A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bill Dudley, who is now a UBS director has an opinion column up at Bloomberg proposing that two varieties of regulatory actions against banks—"matters requiring immediate attention" and "4(m) agreements"—be publicly disclosed rather than kept secret. He writes, under the how-can-you-resist-clicking headline "If Only We Knew the Problem Facing America's Banks":

the added transparency would provide a powerful nudge to bank managers and directors: If their response wasn't credible, shareholders would flee and the share price would plummet.

A new Suffolk University/USA Today poll shows Donald Trump beating Joe Biden among Hispanic voters. It's a small sample size—122 Hispanics in the poll, which means the margin of sampling error is significant—but the poll reports 47 of them, or 39 percent, were for Trump, and 41 of them, or 34 percent, were for Biden, with the rest undecided or third party or "refused." By contrast, AP found Biden won the 2020 Latino vote 63 percent to 35 percent.

The New York Sun publishes my latest column under the headline, "To Reset Harvard and Higher Education, Put the Purpose First":

Where might governing boards start in an effort to restore public confidence in higher education, rebuild the reputations of institutions, and repair trust? The task is something like trying to put a derailed train back on track. The first thing is to get people to agree on the mission: teaching, learning, and research.

Please read the whole column over at the New York Sun.

My look-ahead column for 2024 is up at the New York Sun, making the case that the things people are worried about—the presidential election, the wars—may turn out better than expected. "If that all sounds too rosy, remember that one year ago, when nearly everyone was predicting a recession and a flat stock market, this column was floating the possibility that the experts could be wrong and that we could be in for a surprisingly prosperous new year." Please check the full column out over at the New York Sun.

From the White House: REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BIDEN
BEFORE MARINE ONE DEPARTURE

South Lawn

(December 23, 2023)

"Q About the economy, sir, what's your outlook on the economy next year?

THE PRESIDENT: All good.

Take a look. Start reporting it the right way."

It is indeed something of a mystery why so many people see an economy with roughly 5 percent growth, 3 percent or 4 percent unemployment, 25 percent stock market gains, negligible inflation, and tell pollsters they are gloomy to the point where they disapprove of Biden's performance and want to replace him with President Trump. The "start reporting it the right way" reflects the president's frustration.

It's often hard to disentangle what is media bias and what is the underlying reality but on this one my own sense is that there are a lot of ordinary Americans for whom income growth hasn't caught up with price increases. Gas prices, food prices, mortgage rates are up from the Trump era, and wages haven't quite kept pace.

Gas stations and roadside rest stops or "travel centers" have been in the business press lately in connection with the court battle between Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and the Haslam family (former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam, Cleveland Browns football team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam) over Pilot Travel Centers. That's a good story in its own right related to the alleged valuation shenanigans in connection with the family's sale of the business. The press often tends to emphasize conflict or supposed shady dealings, in part because such coverage attracts readers.

Robert Kelner poses a question: "The rate of increase in the number of dollars it takes to buy goods has slowed significantly. The rate of increase in the amount of gold it takes to buy the same goods has accelerated. Discuss."

He's referring to the Bureau of Economic Analysis's release from this morning on personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, a measure of inflation that is closely watched by the Federal Reserve. The PCE number shows victory in the Fed's battle against inflation: "From the preceding month, the PCE price index for November decreased 0.1 percent (table 5). Prices for goods decreased 0.7 percent and prices for services increased 0.2 percent. Food prices decreased 0.1 percent and energy prices decreased 2.7 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.1 percent."

A former New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, has a new column putting into context the article by the former New York Times editorial page editor, James Bennet, about what has gone wrong at that newspaper. She says the "essay joins a growing body of criticism by former Times insiders – Bari Weiss, Jeff Gerth, and my own account – about how and why the paper's leadership – Publisher A.G. Sulzberger and former executive editor Dean Baquet, in Bennet's case – increasingly caved to the demands of digitally obsessed revenue models and its younger, left-leaning staff." She might also add Alison Leigh Cowan to the list of critical former Times insiders.

Miller writes:

"The scandal over Claudine Gay's plagiarism is more than a sideshow—it's symptomatic of a university bereft of original thinking," I write in my latest column for the New York Sun. Please check out the full column by clicking on the headline: "The Harvard Corporation at Antietam."

"The stock market is making rich people richer," Donald Trump said during an hour-and-a-half campaign speech Saturday in Durham, New Hampshire. It sounded like a criticism of President Biden, which is strange, because when the stock market was up during the Trump administration, Trump took credit for it, and if the stock market were down under Biden, you can bet Trump would be criticizing Biden for that, too, rather than praising Biden for reducing wealth inequality.

After complaining about "rich people richer," Trump launched into a criticism of banks.

"Biden's handlers are making the banks much richer and you much poorer," Trump said. "We're gonna get those banks when we get in office, we're gonna get 'em."

"Nobody knows the banking industry better than me, and I'm not gonna let them take advantage of you any longer," Trump said.

Two recent columns of mine:

"The Joy of the Boston Tea Party, 250 Years Later"— the Wall Street Journal

"The Fear Trap: What's Missing From the Current Campus Antisemitism Debate" — the Algemeiner

There's an effort underway by the left to have the government label speech that the left disagrees with as "disinformation," and to suppress that speech. By that definition, conservative websites such as the Federalist or the Daily Wire or Newsmax are "disinformation," while left-wing websites such as the New York Times are trustworthy. The Biden administration even hired a former aide to Madeleine Albright, James P. Rubin, to implement this effort. The New York Times covers it today under the jump headline "Fight Against Disinformation Is Under Fire From Right." That is comical. If the Trump administration or George W. Bush administration had hired a former Donald Rumsfeld or John Bolton aide to define the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN as "disinformation," making it harder to access those sites from government computers and pressing technology companies to limit the reach of the content, you can bet that the Times would be covering it as a threat to free speech rather than as a "fight against disinformation."

One of the recurring themes around here is about how bash-the-rich populism is now a feature of not only the left but also the right side of American politics. The latest example: conservative pundit Ann Coulter responding to legislation proposing to raise taxes on university endowments with the quip: "Please throw in hedge fund managers." Has she not noticed that fund managers (Ackman, Asness, Rowan) are among the ones leading the charge to improve the universities?

The former editorial page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, has a long piece in the Economist about how the New York Times lost its way. Among the highlights of a perceptive article:

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

That's related to the point mentioned here the other day about Harvard President Claudine Gay and "my truth."

Bennet also describes how the Times' commercial incentives skewed the journalism:

Three points from Fed Chairman Powell's press conference today struck me as worth flagging. One was his comment that the Fed is "likely at or near the peak rate for this cycle." The second was an indication that they'd likely start cutting before inflation hits 2 percent. And a third was a recollection that at this time last year, many of the "experts" were predicting a recession.