The new regulation that Security and Exchange Commissioners voted in November doesn’t fix proxy advisory industry duopoly problems, but it actually makes them worse: A group of scholars from major American universities filed a comment to ask the SEC to amend the proposed reform of public companies corporate governance.
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The draft SEC regulation on shareholder proposal and proxy advisory firms will curb the initiative of individual shareholders to improve corporate governance and transparency of public firms, a ProMarket reader writes in the comment he sent to the SEC. “Progress on best practices often depends on the initiative of a few.”
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The Industrial Funding Fee pays $3 million a year for a 23-year old McKinsey employee instead of hiring an experienced person directly to do IT management. The government agency in charge of bulk buying isn’t paid for saving money, but for spending too much of it.
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Purdue’s strategy was to market its opioids directly to patients via brochures, videos, advertisements, and the internet. It also provided information to doctors and consumers through an apparently independent entity called “Partners Against Pain,” but ultimately controlled by the company itself.
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A new study finds that a company is nearly four times more likely to receive an economic incentive in a state where the company makes political contributions to state-level candidates. The results also show that awarding economic incentives to politically-connected firms is not the most effective use of taxpayer funds.
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In 2001, the Food and Drug Administration required Purdue to change OxyContin’s patient package inserts to make addiction risks more evident. The company altered the label to make it appear as though illegal use and abuse were the only addiction-related problems associated with OxyContin. Eventually, Purdue hired the FDA’s medical reviewer for OxyContin.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Goliath author Matt Stoller discusses the political choices that led to the downfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the “addiction to powerlessness” that threatens to undermine its rebirth.
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In an extensive interview with the Swiss news website TheMarket.ch, Luigi Zingales discusses ways to deal with Big Tech and the impact of the antitrust debate on the 2020 presidential election and on consumer welfare. “The digital economy is substantially different from a traditional textbook economy.”
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As 2019 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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A history of American antimonopoly, the case against Big Tech, and how Europe got better than the US at free markets: here are (in no particular order) some of the best books published during the past year.
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Purdue Pharmaceuticals used to cite three major studies to argue that in prescribing OxyContin, addiction-risk was not significant. The most influential of those studies did not even mention OxyContin, because it was completed twenty-five years before OxyContin was sold. After more than a decade, the company had to admit that “data are not available to establish the true incidence of addiction.”
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The average share of votes in favor of proposals that require corporate executives to disclose political and lobbying spending is trending up. But a new SEC regulation will make it harder to resubmit blocked proposals.
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