Thread by @matthewstoller

Glad that @Austan_Goolsbee has noticed that market power and corporate monopolization is dangerous, and that the CARES Act radically contributed to the problem. nytimes.com/2020/09/30/bus…

Why are big companies swallowing the world? It's a *political story.* I published this in 2016 and it still holds up. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

I will say, I find the idea that we never resorted to aggressive competition policy during national crises, as @DanielDancrane asserts and @Austan_Goolsbee repeats, is not really true.

There's the obvious error, which is that the heyday of antitrust under Robert Jackson and then Thurman Arnold in 1937-1940 started during the vicious downturn known as the "Roosevelt Recession." And FDR was full on antitrust mode during that recession.

There's also the sneaky rhetoric. For instance, @DanielDancrane conflates antitrust - which declined in the early 1930s - with competition policy, which did not. Congress, for instance, responded to the Great Depression by, oh, BREAKING UP THE BANKS. Glass-Steagall...

In 1907, the year of a great panic, well, it's true TR didn't use antitrust law. BUT that's partially because the gov't was breaking up all major coal-carrying railroads using the Hepburn Act's commodities clause disallowing a railroad platform from owning commodities it shipped.

There's the AT&T suit breaking apart the telephone giant. That suit ended in 1982. It started in 1974, during a recession so big it was known as the "Crisis of the West." Throughout that time IBM was under antitrust assai;t. Nixon said he wanted credit for going after business.

Plus of course there was the Air Mail Act of 1934, which broke apart Boeing (splitting off United Airlines and United Technologies from Boeing). And the Alcoa suit started in 1937. And the Bank Holding Company Act Amendments of 1970 spurred by a financial panic.

The key rhetorical trick in this fake narrative is using abstract actors. Financial crises and downturns "ushered in" consolidations or whatever.

No, the recession of the 2000s didn't cause telecom consolidation. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did with the Telecom Act of 1996.

And no, @Austan_Goolsbee, this is wrong "The financial crisis of a decade or so ago commenced a wave of consolidation in the banking sector."

No, Obama (your ex-boss) created a wave of consolidation in with *policy*. We tried to break up the banks, you were doing the opposite.

“If enacted, Brown-Kaufman would have broken up the six biggest banks in America,” says the senior Treasury official. “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.” nymag.com/news/politics/…

The narrative of inevitabilism isn't just wrong, it's a specific political attack designed to strip agency from the public, and to excuse the elites who concentrated wealth and power. We have to start being honest and start owning what policymakers chose to do, or not do.

And in another one of those 'inevitable' except not really inevitable policy choices, the Federal Reserve just approved the merger of Etrade and Morgan Stanley. Concentration doesn't just happen. Policymakers choose to make it happen. economicliberties.us/press-release/…