Wall Street

Fahmi Quadir: “Short Sellers are Always an Easy Boogeyman”

In an interview with ProMarket, short-seller Fahmi Quadir, who has shorted companies like Wirecard and Valeant, discussed the public perception of short-sellers...

GameStop, the Cantillon Effect, and America’s Corrupt Financial Plumbing

The GameStop frenzy, far from a morality tale of the people showing up Wall Street elites, should show that something is seriously...

How Wall Street Is Devastating Our National Security

Even the Pentagon now realizes that Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for easy profits and love of monopoly has become a clear and...

Option-Based Credit Spreads Signal a Recession, but the US Stimulus Will Soften the Blow

Over the past month, option-based credit spreads spiked and remain at elevated levels. The surge signals that a recession is at our door, but...

The Covid-19 Bailout That Big Business Is Lobbying for Could Make America Unrecognizable

Supporting industries is necessary to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic. But using the coronavirus as an excuse, Boeing and other companies are...

How Covid-19 Infected Global Financial Markets: a Webinar

Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier and Torsten Slok, Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, discuss what happened during Wall Street's worst week since the 2008...

Five Conditions for Corporations About to Receive Coronavirus Bailouts

Wall Street and the Federal Reserve are getting ready for massive bailouts, so here are the conditions to put on large corporations who need...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Coronavirus Special Issue

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.  This is by far my favorite headline of...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Flash Crash, Alaska, and Venture Capital

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.      Remember the flash crash of 2010? Here's...

Over 60 Leading Finance Economists Ask SEC to Revise the Shareholder Voting Draft Reform

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:...

LATEST NEWS

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.