The Jeff Bezos vs. The National Enquirer scandal highlights the role that extortion may play in the business model of some news outlets.
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Public Trust in Government Falls as Government Shutdown Continues
Amid the longest government shutdown in US history, and with no light at the end of the tunnel, the latest Financial Trust Index (FTI) survey shows decreasing trust in government, especially among Democrats.
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Facebook, Extreme Inequality, and Globalization: ProMarket’s Top Stories of 2018
As 2018 draws to a close, we look back at ProMarket’s most-read and most-widely shared stories of the past year.
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The Solution to the Auditing Industry’s Oligopoly Problem? More Competition
The UK’s reviews of the Big Four auditing firms have largely adopted an approach of more regulation and government oversight. This approach is not an unnatural response in the face of the evidence against the audit industry, but the industry’s political power over regulators, and its clout over academics, have to be reckoned with.
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“Short Sellers Don’t Exist to Fix the Problems. They Exist to Shed Light on the Problems”
In an interview with ProMarket, Fahmi Quadir, the short seller whose bet against Valeant in 2015 helped expose the company’s misdeeds, talks about short selling and its role in exposing corporate fraud.
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One Year After the Net Neutrality Repeal: the FCC Has Abdicated Its Role Protecting Consumers and Competition
Every promise made by broadband providers and every reason cited by the FCC in its decision to eliminate the net neutrality rules has proven false in the past year, writes Gigi Sohn. Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism: “There will be net neutrality in this country within the next several years.”
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“US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jonathan Tepper talks about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and how a passionate fan of free markets came to write a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism.”
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Mercenary Science: How Corporate Partnerships Can Corrupt Public Universities
UC Berkeley’s disastrous partnerships with Novartis and BP are cautionary examples of all that could go wrong when public universities allow private interests to lease vast swaths of their campus for years at a time.
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Subsidies to Amazon Are Uneconomical, Un-American, and Unconstitutional
Corporate subsidies are a negative-sum game. They foster crony capitalism, hurt productivity growth and inflict great harm on product market competition.
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Ten Years After the Financial Crisis: “We Are Safer, But Not As Safe As We Should and Could Be”
Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, whether the actions that were taken since seem sufficient, and the risks that might forestall a new crisis.
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“In the Wake of the 2008 Crisis, You Can’t Ignore the Influence of Big Business on Economic Policy”
Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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Implicit Government Involvement In The Puerto Rican Debt Crisis
Why were Puerto Rico’s economic and financial troubles not reflected in its bond yields prior to its 2016 default? A Stigler Center working paper explores the possibility that this puzzle is related to government involvement in financial markets.
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