What we’re reading (10/14)
“Joe Biden Keeps Everyone Guessing On Wall Street Regulation” (Wall Street Journal). “Fifteen years ago, Joe Biden defended credit-card companies during a testy Senate exchange with Elizabeth Warren over legislation curtailing consumers’ ability to shed their debts in bankruptcy. This March, he adopted her argument entirely. Mr. Biden spent 36 years as a senator from the credit-card and corporate mecca of Delaware, where he built relationships and a voting record that provided ammunition for his opponents during a bruising Democratic presidential primary. Now, he is edging left on a range of issues from student debt to stock buybacks, leaving both progressives and Wall Street Democrats guessing whose side of the financial-regulation fight he is on.”
“The Man Who Speaks Softly—And Commands A Big Cyber Army” (Wired). “Over the next 15 years [after September 11, 2001], as America waged the resulting war on terror, Paul Nakasone became one of the nation's founding cyberwarriors—an elite group that basically invented the doctrine that would guide how the US fights in a virtual world. By 2016 he had risen to command a group called the Cyber National Mission Force, and he was hard at work waging cyberattacks against the Islamic State when the US suffered another ambush by a foreign adversary: the Kremlin's assault on the 2016 presidential election.”
“Walmart Divides Black Friday Deals Into 3 Separate Events That Kick Off Online” (CNBC). “For shoppers who can’t part with Black Friday traditions, Walmart said Wednesday that it still plans to have in-store events featuring deep discounts. Yet the holiday sales days will come with pandemic-related precautions. Stores will open at 5 a.m. local time. Customers must line up single-file before they enter. Stores will limit the number of people inside. Employees will distribute sanitized shopping carts. And some, dubbed health ambassadors, will greet shoppers and remind them to put on a mask.”
“COVID-19 Has Changed The Housing Market Forever. Here’s Where Americans Are Moving” (Forbes). “Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, more deep-seated, tectonic-sized questions beyond markets and interest rates are being asked this time around that no one really has the answers to yet—like will people feel safer living in the south and southwest where they can spend all year social distancing outside? What if companies let workers work remotely for the rest of their lives? Why go back to retail shopping when I’m already ordering everything online? What’s the point of living “downtown” if half of the restaurants, bars, and museums never open back up?”
“Corporate Taxation And The Distribution Of Income” (National Bureau of Economic Research). Interesting new paper. Here’s the abstract: “Higher corporate taxes reduce corporate business operations, replacing them with operations by noncorporate businesses that are risky and have undiversified ownership. This shift contributes to income dispersion, with effects so large that higher corporate taxes can increase income inequality even when the corporate tax burden falls entirely on capital owned disproportionately by the rich. Estimates suggest that the riskiness of U.S. noncorporate business increases by 12.3% the aggregate income of the top one percent, and that income dispersion created by a higher U.S. corporate tax rate offsets more than half of the distributional effects of reducing average returns to capital.”
