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Rana Foroohar

Friday 19th of April 2024

2008 financial crisis Perhaps the most devastating political legacy of the 2008 financial crisis was the sense among a large swath of the American population that the system was rigged. Homeowners and taxpayers took the fall and “nobody went to jail”, as financial reform activists still frequently point out. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 13, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus The federal government will end up shouldering the cost of unemployment insurance for these contract [gig economy] labourers because companies such as Uber have successfully avoided having to admit that they are, indeed, real employees who should receive real benefits during normal times. If I were a chief executive in a company that has to shoulder those burdens directly, I would be furious … it's ridiculous that a com- pany with a valuation of $46bn has managed to push that burden onto taxpayers by lever- aging the free-market fantasy that there is an equal power dynamic between America's gig workers and its biggest corporations. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, Mar. 30, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus [W]hat I see in my own neighbourhood underscores how Mr Trump's fumbling response to coronavirus is part of a bigger national problem. Policy choices, made over decades, have relentlessly favoured the interests of the private sector in general, and large corporations in particular, over both the state and labour, in ways that are proving costly to our health and our economy. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, March 30, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Debt As the fabulous Michael Pettis explained a few days ago in an FT Markets Insight, US national debt levels will continue to rise unless we can spread the wealth more broadly, because as much as the rich can consume, they can’t consume enough to make up for a shrinking middle class, nor do they create enough jobs to make a sustainable labour market. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 31, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Economics For far too long, the economics profession has had physics envy, rewarding and promoting people who are better at maths than morality. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, December 16, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Economics Their [Janet Yellin and George Akerlof's] paper showed that salaries can be far higher than expected when human emotions are valued. Rational Mom and Dad, it turns out, may behave quite differently from Rational Man. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, November 29, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Food In 1930 the average US family spent 24.3 per cent of its income on food. By 2007 that number had fallen to 9.8 per cent. This is because America’s food system, like most of the world's, became dramatically more concentrated, industrialised and globalised over that period. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, December 11/12, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Globalization … regionalisation, not globalisation, is the future. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Globalization Yes, our most recent round of globalization produced more wealth than the world has ever known. Unfortunately, as economist Dani Rodrik has pointed out, for every $1 of efficient gain from trade, there is typically $50 worth of redistribution towards the rich. The economic and political consequences of that are the key reason that we are now in a period of deglobalisation. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, May 22, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Healthcare Now, the effects of Covid and the promise of more federal spending on health are fuelling investor interest in areas such as psychiatry practices, home healthcare and even hospice care. Dangers lie ahead. “Think about how private equity will make money in something like hospice,” says [Eileen] Appelbaum [of the Center for Economic and Policy Research]. “They'll cut the seasoned staff trained to help families understand and cope with the process of dying, and hire people who might be able to help clean the house.” Welcome to healthcare, American style. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, April 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Higher education [W]hile higher education has become more diverse by culture and ethnicity, the income gap has grown to be twice as large as the race gap. … racial preferences have not changed economic power structures in the US. Indeed, they’ve arguably hardened them by creating what might be called a rainbow aristocracy. … The system is rigged against the less affluent. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 17, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Housing About three-quarters of the US is now “housing unaffordable” for average wage earners. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, October 6, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Housing But the fact that a multinational PE [private equity] firm can become the country?s biggest landlord is something that simply doesn?t sit well with a lot of Americans. It illustrates all too starkly how the financial markets seem to exist in in a closed loop of service to themselves. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 13, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Income inequality When the largest pay rises come from billionaires who announce they want to be beneficient, that is not a sign that the system is working — it is a sign that it is not. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, October 7, 2018, on the announcement by Jeff Bezos that he would raise Amazon's minimum wage in the U.S. to $15/hour © 2018 Kwiple.com
Markets Another reason for the concentration of corporate power is political capture. Americans invented modern antitrust policy, and love to rail against “statist” old Europe. But a fascinating study by academics Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon shows that EU markets are, in fact, more competitive. They have lower levels of concentration, lower excess profits, and lower regulatory barriers to entry. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 23, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Markets Technology has made markets faster, but arguably not better. It certainly hasn't made them cheaper. As academics such as Thomas Philippon have shown, none of the many technolog- ical “innovations” in the financial markets since 1880 has actually lowered the cost of financial intermediation. Someone is making as much money as ever. Fintech just makes it tougher to see who. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Markets  What social networks have done to society, trading apps have begun doing to markets. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Oligarchs Oligarchs are immoral business leaders who, as Russia's Vladimir Putin defined them in the Financial Times, use their “proximity to the authorities to receive super profits”. That makes me wonder: is there any better description of  Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg – a man who caters to US President Donald Trump by refusing to remove his inaccurate and inflammatory posts from the social media platform – than an American oligarch? Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, June 7, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics Remember the phrase, “It's the economy, stupid?” It was coined by James Carville, strategist of US President Bill Clinton's successful 1992 campaign against George H W Bush. … Yet it doesn't appear to be working for Joe Biden, even though many of the top economic indicators … have been in his favour. … I suspect if Carville was on Biden’s team today, he might come up with a different phrase for the next election cycle: “It's geopolitics, stupid.” Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Productivity First, the losses suffered by labour relative to capital are even more extreme than previously thought. While productivity gains since the mid-1990s amounted to 25 per cent  in real terms, wages grew only 11 per cent. Meanwhile, capital income  increased by two-thirds.  If there is any doubt that the link between  productivity and wages has broken down, this should put it to rest. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, May 30, 2021, on lessons learned from a new report from McKinsey Global Institute © 2021 Kwiple.com
Punt returners say Why should she? She's already leading Facebook. Unnamed participant at a meeting of corporate executives responding when asked if he thought Sheryl Sandberg could run for president one day Quoted by Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 7, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
State of the union All of this raises a larger question currently being discussed by some investors. When it comes to issues of political risk and volatility terms, is the US starting to more closely resemble an emerging market than a developed economy? Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 21, 2022 [“All this” includes overturnig Roe v. Wade, curbing federal agencies' ability to apply rules nationwide, mass shootings, making it easier to carry concealed weapons, rampant inflation, armed insurrection] © 2022 Kwiple.com
State of the union While US political risk in global comparisons is still relatively low (it ranks 85 out of the 127 countries tracked by [Mark] Rosenberg) [who has been tracking political risk on a daily basis since 2013], it is now by far the highest of any developed market. Only countries such as Turkey, Colombia, Mexico and Israel look anything like the US within the OECD nations. Even more worrisome is the fact that the change and volatility of key metrics, including the risks of social and government instability, political violence and even the risk to democracy, make the US look much more like a developing nation than a developed one — let alone the supposed leader of the free world. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
State of the union Wall Street is not primarily  a helpmeet to Main Street, as it once was. It’s the tail that wags the dog. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court Two recent Supreme Court rulings — one ending affirmative action in university admissions and another vetoing  Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan — have been lambasted by progressives as yet more evidence that the judicial branch is wrecking America. But there is a silver lining to almost everything, and I can see one here. The Supreme Court has unwittingly elevated the issue of income inequality, and the need for class-based educational reform in the US. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 17, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court [T]rust is built on consistent adherence to the rule of law. The recent, radical rulings by the Supreme Court, which itself reflects political polarisation, have made clear that the law won't be applied  in the same way everywhere. The legal framework that binds you will depend on who you are, and where you live. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Surveillance capitalaism I’d argue that high-speed trading platforms designed to rope in the most vulnerable novice traders (the average age of the 18m users is 31, and the median account balance is $240) are simply a new and more nefarious kind of surveillance capitalism. … We have no idea of the true value of the personal data that is sold by platform giants like Facebook or YouTube to advertisers as the hidden charge for the supposedly “free” services we enjoy online. In the same way, the users of Robinhood have no idea that the reason that they and their fellow retail bros can trade “free” online is that their order flows are being shared with bigger, richer fish. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology We understand the threat to democracy posed by platform technology. But less has been said about the dangers posed to our financial system as “likes” become “buys”. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality Right now, the top 10 per cent of households in the US own 87 per cent of equities. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, May 30, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com