This
might not be the best time for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to make the case
that rising risk and regulation are harming the marketplace and consumers. See Public
Policy Risks Soar Amid Growing Trend to Regulate Rather than Legislate and
Partisan Approach to Lawmaking. A
content analysis of companies' 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission quantifies a rise in risk disclosures, with increases in key works
such as data privacy, immigration issues, labor, and intellectual property.
The
Chamber appears intent on persuading the court of public opinion that life is
getting riskier and harder for business.
It
appears to me that Business America has largely foisted risk onto consumers,
and counterintuitively their profit margins have increased despite frequent
complaints that regulation raises the cost of doing business, squelches
innovation, and reduces employment.
I
cannot find an airfare or hotel booking that permits cancellation without a
risk premium doubling the non-refundable rate.
Similarly, if risk is so harmful, how can businesses, in a variety of
market segments, find it possible to increase revenues and profit margins? Even the Wall Street Journal notes
this anomaly. See Why
Is Inflation So Sticky? It Could Be Corporate Profits
I
was indoctrinated by my UPenn and UVa training that market forces are largely
unimpeachable. In most cases yes, but
just now, even some people at the "Diary of the American Dream" (a
former marketing slogan for the Journal) see companies able to game the
system. Apparently, we consumers can
become numbed by the constant drumbeat that inflation is unavoidable when markets
become disrupted by supply chain and other extraordinary circumstances. The
Chamber of Commerce wants to include in the emergency rationale upward price
pressure created by added risk and government regulation.
No
one in the Chicago School seems able and willing to concede that sometimes
market self-discipline fails. How can
these true believers explain the success achieved in keeping prices and margins
extraordinarily high by blaming risk and the government even when the underlying
emergency triggers have ended? Now there
are too many truck drivers at west coast ports chasing after declining loads. No bottleneck in the supply chain anymore.
Sticky,
slimy, unclean, but surely not invisible hands at play.
