The DealBook DC Policy Project concludes.

That’s a wrap. Over the past two days, we heard from policymakers and business leaders about the prospects for a post-pandemic recovery, the odds of bipartisan deal-making, top priorities for prosecutors and the future of health care, travel, macroeconomics and the markets.

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Senator Mitt Romney on stimulus: “There are people who need the funds.”

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, spoke with The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook DC Policy Project about the prospects for compromise in an era of stark partisan divisions.

Highlights from the discussion:

  • On meeting President Biden to talk about stimulus, Mr. Romney said: “I pointed out that we’re sending a bunch of money to states that don’t need it. There are people who need the funds, small businesses need the funds. We could be spending the money, by the way, on climate change technology, on infrastructure. But to send money to places that don’t need it is really not great policy.”

  • On a proposed federal minimum wage of $15 per hour: “We’ll lose 1.3 million jobs,” he said. “The minimum wage right now is $7.25 an hour. Going to $15 an hour is such a huge leap that a lot of small businesses won’t be able to make it,” he added. “They’ll go out of business and people will lose jobs.”

  • “Clearly our interest rates are very low right now,” Mr. Romney said. “But I’ve been around a while, and interest rates that are low some day become higher. The average interest rate on federal debt over a long period of time has been much higher than it is right now, and it will not always be so low. So if you load up on debt when the interest rates are low, when they come back to a higher number, they could come back and bite you.”

  • “I’m very open to a carbon tax, carbon dividend, where there’s a tax on oil companies and coal companies and so forth,” he said. “The funds that are raised then go to individual taxpayers so they could meet the costs of the higher price of energy.” Bill Gates has said “don’t play around the edges,” the senator said. “He is suggesting a major investment at the federal level in new technology, carbon capture, perhaps, nuclear energy and so forth.” Mr. Romney said he was open to ideas that would make that happen. “The carbon tax, carbon dividend, is such an idea,” he said.

  • “Populism is successful because it’s popular,” Mr. Romney said. “There’s a populist movement on the right in this country and on the left. They’re not going away any time soon. Although I think over time policies that endure, and that really help the American family, will be more successful. So, I remain, if you will, a more traditional conservative than some of the populist rhetoric within my party.”

  • “Will President Trump continue to play a role in my party? I’m sure he will,” Mr. Romney said. “I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” He conceded that “a lot can happen between now and 2024,” but according to the poll he’s seen, “if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.” How would the senator vote in the general election, in that case? “I would not be voting for President Trump again. I haven’t voted for him in the past. I would be getting behind somebody in the tiny wing of the Republican Party that I represent.”

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Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Jay Clayton, former S.E.C. chairman, on the markets.

Vlad Tenev, the chief executive and co-founder of Robinhood, and Jay Clayton, the veteran Wall Street lawyer who led the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Donald J. Trump, spoke at the DealBook DC Policy Project about the state of the markets, the future for financial regulation and the lessons from meme-stock mania.

Highlights from the discussion:

  • “People didn’t pay much attention to order flow until recently, because you had trade commissions, and if you look at it holistically, trade commissions were a more significant source of revenue for brokerages,” Mr. Tenev said. “Payment for order flow is necessary to generate some revenue to cover our costs of running this business. You can think of it as a profit share between market-making, which is also a for-profit business, and the introducing broker in this case, Robinhood.” (For more about the practice of payment for order flow, read this.)

  • “What we want is to drive competition between brokers, drive competition between market-makers, and do it in a way that the costs of trading are driven down, yet still resilient, still liquid. And that has happened,” Mr. Clayton said. “That has happened dramatically over the last two decades and now we are at a new point. We have a new flow into the system: much more retail flow.”

  • “I think it’s pathological that you could have greater than 100 percent short interest,” Mr. Tenev said. “It’s because we are unable to track it. If I own a stock and then I lend it to someone who shorts it and someone else buys it, that buyer doesn’t know that it’s been lent before. So the system is not tracking how many times a stock has been shorted.” On moving U.S. markets to real-time settlement, “not only can you speed up settlement time, but you can actually improve how you track these shares,” he added. “And we should know exactly what the chain of custody for all of these shares has been and how many times it’s been shorted.” Mr. Clayton noted, “We trade in milliseconds, but we settle and lend in days,” and to avoid the risks this creates, “They need to be brought into harmony.”

  • “I don’t think short selling is inherently wrong,” Mr. Tenev said. “But if you short sell the same share hundreds of times, I don’t know if people have really studied the effects of that and how things would be different if there was some limitation.”

  • On investing and social media: “There is a difference between the classic ‘pump and dump,’ which is: You take a company that probably doesn’t do very much, you go out to unsuspecting folks and you say, ‘Buy this stock, it’s going to take off.’ You create demand in the marketplace yourself by buying a few shares. And as the tide rises, you sell out and that’s terrible behavior. It’s bad for our markets,” Mr. Clayton said. “That’s different from let’s go to the complete other end of the spectrum. People on social media saying, ‘You know what? I’ve done my research. I like this company. You know, let’s sort of buy in it together.’ One of the difficult things for regulators is life is almost always somewhere in between.”

  • “You’ve seen people on social media discussing their trades and then going to their brokerage and executing their trades,” Mr. Tenev said. “You can see a world where actually it’s simpler for these to be integrated and for there to be platforms where your trades are automatically posted in a feed and people are following you. And then you can really easily tap to buy a stock. And then I think you have to ask: Are regulatory guidelines adequate, currently, for that type of world? Or do they need to be updated? Do we have to think through what constitutes a recommendation?”

Karen Lynch of CVS Health on the vaccine rollout.

Karen Lynch, the chief executive of CVS Health, spoke to The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook DC Policy Project about corporate America’s role in distributing the coronavirus vaccine, among other public health-related issues.

Highlights from the discussion:

  • “There’s more to health care now,” Ms. Lynch said. “There’s not only the physical places of care. There’s now virtual care. There’s more specialists that we interact with. There’s complexity in diagnosis. There’s more treatments.” That’s why, she said, there is “all the more reason that we have to think about helping people navigate this maze that we all live in today.”

  • CVS will be offering the Covid-19 vaccine in 17 states by the end of the week, she said. “We are getting about a half a million doses a week right now, and we expect that to ramp up over time,” she added. “We expect to see increases in supply increase dramatically from April to May, we expect to see another hundred million from May to June, probably another 200 to 300 million doses. So as that supply increases, you will see more and more stores open up across the country. We have the capacity with our 10,000 stores across the U.S. to do 20 to 25 million shots per month.”

  • “I think masks are with us for at least until 2022, until we get everyone vaccinated,” Ms. Lynch said. “We still don’t know when people are vaccinated if they are carrying the virus, which is why the C.D.C. is still recommending that people wear masks. So I think masks will be with us for a while.”

  • On whether to require that employees be vaccinated, she said: “We have had a lot of debates in our company. And I think it’s a company-by-company response. I think that a lot of companies are thinking about the incentives and incentivizing people, their employees, to get vaccinated. We have done a lot of work on this. We found that 85 percent of our employees want to get vaccinated.”

  • “As we think about the business going forward, there will continue to be vaccinations required for Covid,” she said. “There will likely be an additional booster shot next year.”

  • CVS has conducted more than 15 million coronavirus tests in the United States to date. “I do see this as a continuation of a health care need,” she said. “As you think about the future of health care, as viruses emerge, people will want to test and see what’s going on. And they will be looking for avenues to do that. So I think testing will continue to evolve. But it’s here to stay.”

  • “We are very focused on connecting the head to the body,” Ms. Lynch said. “The pandemic has put a spotlight on the importance of mental health. We have seen more suicides. We have seen an increase in depression. We have seen an increase in anxiety. We have seen an increase in prescription drugs for behavioral health. So all across the board, I called it early on the pandemic this was going to be the second wave. We clearly have seen it. I think the implications on mental health from this pandemic are in their infancy. I don’t even think we know what the long-term impacts are.”

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Janet Yellen and Delta’s C.E.O.: Day 1 of the DealBook event.

On the first day of the DealBook DC Policy Project, top policymakers and business leaders discussed the path to economic recovery, the dangers of Big Tech, the future of travel, the point of stimulus and more.


Janet Yellen: “I think we have more fiscal space than we used to.”

The Treasury secretary opened the event with a wide-ranging discussion about her priorities, including on whether the government has room to borrow even more to help bolster the economic recovery via stimulus spending.


Letitia James: “These big tech companies stifle competition, innovation, creativity.”

The New York state attorney general, spoke about several of the cases that her office is pursuing against powerful business interests. “The federal government under the previous administration was absent in a lot of areas, and particularly in the area of antitrust,” she said.


Ed Bastian: “The pent-up need and urge and desire to travel is like never before.”

The chief executive of Delta Air Lines said that travel would rebound, eventually, because “people want to experience life.” But international flights will be the last to recover, he said, as countries remain “very, very careful about letting anyone into their borders.”


Steve Ballmer: “There’s something fishy about spending $2 trillion and only getting $800 billion back.”

The former chief of Microsoft founded a nonprofit organization called USAFacts to collect and organize data about the country in an accessible way. Crunching the numbers, he questioned the efficacy of some stimulus programs and suggested other ways the money might be better spent.

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