New Economic Perspectives has the article Countering Chinese Accounting Control Fraud and Predation Against U.S. Investors.

What the China Hustle accounting control fraud schemes and the predation schemes described have in common is that neither would be possible if the SEC and either the Bush, Obama, or Trump administration were not so utterly spineless for at least 15 years as to allow the fraud and predation schemes to persist. The Chinese context should have been the easiest context for the U.S. to deny the ability of Chinese corporations to list on the U.S. markets unless the SEC had the power to prevent fraud and contract provisions in the U.S. that China agreed in a binding fashion were enforceable in China. The SEC has not required such a grant of power as a condition of approving Chinese stock listings in the U.S. and has not insisted on enforceable contract terms to prevent predation. The SEC is not even asking for such powers, warning Americans not to invest in Chinese stocks, or seeking to ban such listings.

I commented on the post as follows:

Thanks for the warning. I might have finally decided to invest in Chinese stocks if I hadn’t read this article. What frightens me though, is that I have no assurance that these shenanigans aren’t going on in the highly rated USA companies where I do most of my investing. I try to look at measures to assure myself that I am not investing in companies that are going deep into debt to buy back their own shares to boost the per share earnings and dividends. I’ll only know if I have succeeded when I don’t go broke in the coming market decline.

The Intercept has the article Elizabeth Warren Plan Would Allow the Government to Manufacture Its Own Generic Drugs.

Warren introduced legislation on Tuesday with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., that would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within the Department of Health and Human Services. That office would have the authority to manufacture generic versions of any drug for which the U.S. government has licensed a patent, whenever there is little or no competition, critical shortages, or exorbitant prices that restrict patient access.

I don’t get it. Drugs become generic when the patent runs out. This used to be the brake on rising drug prices until the industry figured out they could get away with violating the laws by fixing prices. If we just enforced the laws we already have, life would get back to normal when we used to have a Department of Justice that was not blind to white collar crime at the highest levels.

The concept of “restraint of trade” seems to have let the public conversation, so I looked it up to see if I was dreaming that such a concept ever existed. WikiPedia has a long article on Restraint of Trade. Here is part of what it said with respect to the concept in the USA.

In the US, the first significant discussion occurred in the Sixth Circuit’s opinion by Chief Judge (later US President and still later Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft in United States v. Addyston Pipe & Steel Co.[9] Judge Taft explained the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890[10] as a statutory codification of the English common-law doctrine of restraint of trade, as explicated in such cases as Mitchel v Reynolds.[11] The court distinguished between naked restraints of trade and those ancillary to the legitimate main purpose of a lawful contract and reasonably necessary to effectuation of that purpose.[12] An example of the latter would be a non-competition clause associated with the lease or sale of a bakeshop, as in the Mitchel case. Such a contract should be tested by a “rule of reason,” meaning that it should be deemed legitimate if “necessary and ancillary.” An example of the naked type of restraint would be the price-fixing and bid-allocation agreements involved in the Addyston case. Taft said that “we do not think there is any question of reasonableness open to the courts to such a contract.” The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. During the following century, the Addyston Pipe opinion of Judge Taft has remained foundational in antitrust analysis