If you are a drug company, and you acquire a drug that has no competitors, and you immediately massively increase the price of the drug, we assume that you’re doing it to make money. There is a fairly well accepted playbook for distracting attention from that obvious explanation. You’re raising the price to fund research and development, for instance. Or, sure the list price of the drug is high, but you have assistance programs to make sure that anyone who needs it can get it.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, both under congressional investigation over skyrocketing drug prices, were focused on making money before helping patients, members of Congress said internal documents obtained from the companies show.

“$1 bn here we come,” former Turing Chief Executive Officer Martin Shkreli said in an e-mail to the chairman of the board on May 27, after the company had made progress toward acquiring the antiparasitic drug Daraprim, according to a memo from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s ranking Democrat Elijah Cummingsof Maryland. After buying the drug later that year, Turing raised the price by more than 50-fold, to $750 a pill.

They are really just in no way good for those companies. Valeant had a presentation describing “PR Mitigation” as a “Critical Risk” to its plans, and suggesting that it should “Minimize media coverage of the pricing increase,” oops. More worrying, perhaps, is an e-mail from Howard Schiller (then chief financial officer, now interim chief executive officer) to Mike Pearson (then CEO) saying that “about 80%” of Valeant’s growth came from price, not volume, which John Hempton points out seems to contradict what Pearson said on an earnings call.

Turing was run by Martin Shkreli, how do you think its internal e-mails read? Turing Pharmaceuticals, had paid $55 million to acquire the drug Daraprim, and had raised its price more than fiftyfold to $750 a pill, or $75,000 for a bottle of 100.” Turing even price-gouged a dog, though at least it had the heart to recommend a generic alternative. The Director of Specialty Pharmacy Development at Walgreens forwarded a request for financial assistance for a dog that had been prescribed Daraprim to treat its toxoplasmosis. The request stated: “I have an unusual request. There is a dog that is a patient and he needs Daraprim. He is obviously not covered by insurance … the cost of what was prescribed is $5,000 for this little guy.” Jon Haas, the Director of Patient Access at Turing, responded: “You can buy Pyramethamine/Sulfa [sic] combo pills from a vet meds website for about $80.”

Benjamin Brafman, the same lawyer who helped get rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs acquitted of gun and bribery charges in 2001 represents Shkreli. Shkreli asserts that he is “innocent, and not guilty,” a potent combination, while Brafman is more circumspect, saying that “Mr. Shkreli never intended to violate the law, nor did he intend to defraud anyone.” Shkreli does not, however, have a new public relations person.

“The world is changing its mind about me,” he said. “I think the tide is swinging from, you know, this is a bad guy to people listening to me and really understanding who I am.”

To be fair, an actual public relations professional says of Shkreli’s approach: “It’s certainly unconventional, but is it bad? I don’t think we know yet.” I feel like I know?

Are missing refugee children being exploited?

More than 10,000 refugee children have disappeared in the past two years after registering for asylum in Europe, European Union law enforcement agency Europol warned, as EU leaders looked to stem the flow of migration ahead of warmer weather. Cold winter temperatures and increasingly dangerous sea conditions have not stopped tens of thousands of people from trying to make the risky journey to Europe in January, and young children face added dangers of exploitation both along the trip and upon arrival in the EU.

“Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members,” Europol Chief of Staff Brian Donald said, Agence France-Presse reported Sunday. “We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with,” said Donald, noting that the 10,000 figure was likely a conservative estimate.

Escalating violent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa sent more than 1 million people to seek asylum in Europe in 2015, with more than half of them coming from war-torn Syria. While around 27 percent of all refugees that have arrived since 2015 are children, recent research from the United Nations reported that in January, around 55 percent of new asylum-seekers in Europe were women or children.Europol’s report on missing refugee children looked at those who registered as asylum-seekers at some point in Europe and then disappeared. Around 5,000 of the 10,000 missing children disappeared in Italy, a country that has been a popular point of entry for tens of thousands of refugees looking to cross into Europe via the Mediterranean Sea — often coming from North Africa.

Greece has been another frequent point of entry because of its close proximity to Turkey, and EU leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel have looked to stem the flow of refugees traveling from Greece to northern European countries like Sweden and Germany. European authorities have attempted to slow migration by creating a bottle-neck in Balkan countries like Macedonia by adding additional border guards and police vehicles as leaders look for a permanent solution to the crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“So no matter what, we need to prevent the influx from massively increasing again in the spring,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maziere said, as reported by German magazine Der Spiegel, adding, “time is running out.”

Stephen Foley  writes: The world’s largest asset managers have held secret summit meetings to hammer out proposals for improving public company governance to encourage longer-term investment and reduce friction with shareholders.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Warren Buffettconvened the sessions with the heads of BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard and Capital Group to work on a new statement of best practice that would cover the relationship between U.S. companies and their investors.

The unusual collaboration comes at a time of rising shareholder activism and a raging debate about whether public markets demand short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment.

In recent years, some private companies have shunned early public listings, and technology bosses such as Michael Dell have argued that equity markets are too focused on short-term gains. Some large technology groups have also opted to go public with dual-class share structures that limit shareholder rights in an effort to minimise the influence of activist hedge funds.

Do Sheryl Sandberg  and Christine Lagarde represent women?

Dawn Foster: Will young women be convinced that the freedom they’ve inherited is part of the natural state of affairs and not the temporary outcome of a long battle that is still being waged, and in which everything could suddenly be lost”.

Anyone familiar with abortion rights campaigns, for example, knows this to be true. Reproductive freedoms have been hard won in many countries, but millions of women worldwide are still denied the right to abortion, and religious groups are committed to chipping away at reproductive rights across the globe.

Women’s rights are precarious. It’s not simply a question of marching towards a more equal future: we have to keep an eye on the past too. For every battle won, there remain people who will happily reverse those decisions and cast women back decades in terms of social progress. This is the problem with using individual women’s successes as bellwethers of feminist progress. Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo!) and Christine Lagarde (managing director of the International Monetary Fund) may talk about women’s equality, and proffer their own positions as proof of progress – but post-crash, many women feel their lives are measurably worse.y.

It’s all well and good to encourage women in business to speak up more in meetings, but most women don’t – and will never – work in managerial roles. And for them, being told women must be the architects of their own fortune won’t wash. A broader understanding of how inequality is perpetuated, and how the economy disadvantages women, can yield policy that is fairer to women.  Representative Women

Nigeria has asked the World Bank and African Development Bank for a $3.5 billion loan.

The request comes as Africa’s largest economy grapples with a $15 billion budget deficit in the wake of the oil crash that has seen prices fall about 70% in the last year and a half.

Nigeria’s finance minister, Kemi Adeosun said these loans aren’t an “emergency” measure, but merely the cheapest way for the country to shore up its finances.

Nigeria produces about 1.8 million barrels of oil per day and 35% of its GDP comes from the oil and gas sector; 90% of Nigeria’s export revenue comes from the sale of petroleum.

The important takeaway, however, is that while the crash in oil prices seen during 2014 and 2015 was stunning, it isn’t until this year and beyond that we’ll start to see the real impacts on both private corporate and government budgets from the sustained decline in prices.

Nigeria’s package might be composed of $2.5 billion from the World Bank and $1 billion from the African Development Bank. The loans would likely be priced at below-market rates.

There is a rising risk of violence inside the country disrupting its oil production, a development that could boost international prices but would certainly further stress Nigeria’s financial position.

The proposed package of loans made to Nigeria wouldn’t come with the strings usually attached with a loan from the IMF — which often include extensive “structural reforms,” which is basically short-hand for coming up with additional revenue to ensure repayment — the IMF will be expected to endorse a loan from the World Bank.

David Rothkopf writes:  Davos bashing is easy. Saving the world is hard. The venerable gathering of global elites on that frosty Swiss mountaintop is regularly the target of criticism and speculation about its relevance. But if this past year’s event is any indication, there is also still a greater and higher sense of purpose to the gathering than one finds at many other similar events, and there is much to be learned for the visitor who ventures up the mountain to listen rather than to be heard or seen.

There is no doubt that most of the people who have never been to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the alpine ski resort are happy to accept the idea that the gathering lies somewhere on a spectrum between being an odious, self-congratulatory mogul-palooza and a shadowy gathering to plot a conspiracy to oppress the masses. Many of the people who actually attend are also put off by aspects of the meeting, ranging from the difficulty of getting into formal sessions to the lingering sense that it is at secret, informal ones that the really good stuff is happening.

The event has become much more corporatized and formal over the years, making real brainstorming tough to do. And of course, as it has in past years, this year’s Davos was dogged by the fact that the audience suffered from a numbing sameness of its participants. Once again, women, minorities, people from emerging markets, and the young were under-represented, as were artists, scientists, technologists, and religious leaders.

In other words, a meeting with the purported goal of changing the world was missing the people most essential to that discussion.

Some of the speeches are tired. Some of the speakers are the usual suspects. The sidewalks aren’t shoveled, and every year a handful of innocent global titans flop down on the ice and break something. Even the celebrity sightings are getting a bit boring. .

Davos is in its own extremely earnest, rather dry way, actually serious about its mission of making the world a better place. Davos, more than any other similar gathering, shifted the debate of world leaders toward taking climate issues more seriously. It has focused attention on regions in crisis, the need for better infrastructure, and on emerging issues that are worthy of debate — like this year’s discussion on the “fourth industrial revolution.” In my few days there, I sat with world leaders who took a break from their usual intellectual fare as they discussed issues of faith, archaeological evidence as to why civilizations fail, the big questions associated with intelligence in the cyber-age (I actually moderated that discussion), and the future of the Americas.

I was also fascinated to watch discussions about ongoing turmoil in the Middle East become seemingly overshadowed, in terms of generating foreboding among the delegates, by the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. It was interesting to hear once again predictions of global downturn play in a kind of counterpoint to individual CEOs of very big companies saying, “It’s going to be a bad year for the world but not for us.” It was enlightening to hear why China does not worry so many despite its downturn; why Iran is so appealing to so many European companies; why Brazil is the universally acknowledged big emerging-market basket case to watch for the year ahead; and to see the mixed reactions to the consequences of low-priced oil and a downturn in the commodity supercycle.

But this meeting is the target of criticism for a reason.

It is the granddaddy of the world’s big high-level conferences, and it has an important role to play in the world.

It is the granddaddy of the world’s big high-level conferences, and it has an important role to play in the world. People watch it closely; it attracts the skeptical views it draws precisely because it actually makes a difference, whether it is regarding how a leader or policy initiative is viewed by markets or how a particular threat (from climate to regional unrest) might be assessed or addressed. What is more, if it were to change, it could actually make an even bigger difference. No other single event is in position to do as much were it to evolve to be more of a 21st-century global summit. And that is the Davos story you won’t be reading this year. Because you typically only get two extremes: ass-kissing paeans to the superrich or written Molotov cocktails.

But the reality of what transpires each year high on the mountain is actually not so simple. There’s life and value in this old meeting, if only its curators would take the time to give it one of those rejuvenating sheep-placenta injections that Swiss spas are so famous for.

Martin Guzman writes:  Mauricio Macri’s election as Argentina’s president brought to an end 12 years of government led by Néstor and Cristina Fernández Kirchner. Macri’s administration inherits a delicate economy. If he is not careful, Argentina could face a balance-of-payments crisis, owing to deteriorating external conditions and macroeconomic mismanagement, especially since 2011.

Some aspects of Argentina’s economic situation, however, are highly desirable – not least its low debt-to-GDP ratio. As a result, Macri’s government faces a much less daunting task than the one confronting Kirchner in 2003, after a decade-long experiment with Washington Consensus policies (financial deregulation, trade liberalization, and privatization), together with the peso’s peg to the US dollar, ended in disaster. When Kirchner took office, Argentina had just experienced its most severe economic crisis ever. Unemployment, inequality, poverty, and the national debt had all risen. Massive deindustrialization and deep weaknesses in its education system did not bode well for the future.

In a favorable global environment, the more competitive exchange rate set the stage for reindustrialization, creating jobs for many who had been excluded from labor markets during the previous decade. As a result, from 2003 to 2008, GDP growth averaged more than 8% per year. Argentina’s Economy

Carmen Reinhart writes:  Currency-market volatility has been around for decades, if not centuries. Wide gyrations in exchange rates became a staple of international financial markets after the Bretton Woods system broke down in the early 1970s, and mega-depreciations were commonplace later in the decade and through much of the 1980s, when inflation raged across much of the world. Even through much of the 1990s and early 2000s, 10-20% of countries worldwide experienced a large currency depreciation or crash in any given year.

And then, suddenly, calm prevailed. Excluding the mayhem associated with the global financial crisis of late 2008 and early 2009, currency crashes were few and far between from 2004 to 2014 (see figure). But recent developments suggest that the dearth of currency crashes during that decade may be remembered as the exception that proves the rule.

The near-disappearance of currency crashes in the 2004-2014 period largely reflect low and stable international interest rates and large capital flows to emerging markets, coupled with a commodity price boom and (mostly) healthy growth rates in countries that escaped the global financial crisis. In effect, many countries’ main concern during those years was avoiding sustained currency appreciation against the US dollar and the currencies of other trade partners.

That changed in 2014, when deteriorating global conditions revived the currency crash en masse. Since then, nearly half of the sample of 179 countries shown in the figure have experienced annual depreciations in excess of 15%. True, more flexible exchange-rate arrangements have mostly eliminated the drama of abandoning pre-announced pegged or semi-pegged exchange rates. But, thus far, there is little to suggest that the depreciations have had much of a salutary effect on economic growth, which for the most part has remained sluggish.

The average cumulative depreciation versus the US dollar has been almost 35% from January 2014 to January 2016. For many emerging markets, where depreciations have been considerably greater, weakening exchange rates have aggravated current problems associated with rising foreign-currency debts.

J. Bradford DeLong writes:  Until very recently, one of the biggest challenges facing mankind was making sure there was enough to eat. From the dawn of agriculture until well into the Industrial Age, the common human condition was what nutritionists and public-health experts would describe as severe and damaging nutritional biomedical stress.

Some 250 years ago, Georgian England was the richest society that had ever existed, and yet food shortages still afflicted large segments of the population. Adolescents sent to sea by the Marine Society to be officer’s servants were half a foot (15 centimeters) shorter than the sons of the gentry. A century of economic growth later, the working class in the United States was still spending 40 cents of every extra dollar earned on more calories.

Today, food scarcity is no longer a problem, at least in high-income countries. In the US, roughly 1% of the labor force is able to grow enough food to supply the entire population with sufficient calories and essential nutrients, which are transported and distributed by another 1% of the labor force. That does not account for the entire food industry, of course. But most of what is being done by the remaining 14% of the labor force dedicated to delivering food to our mouths involves making what we eat tastier or more convenient – jobs that are more about entertainment or art than about necessity.

The challenges we face are now those of abundance.  Economic Problems in the Age of Abundance