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The claim is that he didn't declare $200M in income and hid it in off-shore accounts over a decade. Sounds like a large amount of money and a substantial time period.

Notice that his charitable giving began after he was aware the IRS was after him. There is evidence he committed criminal tax fraud, giving the money back or giving the money to charity doesn't ameliorate that. To make an analogy, suppose you robbed a bank and were about to get caught. If you gave back the money, and made some donations to charity, would that absolve you of criminal liability? This seems like an accurate analogy to me, with the "bank" being the US taxpayer in this case.

Here's another article that highlights how he became a major, high profile philanthropist only after it became clear the feds were on his case:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/09/smith-bro...

The charitable giving seems to clearly be part of an aggressive, multi-pronged, and ultimately successful strategy to avoid prosecution.

This is not evidence "the system is working", this is evidence that you can buy your way out of trouble.

That DB/rentech basket option is a tax avoidance scheme. It has nothing to do options pricing and concepts like delta, gamma, etc.

Well, we can agree to disagree, but I think there are many reasonable arguments against this deal that have nothing to do with the RWDSU and everything to do with a lack of transparency and special treatment for a large powerful corporation.

Wouldn't it be better to have a competitive process with multiple bidders to redevelop LIC? Let's see what the market clearing price would be. I'd bet it would not involve subsidies.

$500M is literally a check to Bezos.

And it is a backroom deal in that there was no competitive process to redevelop LIC, which would allow other companies and developers to compete with Amazon, as well as no input from city residents and those affected. The NDA is for Amazon's benefit and was clearly done at Amazon's behest.

1) $500M of the deal is cash. That can be spent on other things. Many other companies are investing large sums in NYC without cash or tax incentives. Why give amazon special treatment?

2) It was a back room deal in the sense that it was negotiated in private without input from stakeholders such as city residents.

With respect to your math, the goal of government is not to maximize tax revenue, but to provide benefits for residents. Moreover, even if it was, the proper comparison is to alternative development plans and not to zero. If the goal is to redevelop LIC, why not have a competitive bidding process to redevelop that area? Many companies and developers would be interested and would bid against each other. When you negotiate with one party in secret you lose all your leverage.

I don't understand why any deal is necessary. Google, Facebook, etc. all seem to be doing fine in NYC without special treatment.

This is not about being against Amazon or tech, it is about being again crony capitalism.

--NYC Resident

NYC resident here. If Amazon wants to come to NYC, great, but why do they need corporate welfare including $500M in cash? We do not need them here, and they should pay full freight like everyone else (including Google, which is buying whole city blocks without second thought and with no handouts). This is a terrible back room deal and crony capitalism.

Well the direct mechanism in this case is hedge funds paying "placement agents" which fund the corruption, so they do have responsibility, even if they are not solely responsible.

Seems like Google has gone a ways from "don't be evil" to applying AI to tracking and targeting drones.

I'm an author of the underlying paper:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3025604

This article is very misleading in several ways:

(1) we do not work for the Finnish Central Bank in any way nor does the content of the paper reflect any views of the Finnish Central Bank (so far as I'm aware), the paper was merely included in their working paper series

(2) the main content of the paper is to contrast the economic model of bitcoin that of a monopolist service provider, from the abstract:

"A simplified economic model that captures the system's properties answers these questions. Transaction fees and infrastructure level are determined in an equilibrium of a congestion queueing game derived from the system's limited throughput. The system eliminates dead-weight loss from monopoly, but introduces other inefficiencies and requires congestion to raise revenue and fund infrastructure. We explore the future potential of such systems and provide design suggestions."

He made fake edits that were against the terms of service. Why should Google tolerate that?

There is a lot of empirical evidence supporting the fact that the rich "own" government, or, more precisely, that politicians vote in ways that are more correlated with beliefs of high income voters than other voters, and that politicians are responsive to contributions. See, for example, the references herein:

http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/6348

Stiglitz is a serious economist and a Nobel laureate, there is data behind what he says, but bear in mind that he's writing this for Vanity Fair and not the American Economic Review.