PRESS AND PUBLICATIONS
EXPANDING THE CORPORATE OPPORTUNITY DOCTRINE
Important disclaimer: the contents are for general informativepurposes and do not constitute legal or other professional advice.Readers should seek legal or other professional advicein relation to any particular matters they may have Corporate opportunity doctrine is a legal principle rooted in case law which mandates that directors, officers and controlling shareholders......
EXPLORING THE RATIONALE BEHIND GLASS-STEAGAL
Readers, who have basic knowledge of the U.S. financial system history, have certainly heard about the famous “Glass-Steagall” Act, which was one of the measures enacted in response to the financial collapse experienced during great Depression. Due to conflict of interest concerns and due to incompatibility of high risk inherent......
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CORPORATE FIDUCIARY DUTIES: DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY OF THE CONCEPT
Important disclaimer: the contents are for general informative purposes and do not constitute legal or other professional advice. Readers should seek legal or other professional advice in relation to any particular matters they may have. More than four centuries have passed since the first corporations ever were established and respectively......
CORPORATE CHRONICLE FROM DELAWARE
It is of no secret that Delaware is the go-to jurisdiction when it comes to registering business entities in the US. To understand the magnitude of Delaware’s popularity in this area consider two of the following facts: 1) the number of businesses registered in this state exceeds its overall population.......
APPLYING COACHING TOOLS TO PUBLIC POLICY OBJECTIVES
Industrial revolutions coupled with progression of capitalism and the competitive nature of human beings has led to a society that is more than ever obsessed with goal-setting, achievement and efficiency. No wonder a new profession known as coaching has emerged in the second half of the last century and has......
CSDR MANDATORY BUY-IN REGULATIONS: WHAT THE FALLINGS-OUT ARE ABOUT
Mandatory buy-ins are one of the most controversial rules in the EU Securities Market that are set to enter into force in the near future. Ever since their adoption, the regulators and the industry participants have been in strong disagreements about their effectiveness for ensuring the safety of securities settlement......
JUDGES, DISCRETION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
Policymakers across the world have reached wide if not absolute consensus that courts are a key component to economic development. The OECD has long recognized the crucial role judicial systems play in determining economic performance by guaranteeing the security of property rights and the enforcement of contracts [1]. It occasionally......
COVID-19: Key measures taken by governments and central banks
Response to the coronavirus pandemic How Global Central Banks are Responding to COVID-19 When times get tough, central banks typically act as the first line of defense. However, modern economies are incredibly complex—and mishaps like the 2008 financial crisis have already pushed traditional policy tools to their limits. In response,......
Helicopter yes, or Helicopter no
Synopsis This is an unconventional monetary policy tool. It involves printing money and distributing it to the public. Imagine waking one morning to find extra cash in your account, a gift from your country’s central bank. But the concept of so-called helicopter money has been seriously debated by economists for......
Inflation or recession? The tug of war in bond markets – The Economist
The yield on ten-year American Treasury bonds is perhaps the world’s most important number, and for weeks it has been all over the place. Hundredths of a percentage point (basis points, in finance speak) matter in this market, because the Treasury’s borrowing costs underpin those for everything from mortgages to......
Investors sought to pull $20bn from private credit funds in first quarter – The Financial Times
Wealthy investors attempted to pull more than $20bn from private credit funds in the first quarter, underscoring the growing strain on an asset class that had boomed into a dominant force on Wall Street. The $20.8bn in redemption requests hit huge groups in the sector, including Apollo Global Management, Ares......
GDP per capita in purchasing power: Which were Europe’s richest and poorest countries in 2025? – Euro News
Gross domestic product per capita in purchasing power standards varies significantly across Europe in 2025. One in three people in the EU lives in a country where GDP per capita in PPS is above the EU average....
The demise of software engineering jobs has been greatly exaggerated – CNN
Computer science and engineering students at the University of Washington, spooked about AI, returned from spring break last week to a surprising email from the department head....
What We Do in the Shadows: Will Private Credit Take Down the Economy? – The Bloomberg
What is worth $1.8 trillion dollars, is deeply intertwined with the software business, small banks, and cockroaches, is veiled in mystery, and could take down the US economy? Private credit! The mysterious, mammoth lending industry — which is now bigger than the entire junk bond market — has been the......
OpenAI thought it could own AI videos. The reality was too expensive – CNN
OpenAI said Tuesday that it would wind down Sora, the TikTok-like text-to-video app that, to OpenAI’s credit, did make some super real-looking stuff. Its release was a turning point for AI-generated video, elevating it from the realm of goofy slop to sophisticated deepfakes (for better or worse)....
The biggest winners and losers of the tariff war as AI-related trade skyrockets – Euro News
A report published this month by the McKinsey Global Institute offers one of the most rigorous accountings of last year’s trade war. Its verdict confounds almost every prediction made when the tariffs were first introduced.It is almost a year since Liberation Day, when US President Donald Trump stood in the......
Amazon’s unprecedented gamble on AI redemption might just work – The Economist
Amazonians like to think of their company as frugal—at least compared with many of their tech rivals. Forget the chocolatey treats and massages available to techies in Silicon Valley. At Amazon’s home in Seattle, the most cherished freebies are bananas, distributed from a food truck in the courtyard. This parsimonious......
Gilt yields surge to highest level since 2008 – The Financial Times
A rout in the gilt market deepened on Monday as traders bet the Bank of England would have to raise interest rates four times this year to counter surging energy prices. The 10-year gilt yield climbed 0.11 percentage points on Monday morning to 5.1 per cent, keeping borrowing costs at......
Euro-Zone Wage Growth to Quicken in Second Half of Next Year – Bloomberg
Euro-area pay growth is set to accelerate in the second half, adding to the challenges the European Central Bank faces as war rages in the Middle East.The ECB’s wage tracker predicts salaries will rise by an annual 2.5% in the third and 2.6% in the fourth quarter. That’s stronger than......
OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies – The Financial Times
OpenAI plans to almost double its headcount by the end of the year as it accelerates a push to sell to businesses and gain ground on rival Anthropic in a race for a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.The $730bn start-up was aiming to grow to about 8,000 employees......
The Real Economics of AI and Jobs – Time
AI is fundamentally transforming the global job market, driving profound changes in skill requirements, entire professions, and wage structure across both advanced and emerging economies. Predictions about AI’s labor market impact range drastically: from mass worker displacement, to a productivity revival, to somewhere in the middle....
Fed Expected to Hold Rates, Weigh Oil Shock – Bloomberg
Investors will be looking to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this week for insight on how the US central bank is weighing a range of risks to the economy amid US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Officials are expected to hold their benchmark interest rate steady for a second consecutive meeting in......
Why investors won’t know what to make of AI for a while – The Economist
Stockmarkets are, in a literal sense, fortune-tellers: their job is to foresee which businesses will make money in the future and which won’t. When things are not changing much, this is a matter of simple extrapolation. When change happens, it gets harder. This is obviously true in times of acute......
AI and Power Looms: Stories About Job-Killing Tech Have a Way of Going Viral – Bloomberg
On a Sunday in late February, a small investment research firm called Citrini Research posted a 7,000-word essay on Substack that read like a piece of dystopian fiction. The story, narrated from the near future—June 30, 2028—imagines a world in which artificial intelligence has led to mass white-collar layoffs and......
The Fed Keeps Getting Hit With New Shocks in Its Yearslong Inflation Fight – WSJ
It’s happening again.For the fifth year running, Federal Reserve officials find themselves expecting inflation to fall back to their 2% goal only to be confronted with another disruption that complicates the path. First it was the pandemic’s aftershocks. Then, Russia’s war in Ukraine. Last year, a sweeping tariff program....
U.S. Trade Deficit Shrinks 25%, Driven by Gold Exports – WSJ
The U.S. trade deficit declined in January, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, continuing a volatile run for America’s trade balance that has seen imports and exports buffeted by rapid changes to the Trump administration’s trade policy....
Meta just bought the social network for AI bots everyone’s been talking about – CNN
Meta, the company behind some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, just scooped up a new site – for bots. Meta has acquired Moltbook, the social media network where AI agents interact with one another autonomously, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Meta is competing with......
Economists See ECB Holding Rates Until 2028 in Split From Market – Bloomberg
Economists see the European Central Bank keeping interest rates unchanged through 2027 even as inflation threats resurface. A Bloomberg survey conducted March 6-11 showed only 7% of respondents expect a move by December and less than a third see any tightening by the end of next year. That puts them......
AI Still Needs Consultants—For Now – WSJ
AI needs management consultants after all. OpenAI and Anthropic have struck deals with consulting firms to spread AI through the business world. Yet some experts predict the consulting industry could shrink long-term, despite the current boost....
PODCAST: Is the private credit industry a threat to the financial system?
There are jitters among America’s corporate lenders. There have been high profile defaults of big borrowers like Tricolor Holdings and First Brands, which collapsed just weeks apart. Then, last month, investors rushed to pull their money from a fund operated by Blue Owl, a private credit behemoth....
Will AGI Really Be the “Last Invention”?
Listen to leading voices in Silicon Valley, and you might come to believe that “solving intelligence” is sufficient to “solve everything else.” But as seductive as this claim about AI’s potential may be, it rests on a number of assumptions that do not withstand scrutiny....
Are We Facing an AI Nightmare?
AI-doom scenarios are going viral because there are no easy public-policy responses to the problem of large-scale but not universal technological unemployment. Society’s best hope is a Goldilocks scenario, where the AI rollout is not too fast, and where the industry is not too oligopolistic....
What Does a Financial Advisor Do?
A financial advisor’s role goes far beyond managing investment portfolios—though that’s central for most. These professionals serve as your personal financial guide, helping you navigate life’s major money decisions, from saving for retirement and funding education to managing debt and planning estates....
PODCAST: Preparing Tax Data for Generative AI Integration
Access to high-quality data can play a critical role in an organization’s ability to fully utilize all that generative AI has to offer. This is particularly true for tax departments that need to reach a state of data readiness before they integrate the emerging technology into their systems. ...
An AI Bubble Won’t Trigger a Financial Crisis
The AI boom may be speculative, excessive, and reminiscent of earlier episodes like the dot-com crash. But given the nature of the financing and the investments being made, the risks to the financial system are minimal, and policymakers should turn their attention to the impact of AI on the real......
Devaluation
Devaluation is a downward adjustment to a country’s value of money relative to a foreign currency or standard. Many countries that operate using a fixed exchange rate tend to use devaluation as a monetary policy tool to control supply and demand....
The Impact of Impact Investing
As a venture-capital pioneer and co-founder of Apax Partners, Sir Ronald Cohen experienced firsthand the emergence of an investment framework based on rigorously measured risk and return. How plausible is Cohen’s claim that a new revolution is underway, one which adds social, environmental, or development outcomes to the equation?...
How crypto criminals stole $700 million from people – often using age-old tricks
There’s something uniquely agonising about having your cryptocurrency stolen. All transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, known as a blockchain, so even if someone takes your money and puts it in their own crypto wallet, it is still visible online....
OpenAI invests in Sam Altman’s brain computer interface startup Merge Labs
Just when you thought the circular deals couldn’t get any more circular, OpenAI has invested in CEO Sam Altman’s brain computer interface (BCI) startup Merge Labs. Merge Labs, which defines itself as a “research lab” dedicated to “bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability,” came out of stealth......
Why AI Is Unlike Previous Tech Booms
The rise of AI follows a fundamentally different competitive logic than earlier technological revolutions. With massive capital requirements, high operating expenses, low switching costs, and intensifying regulatory scrutiny, success will depend less on scale and more on financial resilience and political influence....
PODCAST: Masters in Business: Perscient’s Ben Hunt
Barry speaks with Ben Hunt is president and co-founder of Perscient, an AI research firm and software company that pioneered the use of language models and unstructured data analysis for investment strategies. They discussed how emerging narratives move a market, and how AI has revolutionized Perscient’s computing power....
Trade Order
Placing a trade order seems intuitive – a “buy” button to initiate a trade and a “sell” button to close a trade. Although executing trades is possible in such a way, it is very inefficient as it requires constant monitoring of the stock. Using just the buy and sell buttons......
PODCAST: At The Money: Investing in Freedom
Do fundamentals or narratives drive market valuations? That is the question so many are wrestling with in today’s 24/7 algo-based platforms and AI-driven mediascape. Perth Tolle is the founder of the Life and Liberty indexes and the creator of the Freedom 100 EM Index (symbol FRDM). She was named......
Manias, Panics, and AI
By any metric, the US – and, by implication, the world – are now in the midst of an intense AI speculative boom. To assess whether all the investment pouring into the industry will build something useful, three questions must be addressed....
PODCAST: At The Money: Algorithmic Harm
On this fan favorite episode of “At The Money”, Barry speaks with Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of the book, “Algorithmic Harm: Protecting People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. Previously he co-authored “Nudge” with Nobel Laureate Dick Thaler. They discuss whether all this algorithmic impact is helping or......
Will Dollar Dominance Survive Digital Money?
Depending on how they are designed, the rails conveying digital money can underpin an open monetary system or entrench a bipolar system of competing blocs with incompatible standards. For the US, continued global monetary leadership will require upgrading domestic and cross-border payment infrastructure for interoperability....
What are interest rates?
If you are borrowing money, the interest rate (or lending rate) is the amount you are charged for doing so – shown as a percentage of the total amount of the loan. The higher the percentage, the more you must pay back. If you are a saver, the interest rate......
New Skills and AI Are Reshaping the Future of Work
Technological change has reshaped job markets for centuries. But the benefits have not always been widely shared. As AI and digital technologies transform today’s workplace even those at the forefront of innovation are not immune to disruption as recent job cuts at major technology companies show....
Are Central Banks Enabling Unsustainable Government Deficits?
Recent developments suggest that the US Federal Reserve’s bond purchases are no longer just a “monetary operation,” but an essential component of the US government’s fiscal financing. The sooner that the Fed and other similarly situated central banks recognize the trap they have created for themselves, the better....
AT1: Investors’ Risky Bets that Keep the Banks Running (by Hayk Khekoyan)
When you hear the word CoCo you probably think of a leather bag with the famous Chanel logo on it, or the 2017 critically acclaimed and commercially successful animated movie of the same name. What you probably do not think about is a complex financial instrument, created with the purpose......
Is Artificial Intelligence Going to Replace Us All? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Nowadays it seems borderline impossible to spend even a few hours without coming across the subject of “Artificial Intelligence”. There is just way too much talk, hype, arguments, doomsday prophecies or bold optimistic statements on how this or that technological advancement or tool, or AI in general is going to......
Did the 2022 World Cup Really Cost More than All the Previous Ones Combined? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
As the World Cup final is played in Lusail, a city that did not even exist a few years ago, Qatar 2022 will go down in the history books for many reasons, not all of them exactly football‑related. Nothing in the world exists as a separate entity in a vacuum:......
The Growing Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Business (by Hayk Khekoyan)
These days it is borderline impossible to spend a day in the business world without hearing the phrase “emotional intelligence”, its abbreviation “EI” or the closely related term “EQ” (emotional quotient, similar to intelligence quotient colloquially known as IQ). While the concept of emotional intelligence is becoming increasingly prevalent throughout......
The Streaming Wars: Part 2 (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Last year I wrote about the so-called “Streaming Wars”. This term is used to describe the process of the rising number of streaming video on demand (VOD) services from all sorts of corporations trying to position themselves in an ever-growing and yet such a tight market. The world is a......
Working Less or Working Smarter and Better? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Work less, earn more. That is the plan for most people. Barring the rare cases of people actually loving their work, for most of us a job is simply a means to survive. If you haven’t won the genetic lottery to be born into outrageous wealth, just staying alive requires......
To the Moon or to the Ground? The Jury is Still Out on Bitcoin (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Bitcoin is back. Back to inexplicably losing more than half of its value in six months, back to being one of the biggest controversies in the world, but definitely not back to its all-time highs of more than $60,000 achieved twice during 2021. “When you find yourself in a hole,......
How to Increase Savings in Armenia (by Alexandra Ouzounian from The Pingry School, New Jersey)
Financial literacy is broadly defined as an individual’s financial knowledge and ability to use financial tools to execute his or her financial goals. The people of Armenia demonstrate a level of financial literacy (Figure 1) and gross savings rate (Figure 2) that is lower than the average financial literacy of......
Personal data protection: EU perspective (by Diana Javadyan)
Nowadays, more than ever, data protection issues are actual and crucial in terms of both data protection standard setting and data protection standard implementation. Recent Fintech developments, e-communities, artificial intelligence application and other technological advancements throughout the world bring up the need of robust data protection framework and protected data......
The Streaming Wars that will Shape the Future of Entertainment (by Hayk Khekoyan)
When the CEOs of Netflix and Blockbuster met in the distant year 2000 to discuss a merger between the two, Netflix was a 3-year-old company valuing itself at a measly $50 mln compared to Blockbuster’s market capitalization of around $5 bln (Sloan, 2020). Perhaps, having taken note of the phrase......
Why You Should Consider Learning Cybersecurity (by Hayk Khekoyan)
3.12 million. This is the estimated number of cybersecurity specialists needed globally as cyberattacks around the world keep growing in both frequency and magnitude (Duffy, 2021). The last few months alone have seen some of the biggest security breaches in history, more on which later. The most important development in the......
Will Energy Ever Be the Same Again? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
As recently as the year 2013, the largest publicly traded corporation in the world was an oil company. Exxon Mobil had a market capitalization well north of $400 bln at the time, which was quite the feat considering there were no trillion-dollar companies in the world yet. Fast forward......
A Possible Future of Money (by Hayk Khekoyan)
If you have not spent the last few years in a cave or on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the words cryptocurrency or digital currency should sound familiar. I will not pretend to know or try to explain all the details of the technology behind Bitcoin,......
The Simple, Yet Quite Complex Global Issue (by Hayk Khekoyan)
For almost a week in the end of March one of the most important marine routes of the world was blocked by a giant vessel, approximately matching in size with New York’s famous Empire State Building. It took almost another week after the vessel was removed for the traffic jam......
The Consequences of the Mass Investment Platforms (by Hayk Khekoyan)
By January 11 not as many people had heard about the American company Gamestop as they have today. As of January 11 Gamestop cost around 1.5 billion USD and was a network of computer games and electronics’ stores situated in several states of the USA as well as in a......
Why We Need Governments (by Hayk Khekoyan)
The man regarded as the father of economics devoted a great deal of time and a big chunk of his work talking about how free markets produce the best outcomes for everyone involved. Adam Smith, in his book “The Wealth of Nations”, told us about the invisible hand that guides......