In his famous book The Big Short, Michael Lewis writes that “when, in 1981, [John Gutfreund] turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation?.?.?.?from that moment, the Wall Street firm became a black box”. Though Lewis was writing about banking, he was referring to a problem that existed not just at Salomon, or even just within the financial sector, but in nearly all American corporations, even public ones. In all too many areas, with the exception of basic financial information, corporations remain black boxes.

Opacity makes it difficult for regulators, investors, workers and customers to figure out important facts, from the full financial risk positions of big companies (a 2018 IMF paper notes that off balance sheet funding had grown since 2007), to whether they live up to their espoused values, to if they treat individual employees fairly.

As the economist Milton Friedman said back in 1970, the social responsibility of managers is to “make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom”. Fair enough. But what if companies don’t even release enough data to let people know whether they are living up to law or custom?