There’s a time for everything. This isn’t the time to make reliable information about the markets and the economy even harder to find.
With a government shutdown underway, crucial reports, including one on jobs and unemployment, simply aren’t available. Even before the shutdown, the Trump administration had been making it increasingly difficult for the public to obtain solid official data on a wide range of subjects.
President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August when he didn’t like the jobs numbers the agency released. Accurate data is becoming scarce for a variety of other subjects, too, including deportations, pollution emissions and the cost of extreme storms.
The last thing we need now is further cuts in data.
Yet President Trump wants to slash another precious information trove: the quarterly earnings reports made by publicly traded companies.
The president has called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to eliminate the requirement that publicly traded companies report their earnings every three months. And on Monday, Paul Atkins, the agency’s chair, said he would “fast track” the president’s desire to shift corporate America to a twice-yearly reporting cycle, instead of a quarterly one. Mr. Trump said this “will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies.”
At another time, this might be a reasonable idea. Why not try it in the United States? After all, Britain and the European Union have already experimented with it without setting off economic disasters.
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The post It’s a Bad Time to Cut the Information Coming From Corporate America appeared first on New York Times.
