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Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

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Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#121

Post by WalterBright »

wolverine876 wrote: post #115
WalterBright wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some? How many people would compromise their ethics a bit for $1,000,000? how about $10,000,000? $100,000,000? Most everybody. It's easy to be virtuous when there's no temptation.

> Most everybody. It depends what you mean, but I think you underestimate people. We all contain virtue and greed, and have the free will to choose which we will favor. Of course, it's more complicated than that anyway: What happens is that some kinds of corruption become normalized and thus people don't feel they are violating ethics, and some corruption, though objectively no worse, is not normalized and is respond…

I agree that a culture of non-corruption needs to be created, and that culture flows down from the top. Caltech did a good job of that with the Honor System. The Tour de France did a miserable job, as competitors feel they have to cheat in order to have a chance.

It's still not a good idea to tempt people too much, and any system should be set up to not be too tempting.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#122

Post by Factorium »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #50
Factorium wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case all over the Western world. Federal Government politician salaries need to be 10x higher.

That’s very dangerous. If they make that much money they will have even less understanding of how the average citizen lives. That’s already a big problem. I wouldn’t want to make it worse.

It will increase the pool of individuals competing for the job, and even encourage new political parties.

In fact, that might be the reason that politicians are paid so poorly now: they can just be drawn from the pool of political insiders and parachuted into districts.

Like another poster said, political term limits of 10 years in combination with this seems reasonable.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#124

Post by westurner »

kolbe wrote: post #119
nerfhammer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the Fed actually have the authority to even do that, regulate what securities Congress members are allowed to hold?

“The Fed” as in the Federal Reserve: no. “The Fed” as in the Federal Government: yes.

"Blind Trust" > "Use by US government officials to avoid conflicts of interest" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_trust

https://www.oge.gov/

... If you want to help, you must throw all of your startup equity away.

... No, you may not co-brand with that company (which is not complicit with your agenda).

... Besides, I'm not even eligible for duty: you can't hire me.

... Maybe I could be more helpful from competitive private industry.

... How can a government hire prima donna talent like Iron Man?

... Is it criminal to start a solvent, sustainable business to solve government problems, for that one customer?

... Which operations can a government - operating with or without competition - solve most energy-efficiently and thus cost-effectively? Looks like single-payer healthcare and IDK what else?

(Edit)

US Digital Services Playbook: https://github.com/usds/playbook

From https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/nice/nice-fra... :

> "NIST Special Publication 800-181 revision 1, the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework), provides a set of building blocks for describing the tasks, knowledge, and skills that are needed to perform cybersecurity work performed by individuals and teams. Through these building blocks, the NICE Framework enables organizations to develop their workforces to perform cybersecurity work, and it helps learners to explore cybersecurity work and to engage in appropriate learning activities to develop their knowledge and skills.

From "NIST Special Publication 800-181 Revision 1: Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework)" (2020) https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-181r1:

> 3.1 Using Existing Task, Knowledge, and Skill (TKS) Statements

(Edit) FedNOW should - like mCBDC - really consider implementing Interledger Protocol (ILP) for RTGS "Real-Time Gross Settlement" https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...

From https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen... :

> Peering, Clearing and Settling; The Interledger network is a graph of nodes (connectors) that have peered with one another by establishing a means of exchanging ILP packets and a means of paying one another for the successful forwarding and delivery of the packets.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#125

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

jessaustin wrote: post #96
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively - maybe it's not so great that government is so big and central and has so much power. Politicians are gonna find ways to corrupt that power no matter what. The same could be said for megacorps. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. China and Chinese SOEs are going to be big and powerful and centralized for the foreseeable future no matter what - and if we don't have anything to oppose them -…

People who live in normal nations laugh at both the people subject to the China authoritarian monstrosity and the people subject to the USA authoritarian monstrosity. Building and subjecting oneself to such a giant voracious parasitic automaton is obvious folly. They don't laugh too loudly, however, because they've read The Jakarta Method . China is actually less of a threat (except to close neighbors like Vietnam) b…

>because they have millennia of tradition and scholarship encouraging them not to care too much what barbarians say.

Except if the barbarians talk about Taiwan (see Jon Cena) or Uygars. China has cowed even the NBA and western movie companies from going near those subjects.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#126

Post by xyzzy123 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #81

I joked in the past that politicians should only be allowed to buy index funds. In their local currency and from their country of course. Basically, do a good job for the economy overall and then your net worth will increase.

I like this. A few thoughts:

First (as usual) it incentivises short term-ism. Some penalty to initiatives where we take a hit now but benefit in 40 years, e.g. climate action.

It incentivises our entire political class to keep broad asset bubbles going and "not stop the party" while they're in control.

It increases incentives to misrepresent or obfuscate the state of the entire economy (money supply, inflation and other macro things that influence the market as a whole).

To be fair all these incentives exist right now, so it might not make things worse.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#127

Post by plandis »

awb wrote: post #7

The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…

The Federal Reserve doesn’t have the power to regulate members of congress AFAIK. This is specifically them regulating people that work for the Federal Reserve

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#128

Post by poulsbohemian »

awb wrote: post #7

The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…

I'd rather see Congressional salaries indexed to household incomes. While sure, $174K might be nominal in the private professional world, it's still 3x average US household income. They have health insurance and pensions. Better gig than the vast majority of their voting constituents. It might give them some humility and understanding of the plight of those constituents if they were remunerated similarly.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#129

Post by leppr »

josho wrote: post #100
louloulou wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the libertarian/small government world view!

Wow, so that actually deters me from libertarian ideals. It sounds like your logic is something like the following: Government is corruptible, so we should have small/weak governments. But, a small gov. doesn't solve the root problem, it just make it easier to corrupt what little power is left. Isn't the real solution to have some group responsible for providing oversight and enforcement to elected officials?

> Isn't the real solution to have some group responsible for providing oversight and enforcement to elected officials?

Most US citizens seem to consider their government to be a "Democracy", that responsibility/authority should therefore naturally fall on the whole of their citizens.

Re: Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks

#130

Post by dahfizz »

lumost wrote: post #108
toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence is really the key thesis. This isn't an argument to pay representatives (whether that be Congressional or at monetary policy orgs) more, but to have robust controls to better detect and action corruption. Greed knows no bounds (see: corrupt billionaires and Dark Triad personality traits [1]) and humans will be humans, so strong systems must be designed and implemented to defend against improper beh…

Living in DC on 174k/yr with a family and a spouse whose job prospects are limited by your profession is a tough order. You are effectively demanding that policy makers be self sufficient, which selects for those policy makers most likely to benefit financially from policy decisions.

To claim living on an income of $174k is a tough order is the most HN thing I've heard in a while.

That's an absolute ton of money. You can live comfortably (but not luxuriously) anywhere on earth with that salary.

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