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/…
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1. There are four parts to the Democratic Party, and only one matters right now. There are media Dems, policy Dems, donor Dems, and regular Democrats. Only the regulator Democrats matter. Who are they? They are the electeds, unions, black preachers - those who deal with voters.
2. Each has their role. Media Dems communicate the message. That's the NYT and Washington Post, MSNBC, black radio, etc. Most deny they are partisan but sure Jan and all that. They want Biden to step down.
3. Policy Dems think about governing. That's progressive think tanks, law firms, corporate lobbyists. Donor Dems think about money and access. That's everyone from billionaires in Silicon Valley to 'ladies who lunch.'
1. Let's talk economic termites, the companies you don't notice, but behind the scenes overcharge you in ways you don't see. Today we're going over CDK Global, a software company that raises the price of cars. thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-ter…
2. CDK Software is business software for auto dealers, managing service, parts and inventory, vehicle financing, accounting, payroll, insurance information, customer information, etc. 15,000 auto dealers use it nationwide. thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-co…
3. Though it's business software, the price gets added to the cost of your car. A small dealership pays $150,000 per year, mid-size dealership groups (5 to 10 stores) pays $1,500,000 or more per year, and large dealerships pays $5,000,000 per year. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
"It is perhaps immoral to repossess a prosthetic limb but it's not the state's role to prohibit a private equity fund from doing so." - former Senator Pat Toomey, probably
The spread of Walmart in the 1980s shattered Southern politics, that’s *purely* a trade and antitrust story. The civil rights movement is not why the South went to the right.
Also West Virginia was never Republican. The story of civil rights delivering the south to the right makes no sense!
The myth of modern liberalism is rooted in southerners being racist instead of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy deregulating airlines and trucking to crush labor. It’s just rich kid story time.
Obviously civil rights broke the Jim Crow machines and that put the South in play for a whole suite of new interests, and flipped a bunch of whites to the GOP. But that just made the region competitive.
Can we admit Obamacare was a disaster and Obama was a bad President yet? Or are we still pretending that Biden is the problem because he’s not cool? time.com/6279937/us-hea…
If the Rs has an alternative beyond ‘feed sick people into a woodchipper’ they would have implemented it already.