Author: Gil

As I wrote, the BIO conference was “a singles bar for CEOs and venture capitalists.” Just add governors.

Last July, I wrote about the nuttiness of the American Jobs Creation Act, a one-time tax break for companies bringing overseas profits back to the U.S. (the tax rate on such earnings drops from about 38% to about 5%). Michelle Leder at Slate just wrote about the subject, calling it an “absurd provision of a law designed to create jobs.”

It’s a good piece, but she makes a “numbers in a vacuum” argument about Pfizer, which leads me to wonder if she’s not being fair toward the other companies, which are in fields that I don’t cover. She writes,

At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn’t list employees by region. But the company’s total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.

Thing is, those layoffs weren’t at all related to Pfizer’s overseas profits. They were a result of Pfizer acquiring Pharmacia and Warner-Lambert, along with a raft of smaller companies. Those acquisitions basically guaranteed layoffs in the thousands; this is what’s known as “generating efficiencies by combining operations.” So those layoffs were in the works long before the AJCA was passed in 2004.

Now, you can argue that the acquisitions were foolhardy or unlucky (especially the Pharmacia one, which pivoted on the Celebrex/Bextra franchise), but complaining that the company should have kept ‘redundant’ employees on because it had this one-time tax refund coming is flat-out stupid.

The first day of the conference was good, but I did a bunch of running around and interviewing, punctuated by a long lunch with a client who revealed that his first marriage ended because his wife was making it with the landscaper. He is not very happy that his second wife enjoys Desperate Housewives so much.

Unfortunately, that lunch ran over into an interview, so I had to reschedule. My subject was only free at 5pm, after the conference ended. We talked till about 5:45, and I headed out from there.

The taxi line was approximately 2 miles long. I took one look at the massive queue and said, “Screw this! I’m goin’ home!”

Unfortunately, the McCormick convention center is pretty remote, so this was not going to be achieved on foot, especially after a full day on a convention center floor.

So I started walking over to the hotel connected to the center. Unfortunately, plenty of people got that idea and were already on line for cabs.

I couldn’t find a shuttle bus, and thought I could be risking things by sneaking onto the bus for the Sanofi reception; after all, that event could’ve been located even further from my hotel. I kept walking.

Then I saw a trolley-bus. The driver was standing outside it, leaning against the door. Three guys in good suits were walking by it. One said, “How much to get us uptown?” His buddies laughed and they walked on.

I said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars right now to get me to the Embassy Suites.”

He said, “Okay!” and jumped into the bus. I ran on and shouted to the three guys to follow me. They did. The trolley took off and started maneuvering through the traffic.

At one point, the driver said, “I hope I don’t get in trouble for this.”

One of the suits (they were all business development/arbitrage guys for biotechs) said, “Don’t you remember? The cops told you to move your bus, because of the safety issues with the protesters! You had to get going, and now you’re stuck in traffic!”

“Man, you guys are smart!” he told us.

Twenty bucks later (about $5-8 more than a cab ride), I was home.

Here’s a pic of the convention center: