What could be happening to Martin Wolf?

This letter I am not sending to the Editor… as I do not want to put him in a tight spot.

Martin Wolf writes “Shareholders alone should not decide on AstraZeneca” May 9. 

Who says they do? They might have the last word yes, but their decisions are filtered through a market that considers, more or less, sometimes in ways that cannot be understood, sometime correctly and sometimes incorrectly, all those other factors that Wolf enumerates. 

Wolf does not want the deal go through… he is free to pressure, as he does… but should Wolf also have a final word on AstraZeneca? I don’t think so… and I believe the Editor would agree.

Should workers or government intervene? If they want… they are free to try.

Frankly Martin Wolf’s positions during the last weeks, like when he proposed to “Strip private banksof their power to create money” and put that exclusively in the hands of even fewer public actors; like when he wanted to “Wipe out rentiers with cheap money”; like him repeating over and over again his mantra about fixing the world with government deficits and infrastructure investments; and now this, breathes desperation of some kind. What could be happening?

What if by lottery some patents are yearly declared null, in order to keep the pharma industry on its toes?

Sir, David Shaywitz writes: “If the pharmaceuticals industry is to remain in the vanguard of science it will have to embrace a far leaner approach, with less bloated bureaucracy”, “Addiction to deals reveals the depth of pharma’s ill” May 2.

Is that really possible in an industry accustomed to working in the protective environment provided by patents? Is it not high time we see to that all that extra money we are asked to pay in order to reward inventions and stimulate new inventions go to that, and not to some other purpose, like the further enrichment of a 0.01% plutocracy?

Perhaps a yearly lottery, by which 5 percent of their patents are declared null, no reasons given, could give these companies more incentives to be on their toes.

Call it a dividend to humanity if you want… in payment for how humanity helped the inventors run the last mile for a patent.

When referencing cash, remember it is usually not really cash... & do we need special taxes on profits from patents?

Sir, I refer to Sarah Gordon’s “Be wary of the tax incentives in pharma’s deal financing” May 1, in order to make the following two observations:

First I believe that we should take the opportunity of the inequality frenzy that Piketty’s Capital has brought on, to discuss the treatment given to intellectual property right profits… as there can be little discussion that patents and similar, are among the biggest de facto inequality drivers. I, for instance, have held for some years that profits obtained under the umbrella of patents, and or of extravagant market shares, should be taxed higher than profits obtained from competing naked in the markets.

Second, when Gordon writes about the “$1.64tn of cash” that Moody estimates US companies held at the end of 2013, she would do better referring to “$1.64tn of liquid assets”… since we have no reason to believe the CFO’s of those companies keep stacks of notes hidden in their mattresses. I say this because we should not forget that any alternative use of these assets, will require their disposal… which has other effects in the market.