Sundar Pichai talking about how ad prices have fallen over the last ten years. Not a surprise that such the progressive policy institute 'report' data actually came from Google. #BigTechBarons
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So an insane story by @musharbash_b, a private equity roll-up of fire trucks is why more than half the fire trucks in Los Angeles were out of service during the catastrophic wildfires in the Palisades and Eaton.
I do a lot on economic termites, this one's a big deal. Cities all over the country have to pay twice as much for fire equipment as they used to because there's now what appears to be some sort of fire equipment cartel.
1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is bad because it was a way of taking the civil rights movement - which was about prohibiting economic discrimination at its core - and corrupting it to serve corporate interests. Here are some examples, starting with UnitedHealth Group.
2. Biglaw's Latham and Watkins bragged their team keeping poultry price-fixers out of jail was a historic 'all-women team' of defense lawyers.
3. Here's financier Brian Regan - who rolled up anesthesiology and radiology practices so he could price gouge - boosting the Women's Private Equity Summit. Equity is awesome!
1. Want some fun news before the Monday inauguration that you won't have heard anywhere else? The antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over. Here's just part of what they did.
2. The FTC filed a monopolization claim against agricultural machine maker John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment, a suit which Wired magazine calls a “tipping point” for the right to repair movement.
3. They also released another report on pharmacy benefit managers, including that of UnitedHealth Group, showing that these companies inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion.
There’s a nontrivial chance that Trump’s new term is the actual catastrophe that liberals imagined his first one would be. I don’t mean authoritarian, I mean economic, military and social collapse.
Here's why I think there's a nontrivial chance of a serious dislocation under Trump. It's not because of him, per se, but structural things he won't fix.
Here are a few. The U.S. net international investment position is negative $23 trillion and sinking rapidly. That's crazy.
That doesn't mean the U.S. will go 'bankrupt,' that concept can't apply to nations. It means the U.S. is trading our entire productive capacity for finance. For instance, we're now a net food importer by value. What? Our farmland is awesome. And yet...
There's something off about all of the post-election recriminations among Democrats. It's not that any of the theories are wrong, it's that none of these pontificators actually know how to make government do anything.
Like, sure, use different language if you think that matters. The bottom line is Obama said you can keep your doctor and health costs would go down and that didn't happen and most Dems don't seem remotely curious why that is.
There are a few people in Biden-world who did CHIPS stuff, there's some export control people, there are some anti-monopolists, but that's sort of it for Democrats who have actually done anything with power.
1. You learn a lot about politicians when the spotlight is not on them. So I want to offer an observation about something Kamala just did - a quiet and almost wholly unnoticed favor to big business and Mitch McConnell - suggesting she would have been a problematic President.🧵
2. In late November, after the election, the Biden White House nominated two people for something called the International Trade Commission. The ITC is the body designed to address cheating by foreign companies who dump products to destroy US producers.
3. The ITC is one of those places where free traders have run the roost for decades, crushing industry after industry by refusing to uphold anti-dumping law. It's also a place that few in D.C. care about. Domestic producers? Pffeh, who cares about steel and mattress imports?