Welcome to the Era of Garbage Film and Television Streaming
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
I should add we're not doing this because we need to cut costs.
The one streaming subscription I have now is Peacock because it is (1) well priced and (2) has some pretty remarkable sports content such as Premier League soccer (stupid of MLS to stay behind the Apple TV paywall because the one thing that will convince people American soccer is worth watching is... watching it) and events like the Rugby World Cup. That's despite my being entirely uninterested in network TV fare such as "Like Columbo but he never talks to anybody because he only uses forensic methods" and "Like Star Trek but set in a hospital" etc.
The really sad thing is that public broadcasters operate in the same way with regard to content quality. Sure, they have (almost) no ads, a lot less complete garbage ("reality" TV, voyeuristic game shows), but on the whole they make the same clinic dramas, soap operas (and sometimes spend billions for the rights to sport).
For-profit media companies cut shows because they're unprofitable, public broadcasters cut them because of a "lack of demand by the public". Media companies make terrible programming choices because they think it will be profitable, public broadcasters make them for political reasons (no matter their structure, they cannot actually be independent of their funding source, the sovereign that organizes their funding).
It would have been nice to read an analysis like that in TFA, but alas it was published in jacobinmag.
Maybe shackling everyone's retirement outcomes, executive compensation, and economic policy to large private corporation's stock price isn't the best way to manifest the world we want...
The alternatives to investment-based pensions do have some trade-offs. Both the tax-based and "public insurance" (current payers finance current pensioners) model are vulnerable to demographic shifts and economic depressions. In many countries with bad demography, the payout you get per income-month has been reduced and the age of retirement increased, because the system threatened to collapse. Since most of the world is now aging rapidly and living longer, these systems are under severe strain.
A significant advantage of pension funds is that they can invest abroad to spread the risk, but in a public system this is impossible.
small nitpick: Pension funds invest only tiny percentages into actual private companies, like the PE firms TFA is referring to.
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/docs/forms-publications/facts-inv...
You are probably talking about Norway's sovereign wealth fund[0] (funded by oil revenues); the actual pension fund is only for government employees and structured almost exactly like any non-government pension fund.
There are of course many financing models that are some combination of the two, but these models have the exact same problem to the degree that they invest in the stock market. Also, there are very few countries in the world that invest their oil surplus as wisely as Norway. Most democracies would just use the funds to hand out election presents to their voters.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
The most broad brush would be a complete and total ban on mergers and acquisitions, an idea that I find mildly interesting but I suspect would fail in practice. Perhaps M&A could be restricted somehow, with particular criteria disqualifying one from being able to accquire?
I think the root of this problem is that private equity managers often have no skin in the game and tend to fail upward. It would be one thing if a private equity manager had a record of taking a company private, streamlining it and making it sustainable for decades to come. Even with the human cost of that, it's preferable to a company going prompt bankrupt. But too many managers seem to take these things private and then run them straight into the ground. Toys'R'Us, for instance, or Red Lobster as quoted in the article. In the latter's case, the management tried boneheaded promotions like "unlimited shrimp," which would be a bad idea even in a zero interest rate world.
I'd propose instead some sort of mandatory filing on the part of private equity managers that is publicly accessible and searchable and shows the track record of a private equity manager, with links to all of the other managers they've worked with. Then, when a PE investor proposes to take a company private, they're required by the SEC to demonstrate that their management isn't tainted by a chain of incompetence.
Who knows if that would work, but it might increase the skin in the game somewhat. The status quo seems to be HBS grads performing with mediocrity at best and having no real accountability.