181–190 of 232 posts
Congress critters giving themselves immunity from insider trading laws was a real sleeve move. I have friends who still believe that we have a fair and democratic government, but I just keep my mouth shut. Let them have their ignorance is bliss.
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This is not a US only problem, virtually any country is run by a couple of political parties and their friends and they can do pretty much anything with little repercussions. 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 i…
> This is not a US only problem, virtually any country is run by a couple of political parties and their friends and they can do pretty much anything with little repercussions. Citation definitely needed on this one.
Not the parent, but Singapore comes to mind as a great example of one party having their fingers everywhere, including the supposedly-apartisan civil service, the trade unions, the political grassroots organisations, and most of the mainstream media organisations.
Singapore's two sovereign wealth funds invest in a massive number of local and foreign companies, and often install people they're grooming (usually ex-military) in fancy positions to boost their resumes [1].
Quite a few Members of Parliament hold quite a few directorships in supposedly private companies [2], but it's all fine and dandy as long as the affiliations are declared.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/i2bnzz/how_does_...
[2] https://singaporearmchaircritic.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/mps...
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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 -…
Deliberately getting rid of "big government" just leads to even more unaccountable megacorps filling the void. That's been the lesson of America for the past 40-50 years. If you want any chance of competing on the global stage in the 3rd millennium, the solution is to embrace big government and do it right. It is possible to implement anti-corruption mechanisms. Like any security measure, they will never be infallibl…
Have to ask how this wasn't instituted in the first place, excluding the "well it's corruption, obviously" answers. Every single financial job in the private sector has extreme guidelines around this, the Fed is like a buyside firm with ultimate private information access.
I can't buy bank stock, or for any practical purposes any financial firm stock (or bonds). I can't buy funds finance-focused mutual funds or any kind. I can't buy stocks of any firm where I have any sort of insider trading, such as contractors.
Lastly, there's a window around FOMC meetings where anyone with any sort of insider knowledge is prohibited to trade at all.
But last I checked on my Robinhood account, I do own some GitLab, Cloudflare, etc. firms that I think are doing quite well compared to their current market prices. And that's mostly based on what I read (HN, etc).
The question is, should employees be disallowed to own stocks at all? (Right now this rule is aimed at officers, but officers are like 20% of the number of employees of my division, so it's still a lot). I would say doing so makes it quite more difficult for economists to take jobs at the Fed, where the salary is not as competitive as in other places such as the private sector (and already all the friends in my PhD Finance cohort earn more than I do..). To make a parallel, imagine that working at Google prohibits you from owning stocks at any firm that trades/buys/sells/interacts with Google or its competitors.
But thank goodness Nancy Pelosi still can.
I’m curious why all the heat is on Pelosi for trading? I see people on twitter making similar remarks. Is she more corrupt than the other politicians or are people just parroting each other and it’s become a meme to be negative towards Pelosi in particular?
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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.
Unfortunately, Congress people must live in the districts they represent. And while $174k is quite decent even in SF, this person will have a standard of living below even what a software engineer with no management responsibilities is going to have.
If you read past the headline to just the first bullet point, you don't even have to go past there: > The Federal Reserve announced sweeping new rules for its top officials Thursday, banning trading in individual stocks and bonds. The top officials of the Fed. not congress people. The comments thread here is making me wonder if all HN comment threads are made up mostly of posters who haven't read beyond the headline.
This is perfect policy, the Fed affects macros not individual stocks so it sounds like the government is doing something when it’s ensuring that Fed officials are only investing in indexes / macros which is where Fed policies are likely to affect markets the greatest. In startup parlance the fed is the rising tide.
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.
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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.
Saying that it is the citizens fault for our politicians corruption is the same flavor as saying it is citizen’s faults for global warming because we use plastic and drive cars.
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Singapore does a good job of matching public servant pay to private sector pay for that exact reason. They go so far as to index government pay scales to private sector pay. The entire intent is to attract very talented people that want to do a good job. Having access to the levers of power is much less of an incentive as a (theoretical) result.
Yeah, that all seems like a great idea. I'm sure Singapore has its issues, but sometimes I think it's funny how logically other countries seem to approach their problems. It's almost as though they actually want to solve them. In the mean time, in the US, we can't have nice things because reasons. It's sort of like how Japan has toilets with warmed seats. In the US, we don't have that because...honestly I have no ide…
Singaporean here. Some of us think that there's a fair bit of legalised "corruption" and cronyism in the public system. :)
(For the sake of avoiding any potential defamation suits that Singapore politicians are so famous for, this is entirely my opinion.)