Tuesday 26 July 2022

A puzzle

This being a puzzle to be sorted out when a gap opens up in my busy schedule. A puzzle which came to be between waking and rising this Wednesday morning. A morning when some sufficient chunk of our railway workforce are on strike and there should be lots of people working at home with time on their hands. Sufficient meaning just enough to close down the network: perhaps the just the chaps who turn the power on in the morning.

We have two real companies, C1 and C2, working away and making money. They have incomes.

We have two funds, F1 and F2, which make money by owning other entities, rather than by actually doing anything. So F1 owns all of C1 and a chunk of F2, while F2 owns all of C2 and a chunk of F1.

We have two investors in funds, I1 and I2. I1 owns a chunk of F1 and I2 owns a chunk of F2. They get dividends.

Puzzle: what are the incomes of F1 and F2?

I suspect that Microsoft's Excel will decline to solve the puzzle on the grounds that the definitions are circular. So will I get to the bottom of the matter in some other way by close of play today? Will anyone else?

PS: if both funds can be bought and sold on the stock exchange, I do not yet see any bar to F1 and F2 owning chunks of each other. But maybe something will come to me. Maybe the regulators will follow Excel and declare such arrangements to be illegal. But then, how would they know if all kinds of dodgy offshore intermediaries are brought into play?

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