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Could venture capitalists make student debt obsolete?

Silicon Valley is captivated by a new concept that could eliminate student debt, Andrew writes in his column.

Students were saddled with $1.5 trillion in debt last year, a record high. An idea called Income Share Agreements has been talked about for years as a way to alleviate that burden. Under this system, tuition is free, but students agree to pay back a percentage of their income for several years if they get good jobs after graduation.

Lambda School, an online learning start-up founded in 2017 with the backing of Y Combinator, has $30 million in funding today from venture capitalists to make the concept a reality.

Andrew writes:

The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It’s an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.

The Lambda model is being closely watched. It’s meant to treat students as investments rather than cash cows — and potentially lift their crippling debt load.

But it also comes with risks.Programs seeking safe investments might reverse the strides made in expanding educational opportunities for higher-risk students; and institutions might move away from degrees that lead to noble, but lower compensated, professions.

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Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Stephen Grocer in New York, and Tiffany Hsu and Gregory Schmidt in Paris.

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How China deepened its influence in Malaysia

Senior Chinese officials offered to bail out the troubled Malaysian government fund known as 1MDB in exchange for deals, a WSJ investigation found. Documents and interviews with current and former Malaysian officials show some of the political forces at work behind China’s One Belt, One Road infrastructure initiative and the country’s efforts to strengthen its position overseas.

Five takeaways from the investigation:

• In secret meetings, Chinese officials told Malaysian officials that China would try to fend off investigations by the U.S. and other countries into multibillion-dollar fraud accusations at the fund.

• The Chinese also offered to bug the homes and offices of WSJ reporters in Hong Kong.

• Malaysian officials suggested that some of the infrastructure projects be financed at above-market rates to generate cash for other needs.

• In return, Malaysia offered lucrative stakes in railway and pipeline projects.

• The infrastructure deals made Malaysia the second-biggest recipient of One Belt, One Road funding after Pakistan.

SoftBank scales back its WeWork plans

SoftBank is increasing its stake in WeWork, a bet on continued growth in co-working. But the investment is smaller than the one originally considered.

The news: SoftBank is planning to invest $2 billion in WeWork, the leading co-working company, the NYT’s David Gelles reports. The money comes from the conglomerate itself, not from its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund. It values WeWork at $47 billion, and brings SoftBank’s total investment in the company to about $10.5 billion.

What could have been: Under one possibility, SoftBank would have spent $10 billion to buy out all of WeWork’s other investors and injected $6 billion more in the company. Several factors led to a smaller deal, including market volatility and the reluctance of investors to sell shares to SoftBank.

The back story: SoftBank, one of WeWork’s biggest boosters, has made multiple investments in the company. Much of its capital in WeWork is from the Vision Fund, which is largely backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. But the relationship between SoftBank and WeWork is under growing scrutiny.

Carlos Ghosn comes to court

Carlos Ghosn, in his first public appearance since being arrested in November, declared today that he was innocent of the allegations of financial wrongdoing that led to his ouster from the vast Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi automaking alliance.

Handcuffed, with a rope around his waist and plastic slippers on his feet, Mr. Ghosn told a packed courtroom in Tokyo that he had “always acted with integrity.” He added:

“I have been wrongly accused and unfairly detained based on meritless and unsubstantiated accusations.”

Mr. Ghosn, 64, a celebrity in Japan since pulling Nissan back from the brink nearly two decades ago, was arrested on Nov. 19 after arriving in Tokyo on a corporate jet. In jail, he has not spoken to his family, who believe he is the victim of a corporate coup, and he can be visited only by diplomats or his Japanese lawyer.

He is accused of underreporting millions in compensation and improperly transferring personal losses to Nissan’s books. Nissan and Mitsubishi removed him as chairman; he remains chairman and chief executive of Renault. Today, he said:

“I never received any compensation from Nissan that was not disclosed, nor did I ever enter into any binding contract with Nissan to be paid a fixed amount that was not disclosed.”

The gig economy is smaller than researchers thought

In 2016, a report from two respected Ivy League economists found that on-call, freelance or contract-to-contract work was reshaping the U.S. job market — a change driven forward in part by platforms like Uber and Task Rabbit.

Alan Krueger of Princeton and Lawrence Katz of Harvard said then that the gig economy accounted for nearly 16 percent of American workers in 2015, up from 10.7 percent a decade earlier.

But yesterday, Mr. Krueger and Mr. Katz walked back their estimate, saying that the nontraditional slice of the labor market probably went up only one or two percentage points. And such work still takes a back seat to the standard single-employer job, according to more recent evidence, including a study from the Labor Department released last year.

Why the disparity? Mr. Krueger and Mr. Katz say that:

• After the recession, the labor market was on shaky ground. Workers needed odd jobs to stay afloat. But rather than shifting permanently to gig work, they returned to more stable, long-term roles once the economy recovered.

• This gray layer of the work force, where people hold multiple jobs and move fluidly and frequently between them, is difficult to track. Survey designs differ from study to study and are often flawed.

Another day, another pharmaceutical deal

The drugmaking industry has seen a flurry of big moves recently:

• Eli Lilly of Indianapolis said yesterday that it would shell out $8 billion in cash to purchase Loxo Oncology of Stamford, Conn., paying $235 per share, a 68 percent premium to Loxo’s closing price on Friday.

• Takeda Pharmaceutical’s $62 billion purchase of Shire, an Irish biotechnology company focused on rare diseases, closed this week. The deal, by far the largest foreign takeover ever made by a Japanese firm, made the 237-year-old Takeda the world’s tenth-largest drugmaker by revenue.

• Bristol-Myers Squibb said last week that it would buy Celgene, which makes the blockbuster Revlimid cancer medicine, for $74 billion.

• GlaxoSmithKline said last month that it would pick up Tesaro, which makes an ovarian cancer drug, for $4.16 billion. In June, Eli Lilly closed a deal to buy Armo Biosciences and its immunotherapy cancer treatment for $1.6 billion.

Revolving door

Jim Yong Kim has unexpectedly resigned as president of the World Bank. He was scheduled to serve until 2022, and his departure, effective Feb. 1, sets up a succession tussle between the U.S., which traditionally wields heavy influence over the process, and other governments. The bank, which has focused on combating climate change and promoting foreign aid, has clashed with the Trump administration. (NYT)

Mick Davis, a British politician and the former head of the Xstrata mining company, is setting up a new mining venture, Niron Metals, with a former executive at the De Beers diamond company and a Swiss investment manager. (FT)

Nellie Liang, the Brookings fellow and former Federal Reserve economist nominated by President Trump for a seat on the Fed’s board of governors, withdrew her candidacy. (NYT)

AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish drugmaker, hired Dr. José Baselga as its head of research and development in oncology. Dr. Baselga resigned in September as the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and later from the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb, after failing to disclose conflicts of interest. (NYT)

Speed Reads

Deals

• Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, an American buyout firm, will take a stake in the British catering operator WSH Investments in a deal that some see as an endorsement of the British economy ahead of a Brexit vote next week. (WSJ)

• The nearly $2.4 billion sale of Rowan Cos., an offshore driller, to rival Ensco, may have hit a snag. One of Rowan’s largest shareholders, the hedge fund Canyon Capital Advisors, said it would vote against the deal. Crude oil prices in the U.S. have sunk more than 30 percent since the deal was announced. (Reuters)

Tech

• The incoming governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, promises new jobs, especially from start-ups. His wife, Annie Huntress Lamont, a leading venture capitalist with deep Silicon Valley connections, might help there. (NYT)

• Two city councilors from Seattle, Amazon’s hometown, went to New York to urge politicians to think carefully about housing and transportation before the company establishes new offices. (Bloomberg)

• Seven charts that suggest Tesla might be emerging from “production hell.” (Bloomberg)

• Qualcomm’s share price reflects two big legal battles: its antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, which continues this week, and its patent spats with Apple. (WSJ)

• Amazon is losing popularity on Wall Street. Analysts have the lowest percentage of buy ratings on the company’s stock in 14 years. (CNBC)

• Samsung said it expected a 29 percent decline in its fourth-quarter operating profit, severely disappointing analysts. The company cites “mounting macro uncertainties” and “lackluster demand” for its memory chips. (WSJ)

• Intel is partnering with Facebook on an artificial intelligence chip for use in processes such as automatically tagging people in photos. (Reuters)

Politics & Policy

• President Trump plans a televised address on his border wall proposal tonight, and a trip to the border later this week, amid a government shutdown in which the $5.7 billion he demands for the project is a key sticking point. (NYT)

• Former Vice President Joe Biden: Will he run? Could he win? (NYT)

• The government shutdown will not, after all, delay tax refunds. (WSJ)

• Financial companies are looking to move some $1 trillion of assets and more than 7,000 jobs from Britain to the rest of Europe to deal with Brexit uncertainty. (Bloomberg)

• Gavin Newsom’s first act as governor of California was to direct state officials to set up a single-purchaser system for prescription drugs, potentially the largest in the country. (Reuters)

Best of the rest

• Hedge funds including Renaissance Technologies, Two Sigma, Citadel and DE Shaw joined Bridgewater in rising above a terrible year for their industry. (FT)

• Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments and other financial heavyweights are backing a low-cost stock exchange called Members Exchange, or MEMX. (WSJ)

• A new minimum wage of $15 an hour went into effect in New York on Jan. 1. But some cost-of-living calculations suggest it should be just under $33. (NYT)

• The Middle East’s largest broadcaster, the Saudi-backed MBC Group, is expanding its video streaming service as part of Riyadh’s propaganda wars against Iran and Qatar. (FT)

• The toymaker MGA Entertainment is suing Louis Vuitton’s parent company, the luxury giant LVMH, to ensure it can keep making Poopsie Pooey Puitton, a plastic purse filled with ingredients for “magical unicorn poop.” (WaPo)

• The chief executive of Starbucks, Kevin Johnson, is aiming to revive sales by scaling back some initiatives of the company’s longtime leader Howard Schultz, including plans for upscale coffee shops. (WSJ)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Wednesday.

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