141–150 of 232 posts
For the Fed, this doesn't seem enough. Their policy has a predictable effect on the whole market, so I think they should not be trading in the couple of weeks leading up to a Fed announcement.
Or just require them to plan their trade and publicly disclose like at least a week in advance. If you become known for being uh.. "corrupt", the market will price out your gains.
No problem. The policymakers will let their trust fund or family members do all the trading with *information that they might have. Are they going to also stop anyone related to the policymakers from not trading? That will be a violation of their constitutional right to own property. There is always a way out for the rich. This is what happens when we have too many regulations.
Someone once told me that a stipulation for public service should involve converting all your holdings into index funds only. Thought that was an interesting proposal.
Hi Senator, congratulations on the election results! I'm u/mywittyname with Beutsche Dank I run an index fund for senators. How it works is, you give me a call anytime you hear about an opportunity and my team of crack investors will look into it, making the trade if we feel it is a good fit. We currently have 200 congresspeople on board and have been beating the S&P500 benchmark by 500% annually. It's a $1,000,000 m…
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 ot…
CEO compensation might be another thing to look at when designing these policies: Often it's paid out only if the company reaches certain goals or paid as options that can only be exercised in the future at a certain price, ie, they are completely worthless otherwise.
"You only get your pension if the carbon emissions are down by X% in 10 years", or something like that.
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…
Honestly, we should give the Federal Reserve performance-based pay. Elon Musk has literally been paid billions for Tesla's phenomenal stock outperformance, why shouldn't we pay the Fed Chairs tens of millions for sustained real GDP growth above 4% balanced with low wealth inequality, low inflation, and low unemployment? They have the most important job in America and they should be paid like it if they do well
Politician + lots of money = golden toilet?
In other words, money works for building a competence hierarchy in business. It doesn't for politics.
What you want is a competence hierarchy in politics. It needs its own separate currency that can only purchase political decisions.
Because it doesn't have that, money is used and that creates a business-in-politics aka corruption problem.
ps. Has this been tried anywhere? This is an idea I thought of on the fly and have not looked into or thought through.
Someone once told me that a stipulation for public service should involve converting all your holdings into index funds only. Thought that was an interesting proposal.
> Someone once told me that a stipulation for public service should involve converting all your holdings into index funds only. For most elected officials (that have broad scope of potential jurisdiction and thus are almost impossible to avoid conflicts of interests), blind trusts are probably even better. For most public servants, even those that have decision-making authority that could potentially raise conflict i…
Most elected officials (almost all federally) already employ blind trusts.
>For most public servants, even those that have decision-making authority that could potentially raise conflict interests, disclosure and recusal rules are probably all that is needed (and, actually, lots of public servants have no decision–making authority that is likely to even require that.)
True there are many levels and for lower level (comptrollers and such) that is probably fine. For senators, representatives, judges, etc. the index/bond fund would be even better than the blind trust, since these index funds are publicly inspectable, passively managed, and anyone can buy them.
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…
This is an example of the "you can pay people not to be corrupt" argument. It relies on people who are both willing to be corrupt, and happy to leave money on the table. It's exactly the same argument as paying for media not to include advertisements. What we should do is stop filtering for trash by having jobs that pay $174K require multi-million dollar application fees (i.e. a campaign.) That's exactly how you woul…
I agree better pay is not the answer. The only reasonable alternative is to reduce their powers (especially reducing the amount of money they can spend and the laws they can impose on people) and spread them to local entities.
Decentralisation is the only antidote to government corruption and waste.
No problem. The policymakers will let their trust fund or family members do all the trading with *information that they might have. Are they going to also stop anyone related to the policymakers from not trading? That will be a violation of their constitutional right to own property. There is always a way out for the rich. This is what happens when we have too many regulations.
I am following you until your last sentence. How does having less regulation help here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps someone will start a “Speaker of the House” index fund which the officers from the Federal Reserve can buy, since they won’t be able to buy individual stocks.
Folks are doing it manually: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039313011/tiktokers-are-trad...
“The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions," said the spokesperson.