Cboe Global Markets Inc. is seeking to introduce a brief delay on one of its markets, becoming the latest U.S. stock-exchange group to attempt to hit the brakes on high-frequency traders, people familiar with the situation said.
The plan shows how “speed bumps” have proliferated among U.S. exchanges in recent years, even at market operators that initially opposed them. IEX Group Inc., the upstart exchange featured in Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys,” kicked off the trend and has since been followed by the New York Stock…
Should the fight against inequality be the Democrats’ defining cause? The party’s rising tribe of left-wing economic populists — headed up by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — would answer with a resounding “yes.”
But another tribe in the party has very different ideas.
Jon Cowan is the president of the Democratic think tank Third Way, the “intellectual heir to President Bill Clinton’s centrist politics,” as The New York Times’ Eduardo Porter put it in a new profile. Cowan acknowledges that “income inequality is severe” and “parts of the economic system are unfair.” But he also insists that “these are not the central problems vexing most Americans. Many of the solutions proposed to meet them are not responsive to the aspirations, needs, and values of those Americans.” Cowan would prefer that increasing opportunity become “the great moral cause of our time.”
American corporations are simply raking in profits. Some are so bloated and cash-rich they literally can’t figure out what to do with it all. Apple, for instance, is sitting on nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars — and that’s down a bit from earlier this year. Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, were sitting on “only” $132 billion and $63 billion respectively (as of March this year).
However, American corporations in general are taking those profits and kicking them out to shareholders, mainly in the form of share buybacks. These are when a corporation uses profits, cash, or borrowed money to buy its own stock, thus increasing its price and the wealth of its shareholders. (Big Tech is doing this as well, just not fast enough to draw down their dragon hoards.) As a new joint report from the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project by Katy Milani and Irene Tung shows, from 2015 to 2017 corporations spent nearly 60 percent of their net profits on buybacks.
Over the past eight years, high-stakes negotiations in Congress over the federal debt limit have repeatedly brought Washington to the verge of default. We were on opposite sides of these debates, as senior policy advisers to President Obama and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, and we continue to disagree about taxes and the proper size of government. Yet we both believe that the statutory debt limit has outlived its usefulness as a mechanism for restraining the size of the national debt. Or, put more precisely, we think that whatever residual value the debt limit may have is far outweighed by the risk that a…
Five years ago, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi took the stage in London to give the speech that ushered in the beginning of the end of the continent’s sovereign-debt crisis.
Several features of the financial panic that had characterized the previous two years began to subside almost immediately after he spoke. But five years later, the economic performances of the bloc’s members are hugely varied, and the recent recovery has been painfully slow.
What if conservatives’ longstanding obsession with maximizing GDP growth and efficiency has actually been a catastrophic blunder? Many leftists and progressives might respond, “Well, duh.”
The news is that one of conservatism’s big thinkers may agree.
Idon’t know about you, but when I wake up in the morning, after dressing modestly and saying my prayers, the first thing I do is shed a couple of hot tears for the rich. Think of poor Jeff Bezos, who has watched numbers go up on a screen for eight whole months and only made $40 billion. When is the last time we had a tax cut in this country?
Too long, according to Steven Mnuchin, our Goldman Sachs alumnus-cum-hedgefund gazillionaire Treasury secretary. Speaking offhandedly to a journalist at one of those Letter of the Alphabet Plus Natural Number summits — I think it might have been the G20 — in Argentina, Mnuchin mentioned a scheme he and his underlings have devised that would allow rich people to hire lawyers and accountants to decide how much money they have actually made at tax time.
Another month, another entry in the long record of the Federal Reserve failing the American people.
It was the winter of 2015 and genuine full employment was obviously still a long way off. But out of a fear of inflation, the Fed began tightening monetary policy anyway, thus preventing people from getting jobs. A year and a half later, it is more obvious than ever that this was highly premature. There is no sign at all that the maximum of employment has been reached, and strong circumstantial evidence that premature tightening has weakened the economy.
How will the Roman Catholic Church survive the scandals engulfing it on every side?
It’s a hyperbolic question, but one with a serious intent.
Of course the church will continue to exist in some form. Two-thousand-year-old institutions with a billion adherents and solid growth rates in the developing world don’t disappear overnight, no matter how thoroughly corrupt they are revealed to be.
But in what form will it survive?
Confused about the fiduciary rule and when it begins? Take a look at what the word fiduciary really means, both in the financial services industry and beyond.
The Catholic Finance Association
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