Business
Commentary: Trump wants to let companies make fewer disclosures, thus keeping investors in the dark
Trump’s SEC is considering eliminating the mandate for quarterly corporate financial reports, but even some big investors call it a lousy idea.
This being the “information age,” it would be understandable if investors sometimes feel inundated with too much information to wade through about the stocks in their mutual fund portfolios.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, bowing like a puppy to the urgings of President Trump, is considering exactly the wrong solution to this supposed burden. It’s proposing to allow public companies to give their investors less information, as though that’s a good thing.
On May 8, the SEC proposed rescinding its mandate that public companies report financial results on a quarterly schedule. Instead, it suggests, semiannual and annual reports should suffice.
This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.
— Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets
The SEC left its proposal open for public comment for 60 days, meaning the window closed Monday. By then, the agency had received more than 68,000 comments, according to a tracker posted online by accounting professor Tzachi Zach of Ohio State.
Almost 99.9% of the comments were negative. Several organizations of institutional investors and auditing professionals, as well as a tsunami of individual investors, expressed opposition.
A similar initiative the SEC aired in 2018, during Trump’s first term, received an overwhelmingly negative response and was eventually dropped.
The tide of opposition coming from individual investors shouldn’t be surprising. “Taking away basic quarterly information means investors are blind for six months at a time,” says Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets.
That’s especially true for small investors, though perhaps not so much for major institutions, insiders or deep-pocketed individuals. “If you’re a big dog, you’ll get the information anyway,” Kelleher told me. “And insiders, who are trading in their own stock all the time, will have the information. This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.”
Trump set off the latest initiative with a social media post on Sept. 15, advocating the move to a six-month reporting schedule. It read, in part, “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”
As was usual with Trump, his argument was a string of uninformed and irrelevant non sequiturs.
It’s doubtful that eliminating quarterly reports will save much, if any, money. Most 10-Qs are cookie cutter documents disclosing financial figures already embedded in corporate records.
The idea that managers would become empowered to “focus on properly running their companies” if only they were relieved of the burden of preparing a report every three months is just malarkey: Any CEOs who feel the impulse to drop everything and involve themselves in what is essentially an automated process can’t be very good at their jobs.
As for China’s “50 to 100 year view on management of a company,” what would that even mean, even if it were true? China doesn’t operate on a 50 to 100 year corporate horizon, but rather on a string of five-year plans. The most recent of these was adopted by the government in March, covers the period up to 2030, and is its 15th in a row.
Despite the flaws in Trump’s arguments, Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, a former corporate lawyer and securities industry consultant, fell into line. Within a few days of Trump’s post, he showed up on CNBC to minimize the potential effect of the change. Private companies rely on semiannual reports, after all, he noted, although the idea of taking private companies as models for publicly traded corporations might not strike experienced investors as the wisest thing.
Atkins cited an enduring chestnut, for which there’s no evidence, that quarterly reporting is responsible for “short-term thinking” in corporate suites (though he admitted that his evidence was “anecdotal”). And he suggested that small investors have ample access to corporate information even without quarterly reports — why, he said, they can just tune in to CNBC!
“To propose change in what our rules are now would be a good way forward,” he said. “So I welcome the president’s putting this up for discussion.”
Something more insidious undergirds the SEC’s proposal than its immediate effect on corporate behavior. The agency rationalizes its proposal as seeking “a tradeoff between reducing regulatory burdens … and promoting efficient financial markets through timely disclosure.”
The problem here, Kelleher points out, is that “reducing regulatory burdens” isn’t part of the SEC’s mission in any way, shape or form. It’s a regulatory agency, and its mission since its founding in 1934 has been to protect investors, not to make things fluffier for stock issuers.
The history of financial disclosure in the U.S. shows a long-term trend favoring more disclosure, not less. In the 1880s, quarterly reporting by railroads and other transportation companies were common.
Early on, pressure for more frequent disclosure came not from government regulators, who barely existed before 1934, but from investors. The reporting of quarterly earnings, notes corporate finance expert Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management, was “a bottom-up historical phenomenon reflecting voluntary arrangements between firms and investors, not a top-down phenomenon imposed by law.”
By 1931, according to financial historians, 63% of New York Stock Exchange-listed firms were publishing their quarterly earnings. The Big Board mandated that frequency for most listed companies in 1939. The SEC mandated semiannual reports in 1955 and quarterly reports, as Atkins said, in 1970.
The evidence in favor of dropping the quarterly reports is uniformly thin. Some advocates cite a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett that was headlined “Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy.”
Couple of points about this: First, the target of Dimon and Buffett wasn’t quarterly financial reporting, but quarterly earnings guidance — that is, the practice of some top executives who project their earnings into the future. (This guidance usually comes at the same time they issue their SEC disclosures.)
It’s guidance, they wrote, that is “a major driver” of short-termism in corporate behavior. That’s because management is giving itself a target it feels obligated to meet, even if factors outside its control interfere with the quest.
Furthermore, Dimon and Buffett wrote, “Our views on quarterly earnings forecasts should not be misconstrued as opposition to quarterly and annual reporting.” They called transparency about financial and operating results “an essential aspect of U.S. public markets … so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.”
Individual investors may be unmoved by the SEC’s proposal because — let’s be candid — how many of them read quarterly earnings reports, anyway? But that’s unimportant, Kelleher says, because other market participants are reading them. “So that information is in the marketplace, and that’s what actually enables price discovery, so stock prices roughly reflect what’s going on at a company, most of the time.”
More to the point, the quarterly reports reflect the highest-quality, detailed information, the information the SEC requires executives to disclose on pain of facing a civil lawsuit from the agency or even criminal liability for faking data. “Main Street investors, whether they read quarterly reports or not, are the real beneficiaries,” Kelleher says.
That’s so. The bottom line is that quarterly financial reporting helps investors. It doesn’t promote short-term behavior and its costs, modest as they are, don’t outweigh its benefits.
Over the decades, scandal-ridden corporations have hidden fraudulent behavior in the interstices between mandated disclosures—think Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among others. Why give any corporation, even an honest one, the opportunity to disclose less?
Hollywood’s fascination with YouTube creators is going to the next level.
Los Angeles-based investment firm Content Partners and media entrepreneur Ed Simpson announced Tuesday that they are launching a new company, Wonderloom Media, that will acquire YouTube-creator led businesses.
Wonderloom’s first acquisition is YouTube true-crime channel Dr. Insanity, which has more than 5 million subscribers and more than 1.3 billion total views.
Content Partners owns or licenses more than 800 films and more than 3,000 hours of television content. The company co-owns the “CSI” franchise.
“This is a kind of next step evolution in the type of IP we will be acquiring,” Alphonse Lordo, a partner at Content Partners, said in an interview.
The effort comes as the film industry continues to struggle to bring more people into movie theaters and has had recent success with the YouTube creator-led films “Obsession” and “Backrooms.” As studios and TV networks have shed jobs over the years, more entertainment workers are applying their expertise at major YouTube creator-led businesses, which have continued to grow their audiences.
YouTube’s audience has shifted from smartphones to TVs, on which many U.S. consumers watch YouTube videos with their families. That in turn has attracted streamers such as Netflix to partner with YouTube creators to bring their content to the same platform that has high-budget television shows and movies.
Simpson, a former TV producer who will be Wonderloom’s chief executive, said Dr. Insanity was the “perfect first acquisition” because it had a loyal audience, proven storytelling and meaningful room to expand. “True crime is an incredibly sticky genre of programming that works just as well as it does on YouTube, as it does on Netflix and linear and cable channels,” he said in an interview.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Wonderloom, based in L.A., also will assist entrepreneurs who started YouTube channels grow their businesses.
The new company also is eyeing possible acquisitions in food, travel and general entertainment programming, added Simpson, a former chief strategy officer at Wheelhouse, a production firm behind “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.”
“This is about building the next generation studio, so we think of this as the beginnings of Paramount, of Warner Bros., of those great studios,” Simpson said. “We see this space following in that very same pattern right now.”
Other Hollywood companies also are getting into the creator business acquisition space. Last month, Century City-based Creative Artists Agency said it was partnering with Integrated Media Co. to form a $250-million holding company called Compound Creative Holdings that will acquire and operate a portfolio of creator economy businesses.
Netflix is going bite-sized. In a pivot toward the short-form content dominating TikTok and YouTube, the streaming giant announced it will start hosting three- to 20-minute videos from top digital publishers right on its homepage starting Aug. 3.
The streamer said U.S. customers will see “fan-favorite videos” from brands run by digital publishers, including BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, PMX (a subdivision of Penske Media), People Inc. and Tastemade. The videos will cover a variety of topics, including gardening tips, travel and celebrity profiles.
The rollout comes as Netflix competes for audience time from YouTube and social media platforms such as TikTok that have viral videos that can occupy users for hours. By bringing series such as BuzzFeed Celeb’s “30 Questions,” on which celebrities provide answers, or Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector,” on which celebrities are hooked up to polygraph machines, Netflix users can learn more information about the people they already watch on the streamer, but in shorter videos.
“Members don’t just want to watch a show or film and move on. They want to keep exploring the stories and personalities they love long after the final credits roll,” said John Derderian, a Netflix vice president overseeing the initiative. “These partnerships help us deepen fandom and create more ways for members to carry those stories with them throughout their day.”
Netflix said it will offer licensed archival and ongoing series, including Harper’s Bazaar’s “Burning Questions,” Billboard’s “24 Hrs With” and People’s “My Life in Pictures” that provide an inside look at celebrities.
The videos from digital publishers will also be available to Netflix customers in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand on Aug. 3.
The Los Gatos, Calif., streamer over time has been expanding its library of content, adding games, live programming such as boxing matches and football games, alongside movies and TV shows.
Business
Commentary: While Trump declares that U.S. is enjoying ‘best economy ever,’ manufacturing jobs have been disappearing
Based on the words of President Trump, America is well on the way to becoming a “global superpower in manufacturing” — indeed, as he declared in a Father’s Day social media post, we are already experiencing the “BEST ECONOMY EVER.” (Capitalization’s his.)
Here’s what the government’s own statistics tell us: Manufacturing investment has crashed during his watch, with construction spending in the manufacturing sector down 26.4% from Trump’s inauguration through May, to $174.8 billion. That’s the lowest figure since February 2023, when the economy was in the midst of a post-pandemic recovery.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told me by email that “the last two jobs reports” showed manufacturing job growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a seasonally-adjusted decline of 2,000 manufacturing workers in May and a gain of 3,000 in June. But the June 2026 figure was 38,000 jobs, or about 0.3% below the level in June 2025, and 75,000 or about 0.6% below the level in January 2025, when Trump took office.
Desai said that “thanks to President Trump’s proven agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and tax cuts, American manufacturing will continue to rebound.”
There’s little mystery about what has come between Trump’s ambition and the real world. To a large extent it’s Trump’s economic program, particularly his tariff policies and, more recently, his war with Iran. Those have injected a level of uncertainty for corporate managements pondering whether to spend money on expansion that they haven’t had to confront in years.
From where we’re standing, we are not seeing signs of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.
— Didi Caldwell, Global Location Strategies
The tariffs and the war have driven up manufacturers’ costs for raw materials and overseas shipping. The general economic atmosphere doesn’t help. U.S. gross domestic product growth came in at a 2.1% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta expects it to have fallen to 1.3% in the second quarter ended June 30.
Meanwhile, the University of Michigan consumer confidence index reached 44.8 in May, its lowest level ever (though it improved to 49.5 in June). Wages have been rising modestly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those gains have been eaten up by higher prices, especially for gasoline and food.
To put things another way, the actual figures show the U.S. economy to be sputtering, and the “vibe economy” as measured by consumer confidence is doing even worse.
Now that Trump’s second term is about to reach its 18-month mark, let’s unpack the factors causing the discrepancy between his ambitions and claims, and the reality.
Trump declared economic victory just as his term was starting. On March 20, 2025, he proclaimed a “manufacturing renaissance” in the U.S. That was based on what he said were “trillions of dollars in new investments” he had “already secured in tech-based manufacturing.”
A White House statement said “the list of manufacturing wins is endless.” The provided list was a roster of announcements, not groundbreakings, much less completed ventures.
Business executives quite properly have taken these pledges with mounds of salt. “Announcements are what people say they’re going to do, but dollars spent is what’s actually happening,” Didi Caldwell, chief executive of a firm that helps companies find factory sites, told the Financial Times. “From where we’re standing, we are not seeing signs of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.”
Indeed, at least some of these announcements have had the flavor of performative efforts to satisfy Trump’s amour propre and extract government concessions.
For example, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook appeared with Trump at the White House in August to announce a $600-billion U.S. spending plan to take place over four years. That was a $100-billion increase over its previously-announced program.
More to the point, however, it incorporated spending with suppliers that Apple had been working with for years. Mentioned in the news announcement was a commitment to buy cover glass for iPhones from Corning. But Corning has been supplying that glass since the first iPhone appeared in 2007. In any case, the announcement appeared to secure a commitment from Trump to exempt Apple from tariffs imposed on imported chips.
Apple’s announcement Wednesday that it will spend $30 billion to buy chips from Broadcom was similarly ambiguous. The announcement didn’t provide details about the terms of the commitment or the timing of its expenditures. I asked Apple for details and whether the deal was related to a desire to remain in Trump’s favor, but didn’t hear back.
A similar phenomenon occurred during Trump’s first term; Trump had built much of his 2016 presidential campaign on a promise to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States. He blamed shrinkage in the manufacturing sector on trade agreements such as NAFTA and the policies of the Chinese, and took credit when an American manufacturer agreed to create or save jobs in the United States.
As I reported in 2019, many of those arrangements turned out to be exaggerated or bogus, or predated Trump’s claim. Some disappeared as soon as public attention turned elsewhere, or were outweighed by job cuts made elsewhere by the same companies.
Trump’s tariffs appear to have had a direct effect on manufacturing employment in the U.S. Since Trump’s inauguration, the manufacturing sector has shed about 75,000 jobs, or 0.6%. After April 2, 2025, when he announced global “liberation day” tariffs supposedly as a response to years of unfair treatment of American exports, the decline picked up pace, with a shrinkage of 68,000 manufacturing jobs.
The Supreme Court invalidated those tariffs in February, but others are still in place, including tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and on goods from China. Nor has he ceased threatening partners with trade wars. As recently as Tuesday, he said he would cut off all trade with Spain because of that country’s disagreement with him over its defense spending and its criticism of his Iran war.
As it happens, Spain is one of the few countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus. That means that any cutoff, which trade experts think will be unlikely, would come at a cost to the U.S.
One might have hoped that Trump had learned a lesson from his first-term trade war with China. That conflict provoked a sharp contraction in the manufacturing economy, with the Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers index falling to 49.1 by mid-2019. (A reading below 50 signifies contraction.)
The ISM index began to recover toward the end of Trump’s term but fell again during the pandemic. Lately it has been falling again, to 53.3 in June from 54 in May.
The Iran war is another deadweight on domestic manufacturing. That’s partially the consequence of blockages of the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial thoroughfare not only for middle eastern oil, but also for such industrial inputs as fertilizer and aluminum. Cement, concrete, olive oil and spices are also among commodities produced in the region that use the strait as an outlet to reach the outside world.
Uncertainties in the region, tensions between the U.S. and China, and heightened concerns over the safety of shipping overall have driven up shipping costs between the far east and the U.S. The price of shipping a benchmark 40-foot container from China to the West Coast has nearly quadrupled to $6,687 now from about $1,700 just before the Iran war began, according to an index maintained by the cargo firm Freightos — even though shipping prices typically decline during this time of year.
There can be little doubt that the U.S. would benefit from an industrial policy — if it’s coherent. China supplanted America as the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods in 2010, and the gap has only widened since then. China’s dominance may be hard to reverse, as it’s built on lower labor costs and transport infrastructure that enjoys focused government investment.
Tariffs could be a component of a new industrial policy, but Trump’s tariffs aren’t rationally geared to protecting domestic industries that need protection. They’re expressions of his whims, and as such they’re totally ineffective. If there are government investment policies targeting industries that need assistance, they’re not apparent to economists or industrialists.
Trump can talk as much as he likes about a golden age for U.S. manufacturing, but from his first term through this one, it’s nothing but talk. And talk, of course, is cheap.
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