David Dayen Profile picture
18 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Here's my curtain raiser on today's GameStop hearing, of which I’m struggling to figure out the purpose, relative to what we need to actually uncover about our financial markets.
prospect.org/power/whats-re…
Publicly traded stocks spike if they have similar names to hot companies. Risky firms issue billions in junk debt. "Blank-check" companies with no products or sales are a hot commodity. Dogecoin. We have a speculation problem but it's not just on Reddit prospect.org/power/whats-re…
It'd be nice if the questioning in today's hearing brooched the unmentionable subject of banning unproductive and speculative trading instruments and closing the loophole that created hedge funds and private equity. prospect.org/power/whats-re…
Meanwhile, Bob Kuttner talked to former SEC adviser Lynn Turner on what needs to be done in our financial markets.
prospect.org/economy/financ…

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More from @ddayen

18 Feb
GameStop hearing has begun here, I'll be intermittently live tweeting if anything interesting happens.
financialservices.house.gov/calendar/event…
One thing so far, Waters announces this is the first of a series of hearings, and future ones will include regulators and policy discussions.
Remarkable pronunciation of "Dough-GEE-coin" from ranking member Patrick McHenry (R-NC)
Read 28 tweets
17 Feb
1/ A couple weeks ago, Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo looked at Indivisible and the drift between the national organization and its local chapters.
We got comments about it. A lot of them.
prospect.org/politics/resis…
2/ So we decided to put them together for a roundtable series we're calling The Future of Organizing. Bob Kuttner introduces the project today.
prospect.org/politics/futur…
3/ Our first two pieces happen to be diametrically opposed to one another. Michael Podhozer of the AFL-CIO argues that Skocpol & Tervo neglected the character of recent elections and the role of unions in grassroots democracy.
prospect.org/politics/indiv…
Read 6 tweets
11 Feb
Read the thread, but I'd say payday lenders & debt collectors & drug manufacturers & minimum wage employers & muni bondholders who don't like public banks all had plenty to lose right now from policies recently advanced in the state. But we're both talking around something-
The biggest advance in recent state policymaking was ending worker misclassification, a groundbreaking law codifying the principle that workers deserve benefits.
And Uber, Lyft & Doordash spent $200 million to evaporate it and literally create their own labor law.
They could do that because of the ballot measure system, which is at the root of most of California's problems, including the housing-related issues Ezra is right to decry.
Read 8 tweets
11 Feb
It's very in vogue to bash California and this doesn't even reach to some things that deserve scorn, like the continuing control of the Western States Petroleum Association and the state Chamber of Commerce in policymaking. And yet-
nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opi…
Thanks to progressives who dragged a reluctant Jerry Brown to tax the rich, the progressive income tax that properly tracks the nature of national inequality has saved the state from post-pandemic fiscal ruin.
the 100% renewable standard is a precedent rivaling anywhere in the world on the only long-run issue that matters for planetary survival. It could be faster but literally the whole world is slower.
Read 8 tweets
10 Feb
Here we have the trotting out of the old myth that you just couldn't stop 10 million people from losing their homes because of mortgage trustee permissions.
That all the paper was fraudulent doesn't enter into the consideration.
The foreclosure fraud settlement was unconscionable but it did order (meager) relief on first-lien mortgages that puts the lie to this idea that you couldn't modify loans because the permissions were so tangled. It's a lie sold by people like Michael Barr who failed homeowners.
Barr also failed the financial system by weakening prop trading and derivative reform, using the self-fulfilling prophecy that it would become loophole-ridden.
Read 4 tweets
6 Feb
Here's a great story with a Hollywood ending.
The last couple pages of my book Monopolized noted this fight against rapidly consolidating talent agencies, stuffed with private equity cash, who were getting rich while their own clients were losing money. (1/)
Unlike other parts of the economy where private equity pushes around workers, writers in Hollywood had a union. And the writers decided to leave their agents in protest. That story is here (from April 2019)
prospect.org/culture/privat…
The writers had two main concerns. First, "packaging" fees, where studios pay talent agencies a commission for employing their clients. This comes out of a show budget, so the agent was vying with their own clients over the same pot of money.
Read 9 tweets

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