Assorted Links: Politics, Google, politics and antiobiotics

1. South Korean politics are strange. I could pretend that my model of scapegoats could somehow have predicted this, but the fact that a prime minister would have to resign after a (very tragic) regional accident really surprised me.

2. An interesting article on Larry Page and Google.  Investors should take note of the following:

"Page recognized that Google’s search-advertising business, with its insane profit margins and sustained growth, was exactly the kind of cash-generating machine that his hero, Nikola Tesla, would have used to fund his wildest dreams. "

A portfolio allocation towards Google seems less about betting on them creating shareholder value in the short or medium term, and more about making sure that if this company takes over large sections of the economy then at least they are hedged. A third scenario is that Google is more like the Xerox of our day. They might be the first to invent and implement a product that becomes as common as a computer mouse (Wow, this example might be a bit dated), but they might not be the company that fully benefits from their advancements. This is a risk as long as the cost of computing keeps falling, since what only a big company can do today might be cheap enough for college students to do from their dorm rooms five years from now.

3. The US Treasury is cracking down on financial insiders trading on material nonpublic government information.  Perhaps "cracking down" is the wrong set of words, "facilitating" seems to be a better word choice.  They are warning privileged investors about additional Russian sanctions before the rest of the market finds out.

Unfortunately this is nothing new - many financial players will attend events like the World Economic Forum because policy makers will often tell market participants what they are thinking before it is more widely known - Trichet in particular told attendees at a meeting a few years before the financial crisis that the ECB's monetary policy was going to be tighter than expected because of petrodollar flows. 

And it should be mentioned that the ones who go there to learn about policy ahead of time are the less harmful ones - those who use access to help shape policy in their interest, leading to regulatory capture, are the ones that do the most damage.

4. New Delhi metallo is an enzyme that can be produced by some bacteria that turns them into antibiotic superbugs. There were 6 cases in the UK in 2008 and 143 in 2013. Scientists are only sure about one treatment working, and expect that treatment to eventually stop working. 

Antibiotic resistance is one of the more interesting (and troubling) collective action problems of our day. Our medical system currently doesn't incentivize research into novel antibiotics enough since novel antibiotics are saved as a last line of defense against resistant bacteria. Part of the solution to this problem involves X-prize type bounties that incentivize researchers and companies to discover novel forms of antibiotics the can be used against bacteria with these new defenses. This is much more important than developing a tricorder, but perhaps it is too backwards looking for those who might otherwise want to be affiliated with the project.