Links for March 25

Some links, on short-termism, trade, the Fed and other things.

Senators Tammy Baldwin and Jeff Merkley have introduced a bill to limit activist investors’ ability to push for higher payouts. The bill, which is cosponsored by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would strengthen the 13D disclosure requirements for hedge funds and others acquiring large positions in a corporation. This is obviously just one piece of a larger agenda, but it’s good to see the “short-termism’ conversation leading to concrete proposals.

I’m pleased to be listed as one of the supporters of the bill, but I think the strongest endorsement is this furious reaction from a couple of hedge fund dudes. It’s funny how they take it for granted that shareholder democracy is on the same plane as democracy democracy, but my favorite bit is, “Shareholders do not cause bad management, just as voters do not cause bad politicians.” This sounds to me like an admission that shareholders are functionless parasites — if they aren’t responsible for the quality of management, what are we paying them all those dividends for?

I wrote a twitter essay on why the US shouldn’t seek a more favorable trade balance.

Jordan Weissman thinks I was “a bit ungenerous” to Trump.

My Roosevelt Institute colleague Carola Blinder testified recently on reform of the Fed, making the critical point that we need to take monetary policy seriously as a political question. “Contrary to conventional thinking, the rules of central banking are not neutral: Both monetary policy and financial supervision have profound effects on income and wealth inequality … [and] are the product of political contestation and compromise.” Relatedly, Mark Thoma suggests that the Fed “cares more about the interests of the rich and powerful than it does the working class”; his solution, as far as I can tell, is to hope that it doesn’t.

Matt Bruenig has a useful post on employment by age group in the US v the Nordic countries. As he shows, the fraction of people 25-60 working there is much higher than the fraction here (though workers here put in more hours). This has obvious relevance for the arguments of the No We Can’t caucus that there’s no room for more stimulus, because demographics.

A reminder: “Ricardian equivalence” (debt and tax finance of government spending have identical effects on private behavior) was explicitly denied by David Ricardo, and the “Fisher effect” (persistent changes in inflation lead to equal movements of nominal interest rates, leaving real rates unchanged) was explicitly denied by Irving Fisher. One nice thing about this piece is it looks at how textbooks describe the relationship between the idea and its namesake. Interesting, Mankiw gets Fisher right, while Delong and Olney get him wrong: They falsely attribute to him the orthodox view that nominal interest rates track inflation one for one, when in fact he argued that even persistent changes in inflation are mostly not passed on to nominal rates.

Here is a fascinating review of some recent books on the Cold War conflicts in Angola. One thing the review brings out was how critical the support of Cuba was to South Africa’s defeat there, and how critical that defeat in turn was to the end of apartheid. We tend to take it for granted that history had to turn out as it did, but it’s worth asking if, in the absence of Castro’s commitment to Angola, white rule in South Africa might have ended much later, or not at all.