Opening Bell: 3.15.17

JPMorgan's Dimon: Repatriation will create 'QE4'-like stimulus (CNBC)
"If all companies did [with repatriated funds] was pay dividends and buy back stock, think of that as QE4 ... and far cheaper, in my opinion," Dimon said, comparing the stimulative effect to that of the Federal Reserve's multiyear monetary easing. "The shareholder will decide what to do with it. It's not like it disappears after that. It is fuel to the system."

Sports Betting Is Starting to Look a Lot More Like Wall Street (BBG)
Contrarian Investments owner Chris Connelly said he has both domestic and foreign investors. Similar to the common Wall Street method of looking for arbitrage in overvalued or undervalued stocks, Connelly said he uses a computer model to look for overvalued gambling spreads and bets against them. “Instead of investing in the stock market and taking a certain stock, I’m investing on sports spreads of athletic teams,” Connelly said. “So I focus on football and basketball, college and pro.”

Fed Is Ready to Raise Rates, but Key Bank Metric Suggests Caution (WSJ)
“The last five, six years, you’ve had actually decent industry loan growth” despite somewhat weak gross domestic product figures, Evercore ISI analyst Glenn Schorr said recently. “Now we have optimism that some policy change will bring” higher GDP growth. “Yet, every bank is talking down expectations for loan growth. It seems a little backwards.”

Proof Wall Street Is Still a Boys’ Club (BBG)
A new study finds that, when it comes to truly celebrating women, Wall Street still has a long way to go. The results show that investment firms treat male employees very differently from female employees after they get in trouble. While women are far less likely to engage in misconduct, they’re punished much more harshly for any infractions.

Focus on Bank Culture Is an Odd Regulatory Strategy (Dealbook)
It is a strange regulatory tool. The Environmental Protection Agency does not spend a lot of time worrying about the ethics of oil refiners or power utilities. It just regulates their emissions. Nor are the country’s workplace safety rules structured around requirements for employers or co-workers to act ethically.

Bill Ackman Is Done Losing Money on Valeant (Bloomberg View)
Everything went bad -- in most tellings, precisely because Valeant was so purely a creature of modern shareholder capitalism. The focus on ruthless efficiency led to pricing decisions that were political and public-relations disasters. The compensation scheme seems to have incentivized shenanigans. The leverage didn't help. Rather than finding an undervalued company with a good business but a shoddy management team and pushing it to extract value from its business more efficiently, Pershing Square found a hyper-efficient value extractor and watched the wheels fall off. That's not the ideal approach.

Domino’s Atoned for Its Crimes Against Pizza and Built a $9 Billion Empire (Businessweek)
At Domino’s Farms, executives had already admitted to themselves a more persistent long-term threat: The pizza wasn’t very good. “When we did consumer tests, if they knew the pizza was Domino’s, they actually liked it less than if they just thought it was a random unbranded pizza,” Doyle says. “We had somehow created a situation where people liked our pizza less if they knew it was from us. So yeah, that was a problem.” Some of the more memorable comments: “The crust tastes like cardboard. The sauce tastes like ketchup.” And: “This is an imitation of pizza.”

Lie-bor? More like Li-BORE, am I right? (FT Alphaville)
Regulators wanted to discourage unsecured short-term lending between banks, since that reduces risk in the financial system. And regulators have responded to the lack of liquidity cited above by tasking a committee of dealers with finding a new benchmark for the swaps market. But after the structural changes, it’s important to remember Libor-related indicators aren’t as reliable as they used to be. And that could make it tougher to get a measure of global banks’ default risk.

Sex toy company to pay $4M to settle claims it spied on users (NYPost)
Two people filed the lawsuit against the Canadian sex toy maker last year after it came to light at the hacking conference, Def Con, that the We-Vibe company was collecting data regarding how customers used the vibrators. The smartphone app transmitted information to the company’s servers about the usage, including temperature and the vibration intensity the owners used the vibrators at and how frequently they were used.