Daily Clips: April 4th, 2016
Panama Papers: If we had to look at “meta-narratives” which surround the 2010s, then economic and social inequality would have to be top candidates. After Piketty stirred the conversation with “Capital” and Nick Hanauer warned of “pitchforks“, the Panama Papers have entered the public conversation. What exactly are the Panama Papers? They are “a massive document link” which “reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance.”
As always, Matthew Yglesias at Vox explains it best:
Here are a few of the highlights the team found, with links to the full stories where you can read the details:
- Vladimir Putin’s inner circle appears to control about $2 billion worth of offshore assets.
- The prime minister of Iceland secretly owned the debt of failed Icelandic banks while he was involved in political negotiations over their fate.
- The family of Pakistan’s prime minister owns millions of dollars’ worth of real estate via offshore accounts.
- Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko pledged to sell his Ukrainian business interests during his campaign, but appears instead to have transferred them to an offshore company he controls.
Climate change puts trillions of dollars of financial assets at risk: Unsurprising.
What’s the right minimum wage?
But in the policy debate, it is the job loss argument that overwhelmingly dominates. On this score, minimum wage advocates have been helped by the facts—the best research now shows that large hikes in the local statutory wage floor has no discernible effect on employment.
Many jobs that fail to pay a living wage reflect the collapse of worker bargaining power over the course of the last four decades. The evidence speaks loudly: Forced to pay higher wages, employers find ways to adjust, through productivity gains, lower worker turnover, lower wage increases for higher wage workers, price increases that have little effect on consumer demand, and even reduced profit margins. Above all, a necessary condition for stronger worker bargaining power in the absence of collective bargaining is a strong macroeconomy. With sufficient time to adjust, jobs that cannot pay a minimally decent wage should be driven out of the labor market.
Tweet of the day:
CNBC as markets ready to open Monday: pic.twitter.com/tgw3WX3c8O
— Robert Costa (@costareports) April 4, 2016
