The president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for increased regulation of hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital funds.

Mr. Trumka writes:

Private-equity funds are leveraged private pools of capital that benefit from extensive tax subsidies. They are unregulated and shrouded in secrecy, and they extract big profits while the companies, their employees and many of their investors lose. In the Simmons case, the leveraged buyout firm that brought the company to bankruptcy walked away with $77 million in profits on top of hundreds of millions of dollars in special dividends. The Wall Street investment banks that arranged the deals pulled down big money, too. Meanwhile, a thousand employees lost their livelihoods, the company's bondholders lost more than $500 million, and a value-creating American company was in effect pawned for cash.

David Cay Johnston has responded to my post about his article about me, and I have written an additional response below his. One more point though, based on my conversation this morning with Jeff Cottrell of Tax Analysts, who returned my call there inquiring about a subscription to tax notes.

Me: How much is a subscription to Tax Notes?

Mr. Cottrell: $2000.

Me: Are there any discounts?

Mr. Cottrell: "That's the lowest subscription cost that we offer it to anybody."

Me: What if I can't afford $2,000?

Mr. Cottrell: Are you a practitioner? It could be a business expense.

Me: No, I'm not a practitioner, I am a member of the public. You are a non-profit that says your mission is to educate members of the public. I'm a member of the public and I'd like to be educated, but I don't have an extra $2,000. Are you saying I'm out of luck?

Mr. Cottrell: "We're a publishing company."

The New York Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, just might be making some sense: "the housing bubble was a geographically uneven affair. Basically, prices rose sharply only where zoning restrictions and other factors limited the construction of new houses."

The way I read that, he's not saying zoning is good because it raises property values, he's saying it's bad because it artificially inflates them.

Maybe they should give him a column in Reason magazine.

Bloomberg News publishes an excerpt from The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein:

Well into the crisis period, when banks such as Citigroup were operating on federal investment and when Citi's stock was in single digits, Vikram Pandit, the CEO, was observed with a lunch guest at Le Bernardin, one of the top-rated restaurants in New York. Pandit looked discerningly at the wine list, saw nothing by the glass that appealed, and ordered a $350 bottle so that, as he explained, he could savor "a glass of wine worth drinking." Pandit drank just one glass; his friend had none.

A Rasmussen Poll finds that 66% of voters believe that Americans are over-taxed, and that "75% of voters nationwide say the average American should pay no more than 20% of their income in taxes."

As mentioned earlier, a former tax reporter for the New York Times, David Cay Johnston, devoted his "Tax Notes" column this week to discussing a story reported here:

Stoll, who edited a smart and now defunct right-wing newspaper called The New York Sun, frames the tax issue in a way that, unfortunately, does not contribute to thoughtful debate but just inflames the mindless partisanship that puts politics ahead of policy.

"Are we really at a point where we want the government taking more of what we earn? Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Rove sound like Nancy Pelosi," Stoll wrote on his blog...

Pajamas Media has published an article I wrote about the price of gold.

Tax Notes, a publication so expensive that it doesn't even say how much it costs on its Web page, has published an entire column by the former tax reporter for the New York Times, David Cay Johnston, following up on my post that was headlined Another Tax Increaser on the Right. More on that later.

Finally, last week the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney was kind enough to offer up some high praise: "Few writers today capture and explain the business-government dynamic as well as Ira Stoll, who blogs at 'The Future of Capitalism.'"

George Will has a column on Social Security: "Because of the displacement of responsibility from the individual to government, 48 percent of workers over 55 have total savings and investments of less than $50,000."

It's not clear to me if that includes home equity.

Just in time for the debate over increased taxing and regulating of hedge funds, Jesse Eisinger has fetched up from the Wall Street Journal and Portfolio at the news non-profit ProPublica to write a super-long article attempting to blame a hedge fund for the financial crisis.

The article, like its target Magnetar, manages to be on both sides of the trade.

On one hand, the headline says, "How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going," and it quotes one person identified flatteringly as a "prominent financial blogger" as saying of Magnetar, "If the world had been spared their cunning, the insanity of 2006-2007 would have been less extreme and the unwinding milder."

On the other hand, the article says, "the hedge fund didn't cause the housing bubble or the financial crisis."

So which is it?

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island wants any investment fund with more than $30 million in assets to have to register with the SEC and disclose its positions, Politico reports.

It's hard to see how a $35 million venture capital fund or real estate fund or hedge fund could pose a systemic risk, even with a lot of leverage. They might pose a competitive risk to larger financial institutions, who might like to saddle their more nimble competitors with the costs of compliance. The giant banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase already have less competition because of the failure of competitors like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. If Mr. Reed's proposal passes, they'll also have less competition from private investment funds.

The Reed proposal goes hand-in-hand with the idea of raising taxes on carried interest -- increased taxes and regulations on firms that didn't cause the financial crisis and didn't need a bailout, in order to improve the competitive positions of the firms that did need bailouts (or take forced TARP money).

Competition is good for consumers. The Financial Times reports that the Wall Street Journal is cutting ad prices by as much as 80% as it launches a new section to compete with the New York Times in New York: "In one sales pitch seen by the FT, News Corp has offered to sell a full-page print advertisement in New York region editions of the Journal and the New York Post and a banner ad in the Post for an estimated $19,000. A full-page ad in both papers combined would normally cost between $91,500 and $95,263, according to publicised rates."

Ordinarily, any advertiser with that little money to throw around would be advertising here at FutureOfCapitalism.com rather than the Wall Street Journal.

Canada's superintendent of financial institutions, Julie Dixon, has an intelligent and important op-ed piece in the Financial Times suggesting that what she calls "embedded contingent capital" -- "a form of self-insurance pre-funded by private investors" -- is a better way of protecting banks than a government bailout fund raised by a tax.

We've been closely following the push to raise taxes on "carried interest." See here, here, and here. Now Politico reports that the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, is getting in on the action:

AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, who was a third-generation coal miner before going into labor leadership, tells POLITICO that more than 10,000 union supporters will "march on Wall Street" on April 29 in support of a financial-transactions tax, and higher taxes on private-equity and hedge funds.

A New York Times reporter who covered the financial crisis, Stephen Labaton, has been hired by Goldman Sachs as "as a full-time consultant on regulatory and legal issues," the Washington Examiner notices Politico noticing. What the Examiner, Politico, and the New York Observer, which also mentioned the move, do not take note of is that Mr. Labaton's wife is reportedly the deputy U.S. Trade Representative for Europe. I am not suggesting that had anything to do with the Goldman move, but it might be worth looking into.

Hugh Hewitt warns that a new congressionally mandated database to be operated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission "will become a government sponsored virtual bulletin board for the serial slandering of American manufacturing."