Conflicts of interest [feedly]

Conflicts of interest
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2019/03/conflicts-of-interest.html

The possibility or likelihood of conflict of interest is present in virtually all professions and occupations. We expect a researcher, a physician, or a legislator to perform her work according to the highest values and norms of their work (searching for objective knowledge, providing the best care possible for the patient, drafting and supporting legislation in order to enhance the public good). But there is always the possibility that the individual may have private financial interests that distort or bias the work she does, and there may be large companies that have a financial interest in one set of actions rather than another.

Marc Rodwin's Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan is a rigorous and fair treatment of this issue with respect to conflicts of interest in the field of medicine. Rodwin has published extensively on this topic, and the current book is an important exploration of how professional ethics, individual interest, and business and professional institutions intersect to influence practitioner behavior in this field. The institutional actors in this story include the pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, insurers, hospitals and physician partnerships, and legislators and regulators. Rodwin shows in detail how differences in insurance policies, physician reimbursement policies, and gifts and benefits from health-related businesses to physicians contribute to an institutional environment where the physician's choices are all too easily influenced by considerations other than the best health outcomes of the patient. Rodwin finds that the institutional setting for health economics is different in the US, France, and Japan, and that these differences lead to differences in physician behavior.

Here is Rodwin's clear statement of the material situation that creates the possibility or likelihood of conflicts of interest in medicine.

Physicians earn their living through their medical work and so may practice in ways that enhance their income rather than the interests of patients. Moreover, when physicians prescribe drugs, devices, and treatments and choose who supplies these or refer patients to other providers, they affect the fortunes of third parties. As a result, providers, suppliers, and insurers try to influence physicians' clinical decisions for their own benefit. Thus, at the core of doctoring lies tension between self-interest and faithful service to patients and the public. The prevailing powerful medical ethos does influence physicians. Still, there is conflict between professional ethics and financial incentives. (kl 251)

Jerome Kassirer is a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an expert observer of the field, and he provided a foreword to the book. Kassirer describes the current situation in the medical economy in these terms, drawing on his own synthesis of recent research and journalism:

Professionalism had been steadily eroded by complex financial ties between practicing physicians and academic physicians on the one hand and the pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology industries on the other. These financial ties were deep and wide: they threatened to bias the clinical research on which physicians relied to care for the sick, and they permeated nearly every aspect of medical care. Physicians were accepting gifts, taking free trips, serving on companies' speakers' bureaus, signing their names to articles written for them by industry-paid ghostwriters, and engaging in research that endangered patient care. (kl 73)

The fundamental problem posed by Rodwin's book is this set of questions:

In what context can physicians be trusted to act in their patients' interests? How can medical practice be organized to minimize physicians' conflicts of interest? How can society promote what is best in medical professionalism? What roles should physicians and organized medicine play in the medical economy? What roles should insurers, the state, and markets play in medical care? (kl 267)

The book sheds light on dozens of institutional arrangements that create the likelihood of conflicted choices, or that reduce that likelihood. One of those arrangements is the question for a non-profit hospital of whether the physicians are employed with a fixed salary or work on a fee-for-service basis. The latter system gives the physician a very different set of financial interests, including the possibility of making clinical choices that increase revenues to the physician or his or her group practice.

Consider physicians employed as public servants in public hospitals. Typically, they receive a fixed salary set by rank, enjoy tenure, and have clinical discretion. As a result, they lack financial incentives that bias their choices and have clinical freedom. Such arrangements preclude employment conflicts of interest. But relax some of these conditions and employers can compromise medical practice.... Furthermore, emplloyers can manage physicians to promote the organization's goals. As a result, employed physicians might practice in ways that promote their employer's over their patients' interests. (kl 445)

And the disadvantages for the patient of the self-employed physician are also important:

Payment can encourage physicians to supply more, less, or different kinds of services, or to refer to particular providers. Each form of payment has some bias, but some compromise clinical decisions more than others do. (kl 445) 

Plainly, the circumstances and economic institutions described here are relevant to many other occupations as well. Scientists, policymakers, regulators, professors, and accountants all face similar circumstances -- though the financial stakes in medicine are particularly high. (Here is an earlier post on corporate efforts to influence scientific research; link.)

This field of research makes an important contribution to a particular challenging topic in contemporary healthcare. But Rodwin's study also provides an important contribution to the new institutionalism, since it serves as a micro-level case study of the differences in behavior created by differences in institutional rules and practices.

Each country's laws, insurance, and medical institutions shape medical practice; and within each country, different forms of practice affect clinical choices. (kl 218)

This feature of the book allows it to contribute to the kinds of arguments on the causal and historical importance of specific configurations of institutions offered by Kathleen Thelen (link) and Frank Dobbin (link).

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Bargaining for the Common Good Comes of Age [feedly]

Amen

Bargaining for the Common Good Comes of Age
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/bargaining-for-the-common-good-comes-of-age/

The week-long strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in January 2019 marked the most significant struggle yet in a movement by teachers and other public-sector workers called Bargaining for the Common Good.  By striking over a long list of community-generated demands and with the support of a dense network of allies, LA teachers moved bargaining away from the union-versus-taxpayer framework into which public employers routinely push such conflicts.  Instead UTLA made itself the spearhead of an effort to reshape LA's priorities around a common good agenda.  Drawing on several years of experimentation by public-sector unions around the country, and coming hard on the heels of the #RedforEd teachers uprisings of 2018, the LA strike illuminated a significant shift in union strategies, one that holds profound implications for the future of organized labor and the relationship of unions to working-class communities.

Judged by the "pure-and-simple" union standards of a generation ago, the UTLA strike might have been deemed a failure because it did not add a penny to the six-percent raise the LA school board had offered teachers prior to the walkout.  But the strike was anything but a failure. The union fought over issues that went far beyond salaries, issues at the heart of public education and its centrality to the aspirations of working-class Angelenos.

The teachers won commitments from the school district to reduce class sizes by four students by 2021, increase investment in the schools, hire school nurses and full-time librarians, reduce standardized testing and random searches of students, and launch a dedicated hot-line for immigrant families who need legal assistance.  Many of these demands were crafted with allies like the Association of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and they explicitly challenged the austerity agenda of LA school superintendent Austin Beutner, a wealthy philanthropist and former investment banker who was installed by the LA school board in 2018 despite having no prior experience in education.

The UTLA strike was the most recent iteration in a string of post-Great-Recession public-sector union battles that have consciously attempted to rethink the participants, processes, and purposes of collective bargaining. If mid-twentieth-century collective bargaining was binary, involving only employers and unions, more recent efforts have sought to give community stakeholders a voice at the bargaining table. If traditional bargaining was done behind closed doors and focused on issues like salary, these fights have been waged in public around broader demands. And if traditional bargaining concluded with signed contracts and the demobilization of the union's membership, these efforts have made bargaining one step in an ongoing strategy of worker and community empowerment.

This approach can be traced back to the depths of the Great Recession, when President Barack Obama's agenda became mired in the politics of austerity and Tea Party activism was installing antiunion Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and tightening the grip of austerity on all levels of government. In that toxic environment, some public-sector unions began to realize they could no longer do business as usual.

That realization helped elect Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators slate to leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2010.  Lewis and her colleagues immediately challenged the austerity agenda that had been forced upon Chicago schools by aligning the union's fight with the interests of community allies. Calling for smaller class sizes, improved facilities, and a host of other demands that went beyond wages and other narrowly defined work issues, the CTU staged a precedent-setting strike in 2012, vilifying Rahm Emanuel as "Mayor One Percent."

The CTU's success was soon replicated by the St. Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT) in 2013. It patiently built an alliance with parents and community groups, with whom it drew up twenty-nine bargaining demands, including one insisting that the school district cease doing business with banks that foreclose on their students' families. After rallying broad community support, the St. Paul teachers won most of what they sought. "I had negotiated almost a dozen previous contracts for the SPFT," explained Mary Cathryn Ricker, the union's leader. "But, for the first time, I felt that signing a contract was just one step in building a larger movement."

A new strategy of alliance-based bargaining emerged from these campaigns. By May 2014, when many of its practitioners convened to compare notes at Georgetown University, the strategy had a name: Bargaining for the Common Good.  Soon it spread beyond teachers' unions. In 2014, a coalition of unions and community allies launched Fix LA, an effort to break the grip of austerity politics on the city's municipal services. That coalition exposed the fact that Los Angeles spent more taxpayer money paying fees to the Wall Street firms that marketed municipal bonds than it spent maintaining the city's streets. Fix LA  demanded that the city use its $106 billion worth of assets, payments, and debt issuance as leverage to "demand better deals with Wall Street," which would allow taxpayer money to be invested in the community and not transferred to wealthy bankers.

While these campaigns were carefully planned, their groundwork laid months if not years in advance, the teacher uprising of 2018 showed that common good bargaining was also adaptable on the fly—even in states where collective bargaining isn't allowed. In a shutdown that closed all 55 of West Virginia's school districts in January 2018, teachers first denounced tax policies that allowed the state's richest citizens to evade paying their fair share and then refused to return to work until other state employees won the same wage increase they were offered.  Soon thereafter, Oklahoma teachers protested the state's failure to fairly tax wealthy oil and gas interests, and Arizona teachers demanded that the state enact no further tax cuts until its per-pupil spending on education reached the national average.

In some ways Bargaining for the Common Good harkens back to the origins of teacher unionism and figures like Margaret Haley, leader of the Chicago Teachers Federation at the dawn of the twentieth century.  She crusaded against corporate tax dodgers who collected public subsidies at the same time Chicago was, as Haley put it, "closing the schools, cutting the teachers' salaries, increasing the number of children in each room, and otherwise crippling the service for want of money!"

Yet if it borrows from labor's past, Bargaining for the Common Good also represents a creative adaptation to the needs of workers and communities under twenty-first century capitalism.  Financialization, privatization, increasing inequality, and, most recently, judicial attacks on unions' ability to collect fees from the workers they represent, which culminated in the Supreme Court's 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision, have undermined traditional bargaining.  Bargaining for the Common Good responds to these changes by recasting unions as defenders not only of their members but the community's very well being. "In bargaining for the common good, we see great possibilities for a style of campaign that puts forward a vision for the city as well as for the schools," UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl explains.

By reframing collective bargaining as a community endeavor advancing broad demands that transcend the narrow wage-hour-and-working-condition economism the predominated in the twentieth century, the Bargaining for the Common Good movement is helping us imagine a revived twenty-first century labor movement.  As teacher unionism continues to boil in recent days—from Oakland, California, to Jefferson County, Kentucky—a common good agenda that unites public workers with the communities they serve is taking clearer shape, and inhibitions against striking that long held workers in check are dissipating.  More workers struck in 2018 than in any year since 1983.

Many worried that the Janus decision would be the final blow to the labor movement, but a new community-centered organizing model suggests otherwise. Not only are unions weathering Janus, they are beginning to find their voice—a voice that has too long remained silent.  Not a moment too soon.

Joseph A. McCartin

Joseph A. McCartin is Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The influence of centrist Democrats is fading fast. What does that mean for liberal technocrats? [feedly]

The influence of centrist Democrats is fading fast. What does that mean for liberal technocrats?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/05/influence-centrist-democrats-is-fading-fast-what-does-that-mean-liberal-technocrats/

It seems Brother Bernstein is not leaning toward his old boss....

To state the obvious, the policy agenda of the Democratic Party has moved to the left. Ideas that used to be on the fringe — Medicare-for-all, guaranteed jobs and the Green New Deal, all financed by very progressive taxation — are now much more widely accepted by Democrats.

Two possible theories explain this evolution: the old one from the center-left and the new one from the "leftier" left. The center left was/is essentially friendly, and largely deferential, to markets. Left to their own devices, financial markets will efficiently allocate excess savings to their most productive uses — so over-regulation is dangerous. Same with globalization. Taxes should be progressive, but not too much so or you'll dampen private investment. Public borrowing crowds out private borrowing, so deficit reduction is an oft-stated goal.

That sounds pretty Republican (or it did before Republicans went nuts). But there are two salient differences. One is that under center-left Democrats, you let the market rip, but you shave some gains off the top and redistribute them to those left behind, say through a robust Earned Income Tax Credit, the highly successful pro-work, anti-poverty wage subsidy that was expanded under President Bill Clinton. The second is that, in rare cases, it is kosher to tweak incentives to achieve a policy goal. A carbon tax to push back on climate change is a good example. Better yet, a cap-and-trade approach, in which the government sets up a market — there's that word again — wherein firms can trade pollution credits. 

The guiding principle is that the center-left policymaker has the technocratic skills to administer exactly the right tweaks and redistributions to ensure that markets continue to deliver optimal results.

Though this position still describes some Democrats, it is no longer the dominant view, as economist Brad DeLong recently showed in a Vox interview. DeLong, who calls himself a "Rubin Democrat" (a reference to Clinton's centrist treasury secretary, Bob Rubin), argues that the moment is such that "The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead." "DeLong believes," according to the piece, that "the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed."

What changed to usher in this twilight of the technocrats? The limits of "unfettered" markets and under-regulated finance, and the risks of letting them rip, have become undeniably clear. Even before the finance-infused housing bubble delivered the Great Recession, market-driven inequalities soared to levels we hadn't seen since the 1920s. 

Then there's the fact that markets weren't really "unfettered" (ergo, the scare quotes). Though their center-left proponents argued otherwise, trade deals were not for "free" trade. They were stacked to protect investors over workers and consumers (as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) argued regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership). Center-left policymakers didn't just leave financial markets alone; they actively deregulated them (see the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking regulations supported by Clinton in 1999). And when the labor unions came knocking for political support, the center-left too often wouldn't open the door (see the lack of support among moderate Democrats for the Employee Free Choice Act).

Next, center-left policies appeared insufficient to meet the challenges Democrats increasingly cared about, such as growing inequality, inaccessible health care, the cost of college, climate change, retirement insecurity and institutionalized racism. DeLong argues, with merit, that many of the center-left policies never got a chance because they depended on "a responsible center-right partner to succeed," and such support was never even close to forthcoming.

But as with the trade deals, the problem wasn't just political. Where center-left Democrats touted the need for "tough choices" on Social Security and Medicare (by which they meant, in part, cuts to benefits), the left wing of the party wanted to expand the programs, as is seen in today's prioritization of Social Security expansion and Medicare-for-all. 

For all these reasons, this twilight of technocrats makes sense to me. But it raises the question: What's up in the morning? If the old left's theory has been proved wrong, what is its replacement?

The Democratic left's new theory of the case is still forming, but it looks something like this: Both parties have stood by while markets were rigged, and therefore, they — both markets and the old parties — cannot be counted on to solve the challenges listed above. We must de-rig them through antitrust action, robust labor standards, union power (as a counterbalance to capital's power) and trade deals that are handshakes between workers across borders, not investors. At the same time, we can very progressively tax accumulated wealth and use the proceeds to both provide opportunities for those who have been left behind and fight existential market failures — most importantly, climate change.

What does the cast-aside technocrat have to say about that? The knee-jerk response is that such intervention into the market pushes too far and will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But this response is unconvincing. Social democracies have long existed (e.g., Scandinavian countries) that go much further to protect their citizens and their environment, spending 10 percentage points more of their GDP through the public sector ($2.1 trillion a year, in our economy) than we do without paying a productivity price for it. Obviously, universal health coverage is achievable, as it exists in every other advanced economy, at a cost of 6 to 8 percent of GDP less than we spend.

The fact is, while opponents scream about the massive negative market responses to the progressive agenda — People will stop working! Investors will stop investing! Doctors won't take patients! — we don't know either what the actual agenda will look like, if it will ever get legislated, or, if it does, what its impact will be on the zillions of moving parts in our economy.

All we know is that in some fundamentally important ways, what we've been doing hasn't worked. DeLong's right. It's time to pass the baton.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

US Imposes Tariffs, and the 2018 Trade Deficit Rises: Lessons? [feedly]

US Imposes Tariffs, and the 2018 Trade Deficit Rises: Lessons?
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/us-imposes-tariffs-and-2018-trade.html

Early in 2018, President Trump began instituting a series of tariffs on international trade. As he tweeted in March 2018: "When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore-we win big. It's easy!"

Last week, the US Department of Commerce announced the US trade figures for year-end 2018. After a year of President Trump's tariffs, the US trade deficit is larger in 2018 than it was in 2017. The bilateral US trade deficit with China is up, too. The government report notes:

For 2018, the goods and services deficit was $621.0 billion, up $68.8 billion from $552.3 billion in 2017. Exports were $2,500.0 billion in 2018, up $148.9 billion from 2017. Imports were $3,121.0 billion, up $217.7 billion from 2017. The 2018 increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $83.8 billion, or 10.4 percent, to $891.3 billion and an increase in the services surplus of $15.0 billion, or 5.9 percent, to $270.2 billion. As a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, the goods and services deficit was 3.0 percent in 2018, up from 2.8 percent in 2017. ... The deficit with China increased $43.6 billion to $419.2 billion in 2018. Exports decreased $9.6 billion to $120.3 billion and imports increased $34.0 billion to $539.5 billion.

Thus, a fairly common situation arises. A politicians claims that a certain Problem has a certain Solution. But when the politician is elected and the Solution is tried, the Problem is either the same or worse. It is rare for any politician in this situation to reconsider their Solution. Instead, the usual approaches are to argue that an even bigger and longer dose of the Solution is needed, or that the Solution was somehow sabotaged by poor implementation and political opposition.  

It will be interesting to see if President Trump acknowledges at some point that using tariffs to reduce the US trade deficit failed in 2018. My expectation is that any such acknowledgement would be followed by a claim that his tariff Solution was somehow undercut and thus only needs to be redoubled in the future. 

But for those with eyes to see, it should be apparent that trade deficits and surpluses rise and fall as a a result of large-scale macroeconomic factors, not because of fluctuation in "unfairness" that can be fine-tuned and adjusted with tariffs. I've tried to explain this point in more detail a few times: for example, see "Misconceptions about Trade Deficits" (March 30, 2018), "Some Facts about Current Global Account Balances" (August 7, 2018), and "US Not the Source of China's Growth; China Not the Source of America's Problems"(December 4, 2018). Here, I'll just focus on events of 2018. 

The US economy had solid economic growth in 2018, driven in part by the short-term effects of the tax cuts signed into law in December 2017. When an economy grows briskly,  consumption tends to rise, including its consumption of imported products. This pattern is standard. For example, the US trade deficit fell sharply during the Great Recession, because consumption of all kinds--including imports--fell as well. Meanwhile, China has been experiencing a slowdown in its rate of growth, so there has been less of a rise in consumption and imported products than would have been expected.

The health of the US economy has led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates several times in the last few years. As a result, global investment funds have flowed back to the US economy, and the additional demand for US dollars in foreign exchange markets has pushed up the foreign exchange value of the US dollar. This makes US exports more expensive overseas, and also makes it cheaper for US consumers to buy imported products. 

It's also a completely standard dynamic that if the US imposes tariffs, other countries will respond with tariffs on US products. In my home state of Minnesota, for example, Trump's tariffs have tended to raise prices and help iron ore producers in the northern part of the state, but China's countertariffs on soybeans have hurt farmers in the central and southern part of the state. 

The idea that exports and imports are the outcome of of macro variables like levels and shifts between consumption and savings across different econmies, which are also affected by exchange rates, is completely standard intro-level economics. News stories on the Department of Commerce announcement made these points. 

The US and other  high-income countries have legitimate concerns about how China's government and firms treat intellectual property. That's a real Problem, and it's worth working to actual  Solutions--like having high-income countries form a united front against these Chinese practices through organizations like the the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. If internationally-coordinated tariffs targeted on the main Chinese offenders emerged from that process, I suspect that even a lot of economists with free-trade leanings would see a case for such a step. But broad overall trade deficits are not the Problem to be chasing, and even if it was the right Problem,  the year 218 has shown that Trump's tariffs are not the Solution.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Medicare for All is Doable; Most Americans Want It [feedly]

So says Dean: Medicare for All is Doable; Most Americans Want It
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/medicare-for-all-is-doable-most-americans-want-it

Dean Baker's arguments for progress are always tinged with a rouge of tongue and cheek, or, as Springsteen says about the Jersey Shore, a tint of fraud. They combine an often ironic literary wit and very competent economics to deliver paradoxes in appealing wrappers.

Example: Dean says: Medicare for all is doable (other countries do it, and save money). Most americans believe in universal coverage for modern society. 

However, Dean also says Medicare for All will put a big part of the insurance industry out of business.  In addition, he notes, the Higher paid US doctors and health professionals, plus (I would add) dislocated employees and patients vulnerable to changes in coverage, will all become enemies. These are powerful interests, so.....the changes will have to be incremental.  

However (again...turtles all the way down)...Recent history  shows that billionaires -- esp those in the insurance and energy spheres -- view incremental socialization of their property the same as taking the whole thing. Green New Deal will play the same, in may respects, as MFA. They will exert ALL their power to crush both, and appeal to billionaires in other economic sectors that if the state can take health and energy property, it can take yours too. They will act as if both are existential threats to the class structure of US society, which in their mind, equates completely with their "freedom".

So Dean says we got to have it, and its doable, but can't get past the the class structure of US society that is the obstacle. In other words, he won't be betting any money on it REALLY getting done. There is the wit, if a bit harsh for me.

Further, most of the countries that have socialized medicine established it BEFORE the global private insurance industry became huge and deeply integrated with financial and industrial capital, as they are in the US. The establishment of these health systems in Europe was also the direct result of socialist, labor and social democratic parties and coalitions (including Communists) coming to power between and after the wars. 

Both MFA and the GND imply a general social-democratic revolution and restructuring of US class and political power to realize. If that is correct, every struggle going forward for progress will embody degrees of the tensions now reflected  among Democrats along the axes between Bernie/AOC social democrat (aka Democratic Socialists) and Biden-O'Rourke liberal approaches to ending the conditions of growing oppression, poverty, insecurity, institutional failures, and violence arising from corrupt, increasingly fascist, authoritarian Republican rule. I submit the tension among Democrats is a reflection of a natural (and healthy, fundamentally) aversion to revolutionary upheavals until all other paths are closed. Baker's wit plays on this dilemma 

I think the two tendencies will continue to regard each other as potential adversaries, pressed again and again into alliance by both reason and necessity to resist the advancing corruption and decay of the billionaire regime. I think of Frederick Douglas, or Thaddeus Stevens, and William Henry Seward. All opposed slavery, but could not agree on how it should pass on. The confederacy decided the matter for them. 

Another version of an analogous dilemma. In an old Vietnamese proverb I learned from a speech by Madame Binh,  the block of wood and the nail are adversaries  -- "The job of one inflicts pain on the other. The block of wood sees no end to conflict. The job of revolutionary is to explain to both: the problem is the hammer."

If our past history is any teacher, the billionaires themselves will hammer together the building that will become their own reckoning and imprisonment.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker To Reduce Inequality, Let’s Downsize the Financial Sector [feedly]

To Reduce Inequality, Let's Downsize the Financial Sector
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/to-reduce-inequality-let-s-downsize-the-financial-sector

Matt Bruenig — the president of the progressive, grassroots-funded People's Policy Project think tank — put forward a creative set of policy proposals last month on child care and family policy under the title of the Family Fun Pack. It prompted a major discussion in progressive circles on child care policy, helped in part by Sen. Elizabeth Warren's important proposal in this area that was released the next week.

In the hope of prompting the same sort of debate on policy directed toward the financial sector, I am putting forward the "Finance Fun Pack." While the full list of policies to rein in finance would be far more extensive, this one has three main components:

1. A modest tax on financial transactions;

2. Complete transparency on the contract terms that public pension funds sign with private equity companies; and 
   

3. Complete transparency on the contract terms that university and other nonprofit endowments sign with hedge funds.

The goal of these policies is to have a smaller and more efficient financial sector. They are also likely to reduce the opportunity for earning huge fortunes in the sector. People looking to get fabulously rich will instead have to do something productive.

A modest tax on trades in stock, bonds and derivatives (like options, futures and credit default swaps) can raise a large amount of money while making the financial sector more efficient. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a tax of 0.1 percent on trades, as proposed in a new bill by Sen. Brian Schatz, would raise close to $100 billion a year or 0.5 percent of GDP.

While this is a good chunk of change (it's almost 50 percent more than we spend on food stamps each year), the really fun part of it is that it comes almost entirely out of the pocket of the financial industry rather than investors. The reason is that most research finds that the volume of trading is highly elastic, meaning that the volume of trade is likely to fall by a larger percentage than the increase in trading costs as a result of the tax.

Suppose that Senator Schatz's tax increases the cost of trading for a typical investor by 30 percent. The research implies that most investors (or their fund managers) are likely to reduce their trading volume by at least 30 percent. This means that they will pay 30 percent more for each trade, but they will be doing 30 percent less trading. As a result, their total trading costs are likely to remain unchanged or even decline.

While every trade has a winner and a loser, on average these net out. This means that most investors will not be harmed if they or their funds trade less frequently. The only losers in this story are the folks in the financial sector who make their money on needless trades.

We do want active financial markets, but even if volume fell by 50 percent we would still be at the levels we were at in the 1990s. No one questions that the United States had a very deep financial market in the 1990s. If we could get back to this level of trading volume and save $100 billion a year or so in trading costs, this would be a huge gain for the economy. It would also reduce inequality, since many of the people doing the trading that would be eliminated are very rich.

The next part of the financial fun pack would be a requirement to make fully public all the terms that public pension funds sign with private equity companies and other investment managers. Their returns would also be fully public. This would mean that anyone could go on the website for any state or local pension fund and see exactly the terms of any contract it signed with a private equity company and also whether the investment turned out to be a good deal for them.

Private equity companies engage in many dubious practices, typically loading up firms with debt and often pushing them into bankruptcy. These practices raise many issues, but a really simple point is that pension funds often don't make money on these investments. The private equity partners get very rich (think of Mitt Romney), but the investors often don't.

As it stands, private equity companies typically require that the terms of their contracts be kept secret, making it difficult to know whether pension funds are being ripped off. Federal legislation requiring full disclosure could be a remedy for this situation.

There is a similar story with hedge fund types who are the favored investors for university endowments. It seems that these millionaires and billionaires have cost places like Harvard billions of dollars with their bad investment choices in recent years.

A recent study found that the average return on the Ivy League's endowments substantially lagged a portfolio with an indexed 60 percent/40 percent, stock-to-bond mix. Harvard led the underperformers, falling behind this portfolio by more than three percentage points. On its $40 billion endowment, this would imply Harvard was throwing more than $1 billion a year into the toilet to make its investment managers rich.

The government could require that to keep tax-exempt status a non-profit has to make all the terms of its investment contracts fully public. This way, everyone at Harvard could know who was getting rich at the expense of students' financial aid and workers' salaries.

Anyhow, that's the Finance Fun Pack. It may not make the rich people in the financial sector very happy, but it should provide plenty of entertainment for the rest of us.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

2020 Trump Budget: A Disturbing Vision

2020 Trump Budget: A Disturbing Vision https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/2020-trump-budget-a-disturbing-vision