Reagan’s SEC appointees adopted a rule to protect corporations so they can manipulate stock prices.

[midnight]

By Harold Meyerson Opinion writer December 30, 2015

"One elected official who’s been following this particular trail of money with justifiable concern is Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who has sent several letters to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White asking the agency to investigate the consequences of its rule and the buyback deluge on corporate investment and the broader economy. Clearly, one consequence of the rule has been to facilitate the rise of shakedown artists (excuse me: activist investors) who buy a chunk of company stock and then threaten the executives with a shareholder revolt that could cost them their jobs unless they buy back shares.

Another consequence of 10b-18, to which White obliquely alluded in her response to Baldwin’s first letter, is that the kind of investigation the senator requested is rendered almost impossible by the rule, which forbids the data collection one would need to do to ascertain if stock prices are being manipulated.

Herewith, then, a goal for the Obama administration’s final year, or, that failing, for the administration that follows it: Repeal 10b-18. Such data as we do have — the rise of corporate rewards to shareholders at the expense of all other endeavors, the concomitant rise in wealth and political power of an investor class grown fat on extracting funds from productive enterprises rather than facilitating further investment by those enterprises — justify the rule’s repeal.

And that, I very much regret to say, is my last suggestion as a regular op-ed columnist on these pages. This is my final Post column, though I may appear here sporadically with occasional contributions, and I’ll have a weekly column on the website of my magazine, the American Prospect . It’s been a privilege to use this space to follow the money, document the Republicans’ war on empiricism, oppose the Iraq War, warn against the Supreme Court’s restrictions on the franchise and its promotion of big money in politics, chart the rise of cities as a distinctive progressive force in U.S. politics, contemplate the achievement of Irving Berlin and the rise of non-Christian Christmas songs, and much, much else. My thanks, above all, to those readers who have followed my prose through exceptionally long sentences. And through short ones, too."https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-end-the-stock-buyback-deluge/2015/12/30/e9408c52-af2e-11e5-9ab0-884d1cc4b33e_story.html

Please note that that printing this story will be his last at W.P.

http://jakehasablog.blogspot.com