Categories
Finance

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon surveys the globe

Twenty-five years from now China will be a developed nation and home to as many as a quarter of the world’s largest companies.

That’s the assessment from JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, who surveys some of the geopolitical landscape in his annual letter to shareholders that was published on Wednesday.

The missive, in which Dimon discusses everything from the strength of JPMorgan’s balance sheet and to whether the U.S. needs big banks (safe to say Dimon disagrees with Bernie Sanders on the answer), also includes a review of some of the roughly 100 countries where the nation’s biggest bank does business.

Though Dimon is bullish on China’s prospects, he anticipates some rough patches as the world’s second-largest economy evolves. “Going forward, we do not expect China to enjoy the smooth, steady growth it has had over the past 20 years,” writes Dimon. “Reforming inefficient state-owned enterprises, developing healthy markets… with full transparency and creating a convertible currency where capital can more freely will not be easy.”

China’s economy grew 6.9% in 2015, which was robust compared with the rest of the world but the weakest for China in a quarter century. The effects of the slowdown have reverberated worldwide, especially in emerging markets that are home to many of Beijing’s largest trading partners.

Bank assets as a share of the economy (Source: JPMorgan Chase)

Screen Shot 2016-04-10 at 3.26.58 AMDimon discusses Brazil, which is battling recession, inflation and political turmoil. Despite those difficulties, the country “has a strong judicial system, many well-run companies, impressive universities, peaceful neighbors and an enormous quantity of natural resources,” reports Dimon.

He also surveys the situation in Argentina, which he notes nearly a century ago had a gross domestic product per person larger than that of France. Though France has since tripled the size of its economy compared with Argentina, the latter “has a highly educated population, a new president who is making bold and intelligent moves, peaceful neighbors and, like Brazil, an abundance of natural resources,” according to Dimon.

Dimon devotes the final three of his 50 pages to a discussion of public policy, including the potential exit of Britain from the European Union. A so-called Brexit could harm the economies of both the U.K. and the EU, he says.

For his part, Dimon would like the EU to forge a political union to match the monetary one it has become. “The [EU] began with a collective resolve to establish a political union and peace after centuries of devastating wars and to create a common market that would result in a better economy and greater prosperity for its citizens,” Dimon writes. “These two goals still exist, and they are still worth striving for.

Categories
Law

Fairness requires sister to honor promise to brother: Court

A battle between siblings over their mother’s estate shows that you can hold someone to their promise if you rely in good faith on that person’s word to your disadvantage, a state appeals court in Manhattan has ruled.

The ruling reinstates a lawsuit by Peter Castellotti to force his sister Lisa to give him half of John’s Pizza in Midtown and other assets she inherited from their mother Madeline.

After Madeline’s death in 2005, Peter and Lisa orally agreed that Peter would pay the taxes on Madeline’s estate with his share of the proceeds from a life insurance policy held by Madeline. In exchange, Lisa promised to give Peter half the inheritance after his divorce from his then-wife Rea and half the income and proceeds generated from the estate before the divorce was final.

After she became ill, Madeline disinherited Peter to prevent Rea from obtaining any of her assets, which besides the pizzeria included a 51% stake in a real estate partnership, a house on Staten Island and funds held in various bank accounts.

Lisa allegedly also agreed to obtain a $5 million life insurance policy that named Peter as beneficiary and to maintain that policy until she transferred the assets to Peter.

After Lisa let the insurance policy lapse in May 2012, Peter sued for breach of contract, charging her with failing to transfer half of Madeline’s assets to him after his divorce became final in November 2008. Lisa countered that Peter’s claim was barred by New York’s statute of frauds, which requires that an agreement to name a beneficiary of a life insurance policy be in writing.

The trial court sided with Lisa and dismissed the case after ruling that because part of the contract was invalidated by the statute of frauds, the entire contract was void. The appeals court disagreed. Associate Justice Rosalyn Richter, writing for the panel, explained:

Here, the allegations of the complaint show an unambiguous promise by Lisa to provide Peter with half of the income generated by the assets during the pendency of Peter’s divorce, to transfer half of the assets upon the finality of the divorce, and to name Peter as sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy of at least $5 million. The complaint’s allegations also show that Peter detrimentally relied on those promises by paying a substantial amount in taxes for Madeline’s estate, and suffered resulting monetary damages.

According to Richter, the trial court properly rejected an assertion by Peter that his paying the taxes on the estate meant that the statute of frauds did not apply.

Still, fairness compelled the court to reinstate the court case. “The theory of unjust enrichment is not precluded by the statute of frauds because it is not an attempt to enforce the oral contract but instead seeks to recover the amount by which Lisa was enriched by Peter’s expense,” Richter explained.

Categories
Sports

LeBron James says he needs to ‘do more’

On Oct. 30, 2014, the Cleveland Cavaliers staged a pregame ceremony to mark a homecoming for LeBron James, who had left four years earlier to play for Miami.

About a minute into the observance, before an arena packed with fans who waved sabers that glowed red, a video of James appeared on the so-called humongotron that hangs from the ceiling of the arena.

“If there’s one thing we all know,” intoned an announcer, before the video cut to James. “There’s no place like home,” James finished, before tossing chalk into the air as tends to be his pre-game ritual. The fans, who seemed to embody the chalk’s trajectory, leaped from their seats.

Fast forward to Friday, when we awoke to news that the Nets had upset the Cavs the night before in Brooklyn.

The Nets entered the matchup with 20 wins in 71 tries and ranked 14 of 15 in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. The Cavs started the game atop the conference and, seemingly, poised to compete for an NBA championship after losing to Golden State in the finals last year.

The loss to the Nets capped a week that featured a series of questions about James’ ability to lead the Cavs back to the finals and his commitment to the team after this season.

Five days earlier, the Cavs lost in Miami after James spent halftime chatting with his friend and former teammate, Heat guard Dwayne Wade, rather than warming up with the Cavs, who trailed by 21 points at the half.

That earned James a talking-to from coach Tyronn Lue, who said James apologized for his behavior. “I just told him we can’t have that, being down like we were and him being the leader,” Lue told cleveland.com.

On Monday, a tweet appeared that suggested James had unfollowed the Cavs’ Twitter feed.  (James declined to discuss it.)

Then on Wednesday, James received another talk, this time from Cavs general manager David Griffin. The prompt: a story by Howard Beck in the Bleacher Report that quoted James as saying he hoped to team someday with his besties Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony.

The talks seemed to have their effect. “I just need to do more,” James told reporters after the loss in Brooklyn.

James will have his chance on Saturday night in New York, where the Cavs will take on the Knicks. “I feel like we’re ready to make a championship run,” James told reporters on Saturday morning before Cleveland’s shootaround.

In a gift of scheduling, the game at the Garden will feature a matchup between James and Anthony.

Of course, the Cavs all need to do more if they hope to return to the finals. “These handpicked Cavs, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, should never have to be a one-man team, and they’re doomed if they are,” Barry Petchesky noted on Deadspin.

Though James, 31, has said he plans to end his career in Cleveland, he also has signed a series of one-year deals that enable him to become a free agent again this summer.

Categories
Sports

New York set to ban smokeless tobacco from ballparks

It may be time for the Mets and Yankees to buy more Bazooka.

The New York City Council this week is expected to vote on a bill that would ban smokeless tobacco from sports arenas throughout the five boros. The bill, which would take effect upon being signed into law by Mayor de Blasio, would make both Citi Field and Yankee Stadium tobacco-free.

The measure also would make New York the fifth major league city to prohibit use of smokeless tobacco at ballparks. In the past year, Chicago, San Franciso, Los Angeles and Boston have enacted similar bans, which are backed by Major League Baseball, as well as by both the Yankees and Mets.

The main sponsor of the measure says distinguishing tobacco based on how players consume it reflects stereotypes about snuff that no longer hold sway.

“I couldn’t imagine us being OK as a city or society as a whole with a baseball player standing in left field smoking a cigarette while the game was going on, on national television,” Councilman Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat who chair’s the council’s health committee, told the Daily News in February. “But… just because of culturally what has existed for a long time, it’s OK for professional athletes to stand in left field or in the dugout and chew wads of smokeless tobacco.”

Though the sight of players dipping has marked baseball for decades, the habit takes a toll. Two years ago, Tony Gwynn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, died from cancer of the salivary glands that he attributed to chewing tobacco.

Curt Schilling, the retired pitcher for the Red Sox, blames smokeless tobacco that he chewed for three decades for cancer of the mouth that he has battled since 2014.

“You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell,” Schilling wrote last year in a letter to his younger self that was published in The Players’ Tribune. “You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.”

Smokeless tobacco contains nitrosamines, which form during the curing of tobacco and can cause cancer and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one-third of major leaguers use smokeless tobacco despite the dangers.

Efforts to ban smokeless tobacco have met with pushback from the players’ union, which asserts that baseball cannot ban snuff so long as it remains legal. As the union sees it, smokeless tobacco presents no danger to others from second-hand smoke.

Still, the union supports efforts to persuade players to quit the habit. “It’s definitely an addiction and it’s a tough addiction to get away from, because you’re always around it and there’s certain triggers,” an unnamed player for the Mets told the New York Post. “But I think if they apply a rule, we should abide by it.”

Categories
Sports

Goose Gossage rails against ‘nerds’ who run baseball

At a reunion on Friday of three of the four inventors of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, who wrote the book, discussed the innovation that Bill James, who pioneered statistical analysis of baseball, brought to the game.

As James saw it, the baseball diamond “was a field of ignorance,” Lewis told an audience at MIT’s Sloan Sports conference in Boston. James, who self-published his analyses starting in 1977. (He also pioneered blogging, you might say.)

James’ work formed a foundation for the use of statistical methods by Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta after Beane became general manager of the Oakland A’s in 1997. Since then, front offices throughout sports have adopted (and refined) statistical tools to inform everything from scouting to strategy.

So it was with amusement that we greeted comments by Goose Gossage, the former Yankees pitcher, who on Thursday unleashed a diatribe against teams’ reliance on math.

“The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” Gossage told ESPN. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played Rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out.

“They don’t know s—,” he added.

Whatever you think of the state of baseball, Gossage has impeccable timing. This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of the MIT event, which opened with the aforementioned reunion of Lewis, James (who did not attend Harvard) and DePodesta (who did).

Grousing by the Goose aside, it helps to appreciate how baseball operated before James, now a senior adviser to the Red Sox, began studying the game. In 2002, the average draft, which lasted 50 rounds back then, produced one everyday major league player, according to DePodesta, who now serves as chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns.

“We aimed to be wrong 48 out of 50 times, instead of 49 out of 50,” DePodesta recalled.

Gossage, it seems, goes with his gut, though even he acknowledges there is a role for statistical analysis, according to Andrew Marchand, who covers the Yankees for ESPN.

Still, it makes you wonder what Gossage might think of “Tracking pitcher performance with instantaneous component ERA and moving averages” or “zWins, an alternative calculation of wins above replacement in baseball,” to cite two of the papers presented at the gathering in Boston.

The tirade, in which Gossage also blasted Jose Bautista as a “f—ing disgrace to the game” for flipping his bat upon hitting a home run in the playoffs last October, earned Gossage, who is at Yankees’ training camp this spring as an instructor, a talking-to from General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi.

In the end the nerd had his revenge. “That’s what’s changed since 2002,” said James. “You used to have to pay attention to those guys [like Gossage]. Now you can just ignore them.”

Categories
Sports

Jacob DeGrom declines to sign

The Mets made Jacob deGrom an offer: take it or take it.

The right-hander will earn $607,000 this season because that’s what the team offered to pay him. DeGrom, who is entering his third season in the majors, has yet to amass enough time in the big leagues to be eligible for arbitration.

DeGrom is unable to negotiate his pay, per the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the terms and conditions of employment for major league players. To be eligible to bargain over pay, a player must either qualify as a free agent (defined as at least six years of Major League service and no contract for the coming season) or have between three and six years of service.

DeGrom can claim neither, which led the Mets to offer him a raise of $50,125 for the coming season. DeGrom, who had 14 wins last year and helped pitch the team to the World Series, responded by declining to sign his contract, as is his prerogative.

“Like the Mets, he is simply exercising his rights under the [collective bargaining agreement],” Brodie van Wagenen, deGrom’s agent, told ESPN. “But given Jacob’s standing as one of the top pitchers in Major League Baseball and his 2015 performance, his worth cannot be properly valued by a formula.”

The drama, which unfolded in Port St. Lucie four days before deGrom faced the Yankees in his first outing of training camp, reveals as much about the uniqueness of deGrom’s career as it does about the vagaries of the CBA.

DeGrom, whose birthday falls on June 19, will pitch most of his third season at age 28, or a year older than Matt Harvey, and five years senior to Noah Syndergaard.

In short, deGrom happens to be older for a third-year pitcher, if by older you mean between one and five years older than the other main members of the Mets’ starting rotation. Harvey will be eligible for free agency in 2019. deGrom won’t be a free agent until 2021.

Thus, the Mets have deGrom pitching for them, relatively inexpensively, in the prime of his career.  Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, defended the offer as the product of the team’s “straightforward approach to determining salaries.”

“Yes, it is based on a formula, predicated on performance,” Alderson told reporters.

That sounded to some like the Mets might be letting the exercise of their rights under the CBA cloud their judgment, especially when the player in question happened to be among the best in the big leagues and one whom the Mets are counting on to pitch them back to the postseason.

Given deGrom’s “unusual circumstances — an outlier on the developmental scale but an instant and charismatic star — would a few extra hundred-thousand dollars have bankrupted the Wilpon family,” asked Harvey Araton in the Times, referring to the Mets’ owners.

Still, you needn’t worry about deGrom, who is poised to earn more money that most people will in their lifetimes. After this season he likely will qualify as a so-called Super Two, which affords arbitration to players with at least two but less than three years of service if the player has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season and he ranks in the top 22% of service in the group of players who have between two and three years of service, all as agreed to in the CBA.

Provided deGrom stays healthy and continues to win, the Mets likely will offer him a series of million-dollar seasons in the hope of coming to terms before an arbitrator imposes an award. And that’s just for arbitration. Free agency holds the prospect of millions more.

During the latest offseason, the Diamondbacks signed Zach Greinke to a deal that reportedly will pay the pitcher $206.5 million over six years. Greinke will turn 33 this October.

Categories
Sports

Mets’ Herrera hits inside-the-park home run

Dilson Herrera may give Mets fans a reason to care less that Daniel Murphy moved on.

Herrera, in his sophomore year with the club, hit an inside-the-park home run on Friday to tie an exhibition in the bottom of the ninth against the Marlins.

As it happens, Herrera is the top prospect to replace Murphy, who in January signed with the Nationals. Murphy walked and grounded into a double play in two trips to the plate on Thursday as the Nationals topped the Mets in the spring opener for both teams.

Herrera, who turned 22 on Thursday, hit .211 with three home runs in 90 at-bats for the Mets last season after starting the season with the team’s triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas. Last May, in his first game in the majors, Herrera turned a double play with a backhand flip to the shortstop.

The Mets have “a viable alternative from within the organization” to succeed Murphy at second base, general manager Sandy Alderson told reporters last fall, referring to Herrera.

Herrera’s homer on Friday bounced off the left field wall and rolled to the foul line. He churned around the bases and dove head first across home plate.

Categories
Sports

Mets starters by (some of) the numbers

Depending on whom you ask, the Mets have either the best or second-best starting rotation in baseball.

That prompted us to take a snapshot of the National League champions’ starters. The table below looks at three stats that together provide one glimpse of pitching prowess.

Fielding independent pitching (FIP), which measures a pitcher’s talent by isolating results a pitcher controls directly: strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches and home runs.

Strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), which counts how many strikeouts a pitcher averages over nine innings

Earned run average (ERA), which measures the number of earned runs a pitcher allows, averaged over nine innings.

pitchersAs the numbers suggest, deGrom, Harvey and Syndergaard, the heart of the Mets’ rotation, all have the potential to be Cy Young award winners in 2016.

Wheeler, who was out last season while recovering from elbow surgery, is expected to rejoin the rotation in July. Matz, a left-hander who missed two months last season (his rookie year) after tearing a muscle near the armpit on his left side, will be trying to regain the form he showed in the first half of 2015.

Colon is expected to hold down the fifth spot in the rotation until Wheeler returns. The right-hander, who is entering his 20th season in the majors, reportedly turned down more money to remain with the Mets.

“All these guys are my family,” Colon told reporters on Wednesday.

Perhaps the best stat of all for Mets fans: Barring injury or a trade, the core of the rotation will be together for at least the next three seasons.

Categories
Sports

The Mets start springtime

As Terry Collins made his way from one field to another on Friday at the Mets’ training facility, a refrain rose from the fans who followed him.

“We’re gonna win it all this year, Terry,” rippled from the crowd. The prediction sounded occasionally like a question but more often than not like a command, the Daily News noted.

That’s how the spring starts when you skipper the World Series runner-up. That’s also how it goes in February, on the day that pitchers and catchers report, with the date for the rest of the squad to report still a week away.

Collins, 66, happens to be the oldest manager in the majors. And that feels, right, too, especially now that the Mets seem wise for re-signing outfielder Yoenis Cespedes.

Being a senior also happens to give Collins something in common with many of those who will fill grandstands across Florida and Arizona between now and the start of the regular season.

Big-league baseball in Florida, “is a spring sport played by the young for the divertissement of the elderly – a sun-warmed, sleepy exhibition celebrating the juvenescence of the year and the senescence of the fans,” Roger Angell observed in The New Yorker, 54 years ago this spring.

Manager and retirees aside, the Mets this spring are all about youth, particularly the arms that propelled the team to a pennant. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Bartolo Colon and Zack Wheeler are the best rotation in baseball, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney.

Both deGrom and Harvey told reporters this winter they would consider playing their entire careers in Queens if the money were right. Of course, that’s what players who are returning to a team coming off a league championship say during the off-season.

Still, the prospect of the right-hander with the shoulder-length locks and the Dark Knight remaining Mets for several seasons feels right, right now, and affirms the possibility that they and their teammates may approach the splendor of 2015.

“I love expectations,” Collins told reporters on Thursday at his first official news conference of the season. “I think they’re great. I tell my players all the time: We create our own expectations.”

“Let the show begin,” he added

Categories
New York City

On the waterfront

For what seemed like an instant on Friday, a fit of labor unrest at the New York-New Jersey seaport left us daydreaming about the docks.

The reverie arose after thousands of longshoremen walked off the job to protest either oversight by the state agency charged with regulating hiring practices at the port or a federal criminal investigation into the leadership of their union.

Reality depended on which unnamed union official provided which explanation to which news outlet. “It was totally unannounced and unexpected by anyone,” one of those anonymous sources told the Times, which noted that the reason for the action “remained shrouded in intrigue.”

Apparently some workers felt the same way. They told the local NBC affiliate they didn’t know the strike was happening when they reported for work on Friday and were awaiting instructions on what to do next.

Whatever the grievance, the stoppage caused containers to stack up in Newark and Elizabeth, as well as on Staten Island. The terminal at the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn either shuttered or remained open depending, again, on whom you asked.

By Friday evening the walkout was over. The terminals, the country’s busiest after Los Angeles and Long Beach, would reopen Monday as scheduled, the Port Authority tweeted about nine hours after the strike began.

Still, however briefly, thoughts turned to a modern-day “On the Waterfront,” or to the contents of all those containers. We imagined life as a stevedore. We Googled the dimensions of a ship that can pass through the Panama Canal: maximum length, 967 feet; maximum beam overall, 106 feet; maximum draft, 44 feet.

Some of us looked away from our labors (which take place at screens, mostly) and out through the narrows, toward a curtain of clouds in steel blue that hemmed the horizon.