22 Aug
2016
Flood insurance, Internet oversight, and the Fed in Jackson Hole – TenCount 8.22.16
- Flood insurance is one of those things easily dismissed until it’s too late. Just ask the folks in Baton Rouge, where FEMA has told uninsured flood victims that the government will pay no more than $33,000 per household to aid recovery. Only 12 percent of the homes in Baton Rouge were covered, below the statewide average of 21 percent, according to the state Insurance Department. More than 86,000 people have registered with FEMA for assistance, with more than 17,000 flood insurance claims filed.
- President Obama will visit flood-scarred Baton Rouge on Tuesday. Congress, meanwhile, is expected to take up reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program next year; current authorization will expire on Sept. 30, 2017. But the process is not expected to be an easy one: The Flood Insurance Program owed $23 billion to the U.S. Treasury as of last year, the result of big payouts for Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina and Rita. Some members of Congress favor scrapping the federal program in favor of private insurance.
- The National Telecommunications & Information Administration is the Commerce Department unit that oversees the administration of the Internet’s domain name system – but not for long. In a blog post last week, the NTIA confirmed that it will turn over administration of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority as of Oct. 1. Who will take over is the question. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has been working for two years to sketch out a private-sector model of operation. But opponents of letting go of U.S. authority over the domain name system say NTIA’s move violates federal law. Expect Congress to re-engage in the debate this fall.
- The Federal Reserve and its acolytes gather this week in Jackson Hole, Wyo., for the Fed’s annual Economic Symposium, which this year has the enthralling title “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future.” Most closely watched will be an address to the group on Friday by Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who might offer her thoughts on a recent paper by the president of the San Francisco Fed that called, in part, for the Fed to consider dropping its two percent inflation target since real inflation is currently at zero percent.
- Also in Jackson Hole will be the Fed Up Coalition, a group comprising unions and other community organizations that lobbies for progressive changes and transparency in Fed policy. Or at least they intended to be there: Earlier this month, the group filed a complaint with the National Park Service and the Justice Department after the hotel hosting the Fed conference cancelled the group’s room reservations.
- Expect more brokerage firms to revamp their mutual fund offerings and compensation systems to account for the fiduciary rule, following in the footsteps of Edward Jones, the St. Louis-based brokerage that last week announced it would cut access to mutual funds for retirement savers in commission-based accounts. If followed by other firms, the change might cause concern for the mutual fund industry.
- Will more health insurance companies follow Aetna out of select ObamaCare markets? That is the worrying question facing the Obama Administration after Aetna last week announced it would withdraw two-thirds of its ObamaCare coverage. While much was made of an Aetna letter saying it would be forced to withdraw from markets if the government blocked its proposed merger with Humana, that real reason Aetna is pulling back is much more simple: too many sick patients and not enough well ones have enrolled in the program.
- The disclosure wars are certain to heat up this fall. Once it returns to Washington after Labor Day, Congress is likely to have on its agenda a possible renewal of the law barring the SEC from requiring companies to disclose their political spending. That was included in the 2015 budget omnibus but expires at the end of the fiscal year. Now. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others, in the wake of reporting by The New York Times, are calling for required disclosure of corporate contributions to think tanks to fund research.
- Shares of for-profit operators of prisons got whacked last week after the Justice Department said it would recommend that the Federal Bureau of Prisons not renew their contracts with private prison operators. The directive is limited to the 13 privately run prisons, which hold about 22,000 inmates, in the federal Bureau of Prisons system. Unaffected are privately run state prisons. Nevertheless, investors took more than one-third of the value off the stocks of the two largest private prison operators, Corrections Corp. of America and GEO Group.
- Like tech? How about tequila? On Thursday evening, NextGov holds one of its periodic Tech+Tequila Meetups to discuss “Government and Artificial Intelligence.” Earlier in the day, FedScoop conducts its eighth annual “Lowering the Cost of Government with Information Technology Summit.”