically hilarious. One of Led Zeppelin’s most infamous tracks is “The Lemon Song,” a sultry blooze ramble from 1969’s deathless Led Zeppelin II stitched together from pieces of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and Robert Johnson’s “Travelling Riverside Blues.” (Zep settled a 1972 copyright suit over the Howlin’ Wolf portion of the song.) In the fifth verse, Plant sings:

      Squeeze me baby, till the juice runs down my leg
      The way you squeeze my lemon, ah
      I’m gonna fall right out of bed

      By swiping that lemon rind at the deposition, Malofiy stole Robert Plant’s metaphoric penis the way Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Zep famously invoked the mythic “Hammer of the Gods” from Norse legend. For Jimmy Page, that hammer was his guitar, but for Plant it was his, um, mighty lemon tree.

      Incredible though it may seem, Malofiy says he’s kept the lemon on ice for the past three years and had it in his briefcase like a talisman when he gave oral arguments for what proved to be his successful appeal of the 2016 “Stairway” verdict. He has every intention of taking it to the retrial that will, barring unforeseen developments, commence in the next year.

      “Robert Plant is always going on about his lemon, and at the deposition he made a big deal out of slicing it up and squeezing it into his tea and then sucking on the rind,” he says with a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. “Jimmy Page famously dabbled in black magic and was always going on about Aleister Crowley, and I said to myself, ‘If they are going to use black magic to try to beat me on technicalities — well, two can play at that game.’”

      Published as “The Devil’s Advocate” in the February 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

  • Journey Through FinovateEurope 2019
    https://hackernoon.com/journey-through-finovateeurope-2019-fa74670f8f2d?source=rss----3a8144eab

    Jim Marous and UXDA’s presenter Karlis JonassNo doubt, if there’s a place you could call the innovation epicenter of the financial world, it’s #finovate. It brings voice to the future banking and illuminates what will be the common practice of tomorrow. This year UXDA stepped on the stage beside other world’s leading finance innovators and influencers to demonstrate which direction the financial industry is heading to. UXDA outlined the rising significance of delightful user experience #design in financial services — definitely one of the routes the future of banking will take. Here’s a recap of the most remarkable Finovate memories to inspire every financial professional who aims to reinvent banking.https://medium.com/media/ef2ac6d98e08e1e48f6da3de24525bf3/hrefMissionThe world of finance is (...)

    #fintech-conference #fintech-event #ux-design

  • Practical Applications of Decentralized Prediction Markets
    https://hackernoon.com/practical-applications-of-decentralized-prediction-markets-cac0bcbd117?s

    How cryptocurrency-powered markets could disrupt betting, finance, forecasting, scientific research, and governanceIntroductionIn early 2016, I speculated that decentralized prediction markets could give us the power to easily “Google” the probability of any imaginable event occurring.¹ Now that the first market has been running for seven months, it’s time to re-evaluate the potential of what was at the time a theoretical and unproven technology.Prediction markets allow users to buy and sell shares in the outcome of specific events. After the event occurs, users holding shares of accurate event outcomes are rewarded while users holding the inaccurate ones lose their money. Share prices fluctuate between 0 and 1 based on supply and demand from traders until the event’s outcome is (...)

    #decentralized-market #ethereum #practical-application #blockchain #predictions