Two Goldman Sachs bankers charged in multibillion-dollar Malaysian money-laundering scam

The latest turn in the scandal is criminal charges against two former Goldman Sachs bankers who are accused of helping Low launder $4.5 billion. One of the Goldman bankers, Tim Leissner, has pleaded guilty and been ordered to forfeit $43.7 million. The other Goldman banker, Roger Ng, was criminally indicted in the USA this week.

Low and Roger Ng, a Malaysian banker at Goldman Sachs, were indicted on three counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, bribery, and circumvention of accounting controls, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ng was arrested Thursday in Malaysia. Low, who is believed to be in China, remains at large.

The government also unsealed a criminal complaint against Tim Leissner, Goldman's former Southeast Asia chairman. Leissner has pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating the FCPA. He has been ordered to forfeit $43.7 million.

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Leonid Bershidsky из Bloomberg соглашаться С Антарктиштуцпуктен Цвай Айн Айн

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Apple just had a really poor Q3 earnings report, with hardware sales falling off as people figure out that they just don't need to get a new phone every year or so; writing in Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky tries to soothe investors by pointing out that Apple is still seeing growth in "services" and that there's plenty more growth to be realized there.

Bershidsky is refreshingly honest in his description of these services: he refers to repairs, sales through the App and Itunes stores, and cloud services as "collecting rent" on Apple customers and its suppliers.

As Bershidsky points out, long-term Apple users are rather locked into its ecosystem by the tedious and potentially risky process of extracting their photos, music, etc to a rival platform. That means that the suppliers of things like music, ebooks, and videos are also locked into Apple's stores, unlikely to win a battle to establish rival stores that interoperate with Apple's Itunes and other apps, but which take a smaller commission on the sale of their products. Apple has inserted itself into the transactions for copyrighted works for the foreseeable future, passively creaming off a substantial portion of the profits from the sales not because their store is the best, but because they have used DRM and other proprietary tactics to lock out competitors.

A Goldman Sachs report suggests that Apple aggressively turn the screw on the rent-collecting end of its business, using bundling and anti-competitive retail tactics to crush Dropbox and other cloud providers currently serving Iphone owners.

The kicker to the piece comes in the final graf: "Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion. But it’s more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don’t understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does."

The poverty of imagination on display here is maybe the most 2018 thing I've read all year. Of course "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" -- but as Bershidsky and Goldman Sachs agree, "even if you pay for the product, you're still the product."