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Matt Stoller Profile picture
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Jan 16,, 5 tweets, 1 min read
I was freaking out about COVID in Jan/Feb of 2020, before most people noticed. Back then Vox was saying it was the flu and Fauci was telling young people to go on cruise ships. Don’t act like the risk calculus of the public health bureaucracy is well-tuned to reality.
Back then among the left’s biggest concerns was whether people were patronizing Chinese restaurants. Our whole intellectual model for governance is embarrassing.
I wrote in Wired in late Feb of 2020 we would be experiencing shortages. Our risk calculus and governance models do not map to reality. wired.com/story/covid-19…
The Trump administration didn’t take COVID seriously until the stock market freaked out, and then a bunch of the Rs engaged in insider trading. The right’s governance model is also a complete joke.
The point isn't that Covid was worse than the public health bureaucrats thought, it's that their goal is to protect their little club. Covid is no longer an emergency, but the public health bureaucrats have flipped to the insane control freak side without restoring credibility.

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More from @matthewstoller

Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 18,
Lina Khan is talking about reviewing merger policy for the FTC and asking for public comments. Such public comments will be, in her words, "critical." Image
Khan saying that the current merger wave "threatens to concentrate markets further." See our report on the merger frenzy. economicliberties.us/our-work/merge…
Khan says that while the merger wave has "delivered benefits for investment banks," it has not delivered benefits for ordinary Americans.

Antitrust mic drop
Read 13 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 18,
My initial thinking is that this is sort of an attempt to do to gaming what vertical integration did to Hollywood.
Some initial thoughts. The Microsoft-Activision acquisition is clear evidence of consolidation in gaming. It's not just that Microsoft already owns 30 studios, it's that Activision itself is a roll-up of 25+ gaming studios. A merger of mergers.
There are reasons to think Microsoft will run Activision better than its existing leadership, which is terrible. But the clear goal here is to build out its streaming service Game Pass, and more broadly to achieve market power in the ecosystem of gaming.
Read 8 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 18,
This paper is incredibly dishonest. The main program was the Fed's bailout of the stock market, but somehow @davidautor de facto deny that the Federal Reserve bailout even existed. Just utterly shameful.
What a shocker that a bunch of Federal Reserve economists don't evaluate the Federal Reserve's massive bailout of billionaires.
The Paycheck Protection Program was quite successful at saving small businesses, and small businesses make a lot of products and services we need, and anchor communities. For some reason economists don't see any value in production or community.
Read 5 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 17,
1. I know everything is supposed to be totally awful in politics, but allow me to interrupt constant doom and gloom with... good news. On the monopoly front, corporate power is, ever so slightly, ebbing. Here are eight examples from the last week. mattstoller.substack.com/p/hope-on-the-…
2. Government antitrust cases are progressing. The Federal Trade Commission won an important procedural victory against Facebook this week. marketplace.org/shows/marketpl…
3. Meanwhile, state attorneys general, whose antitrust case was dismissed last year, appealed the dismissal. Normally they would have given up, but increasing heat on Facebook gave confidence to state level enforcers.
Read 17 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 16,
So a different way to characterize what Google was doing to publishers is 'stealing.' Sorry to get all technical about it. wsj.com/articles/googl…
"Google pocketed the difference between what it told publishers and advertisers that an ad cost and used the pool of money to manipulate future auctions to expand its digital monopoly.”

Or, you know, stealing.
"The documents cite internal correspondence in which Google employees said some of these practices amounted to growing its business through “insider information."

So, then like, that's stealing.
Read 5 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
Jan 15,
Biden is flailing because the political emergency of the pandemic is over but the professional managerial class won't let him govern according to what voters actually want.
Hospitals and health care systems are under pressure because we let financiers strip mine them for parts. Little to do with Covid. Biden could fix this but he'd have to acknowledge it.
The stress on hospitals is coming from Wall Street.
Read 5 tweets

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