The headline of the article is a bit sensationalist. Mentioning the order of magnitude of the assets under management (about $1.5B) gives no indication of the head count, profitability, revenue, or local/state tax contribution for this company. For all we know, Smead Capital only employs a dozen people in the USA.
The fund literally only invests in stocks like Amex, Discovery, Home Depot, and Target.
It’s by all accounts a very small asset management company that has a few big whale clients. Good luck attracting the same level of whales in Phoenix as you would in Seattle, when your potential client base is full of major hire-on grants at places like Microsoft and Amazon.
The fact this is being reported by KTAR is strange. They are a small, conservative radio station. Not even a news network picked this up. They will report just about anything you call in
• Firms like this manage a large amount of capital but do so with relatively few employees. The actual loss to the Seattle economy is small.
• They certainly seem to want to threaten workers - unionize or otherwise show solidarity and we’ll punish you economically.
• The only sensible thing for employees to do is organize the labor it sells much as corporations employ managers,
incentive and process to organize the labor they purchase.
• If successful, labor will be eventually be in a position to punish firms and locales that undermine labor power.
If this comes to pass, it shouldn’t be too difficult to raise Cole Smead’s costs until the firm isn’t viable. From a game theory perspective, this sort of tit for tat is the only sensible way to bring about a mutually beneficial equilibrium.
Who cares. Firms now want so many tax concessions that cities probably lose more than they gain with these corporations.
So tired of this emphasis on the economy and job growth. The key is well-being, and a city that concentrates on well-being will get all the employment opportunities they want without a single concession. Of course, while employment opportunities last in the coming automation and robotic world.
Well, those experimental communities always fail. Too disorder results in an beautiful experiment collapsing.
The real problem is that these experimental communities need to have some type of binding social customs to govern the group. The Native Americans existed for millienialiums existed by having an agreed-upon binding social customs that held their society without formal written law.
In this case, these groups do not have take time to really develop these social customs or beliefs and guess what their experiment blows up. And chaos and strife breaksout which results in people dead.
IN a society as complex as the US, the rule of law and strong faith in institutions leads to a stable democratic institutions. These people fail to grasp that reality and the investment firm decides go to Arizona.
In reality, Seattle is better managed city than the wild west of Phoenix. But again, we are seeing the devastating effects when leaders do not put in faith into the institutions that they created and then as a result, chaos results which is a huge virus spike.
Phoenix is not a place that I would put a business knowing that long-term effects of climate change. If I want to keep a business for longer than ten years, I would not put it that town. I would rather put into Seattle than Phoenix.
