Donald Trump this week gave one of the most bizarre press conferences that Washington, or New York, has ever seen. It was not just because of the extraordinary allegations about Russian espionage, nor because the US president-elect attacked CNN as a purveyor of “ fake news”. The other factor that made Wednesday’s events peculiar is what Mr Trump is (or is not) doing with his corporate interests.
Instead of selling his stake in the Trump businesses when he enters the White House, or putting them into a blind trust, he merely plans to hand control to his family and refrain from foreign deals.
That falls lamentably short of what former presidents have done, or what is considered acceptable by Walter Shaub, head of the US Office of Government Ethics.
Mr Trump’s plan fails on another count, too: it does not provide much transparency for his dealings.
This opacity extends to his team. Cabinet members will be required to disclose their financial interests to Congress. But advisers who do not need to be confirmed by the Senate - such as Jared Kushner, the president-elect’s son-in-law - face few disclosure requirements.
And even when government officials do disclose their interests, this tends to occur in the form of long, baffling documents. If a voter wants to know, for example, the degree to which Mr Trump’s top team does, or does not, have business ties with Russia, they will struggle to find this in any clear format.
Is there a remedy? One obvious step would be for Mr Trump to do what previous presidents have done and make a proper divestment. But there is another, less obvious, idea worth discussing: why not inject more transparency into the whole process by copying an experiment that has just taken place next door to the White House, at the Office of Financial Research?
The OFR is not widely known. No surprise there: it was created only after the 2008 financial crisis, when a clause was slipped into the Dodd-Frank reform bill that required the US government to create an independent financial monitoring unit. And the work the OFR does - collating data on global capital flows, banks and markets - will strike ordinary mortals as mind-numbingly geeky and thus easy to ignore.
But if you visit the OFR website today, you can find a veritable treasure trove of information. There are easy-to-read charts outlining the biggest global finance risks. There are research papers discussing the dangers of bank contagion, Chinese finance or the systemic problems created by exchange traded funds. Or, if you prefer, click on the section on money market funds and look at how the funds held by BlackRock or JPMorgan, say, fit into the wider market.
Much of the time, the OFR is simply collating existing data and making it easy to understand. But nobody should underestimate how radical this work is. A decade ago it was almost impossible for ordinary mortals to join up the dots of finance because the system was so opaque and fragmented. Now it can be partly done with a few clicks of a mouse.
Will this experiment spread? It is unclear. Some Republicans dislike the OFR since they feel it imposes onerous reporting requirements on banks, and Mr Trump has threatened to undo the Dodd-Frank reforms. But it is not clear whether the president-elect really will reverse financial reform. For one thing, the big Wall Street banks do not seem keen since they have invested heavily to create systems that comply with the new laws. This suggests Mr Trump may limit himself to a few token rollbacks.
But as the debate rumbles on, what is clear is that it would be a gross mistake to defang the OFR, particularly since it costs only about $99m a year. What the Trump team should do instead is hunt for other innovative ways to use big data to make government more transparent.
That is why the question of corporate and financial exposure among the president-elect’s top team might offer an interesting battleground. Nobody can remove their corporate pasts - this cabinet is loaded with C-suite experience. But what somebody should do is insist on collating all the data on past and present corporate and financial interests and present them in a user-friendly manner that voters, politicians (or Mr Trump himself) could easily peruse.
This would not, in itself, remove the conflicts around Mr Trump; that can be done only by the president-elect himself. But the main point is this: against the odds, Wall Street has managed to become more transparent in the past decade. Now Washington should follow suit. And if Mr Trump fails to act, then Congress should.
