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1. Ok, time to address this piece by Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke on the need for more bailout authority to address financial crises. It is a surprisingly interesting but hidden political argument.
2. The argument is that the banking system 'outgrew' protections against panics put in place during the Great Depression. They didn't see the crisis coming, but their response as firefighters was pretty good. Banks were bailed out, which was unfair, but America recovered.
3. It's couched in technical terms, but basically they argue, accurately, that what happened was a standard banking panic, only one that happened in the unregulated sector of the banking system which ordinary people don't have access to. But one critical to the flow of credit.
1. There's a lot of wishful lefty thinking going on right now. The young generation isn't necessarily progressive. Gillum supported fast track corporate trade authority. Pressley opposed Medicare for All. Beto supported bank deregulation.
2. The crevices where power really lives in America is in the arcane technical boring stuff about banks, trade, monopoly rules - aka big money. That's not excitable stuff right now. What someone does when you're not looking is who they are.
3. Capuano was an old white man bigot about Kaepernick. He also has a 20 year record of voting against wars and fighting bank deregulation when no one is looking. Both matter. Or do they? If you believe Capuano's record was not important then you are saying you will serve power.
1. A short thread on how ideas travel, with a case study on the problem of monopoly, now being studied by central bankers at Jackson Hole. How did this idea break into modern discourse? It started in the late 1990s, with a journalist named Barry Lynn (now my boss).
2. Lynn noticed that an earthquake in Taiwan took down a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated factories halfway across the world, toys, cars, etc. He asked, what happened? The answer is that essential components had been sole sourced in Taiwan.
3. This caused what he called an industrial supply shock, like a bank run, but in the industrial world. These are happening more and more. He wrote a book on this in the early 2000s called End of the Line. amazon.com/End-Line-Comin…
coffee ($5) or help for the 
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1. Ok, I'm going to talk about an under the radar fight over wealth, power and the law. It's going on at the most important Federal agency no one cares about, the Federal Trade Commission. And there's even something you can do about it.
2. The FTC is charged with policing America's markets. It has massive power over mergers, monopoly, and unfair trade practices. It won't surprise you that for forty years, because of law and economics "scholars" like @ProfWrightGMU, it has enabled fraud instead of stopping it.
3. There are five FTC Commissioners (3 Rs and 2 Ds), and it's a pretty consensus driven agency. Dissents are somewhat rare. But last week, @chopraftc, a new commissioner, dissented on a small consumer protection case over a company called Speedway Motorsports.
This cycle Democratic voters are electing mostly centrists with a smattering of leftists. What matters far more than these labels, which are basically about how much to spend on social welfare, is whether people broadly are seeing the threat of corporate concentration.
Just by watching hearings in Congress, it isn't really the left interested in the details of corporate power. There are some progressives who are there, but it's mostly the GOP, random centrists, and a few progressives who are trying to figure out how to structure commerce.
Small pharmacists have a lot of GOP support. Uber-centrist @MarkWarner has the boldest and most interesting views on Facebook/Google/Amazon. @RoKhanna and @SenWarren are doing important work on defense contract monopolies. And @SenWarren worked w/the GOP on hearing aid cartels.
Russia is a dangerous and hostile power that meddled in the U.S. election. It's worth remembering that Russian lifespans dropped radically after Larry Summers and Bill Clinton's neoliberal boys went over to help the USSR transition to capitalism. Russia is mad at us for a reason.
The Chinese however have no reason for hostility to the U.S., which has historically been a good friend. China's increasing dangerous posture is purely a result of Wall Street's recklessness, bad policy from Clinton to Obama (and now Trump), and its own autocratic government.
Trump's power is based an exploitation of our own unwillingness to fix the flaws of the international trading and security system. Germany doesn't pay its fair share for NATO, it is deeply protectionist, and so forth. "Tear it all down" is bad, but the status quo is also bad.
Everyone in the Midwest just loves student debt and shitty health care monopolies. Last time I was in Des Moines people would not stop praising the price of pharmaceuticals.
One of the reasons @Ocasio2018 did well is because Obamacare obviously didn't work for the majority. In 2009, 7% of large employers offered high-deductible health care insurance. Today it's 39%. Insured people are losing their health care and the Democrats didn't notice! 
There's no real mystery with why people are turning to different candidates. It isn't some grand youthquake, it's that the Democrats haven't been relevant to anything for years. Obama promised lots in 2009, but did a terrible job. This wasn't hard to see. washingtonpost.com/posteverything…
1. Since I'm the liberal that Democratic socialists both love and hate, let me do some history on the origin of modern Democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is in many ways actually just old school Democratic populism.
2. I understand why young people dislike liberalism and Democrats. There's been a total failure of leadership among liberals and Democrats for decades. Why would anyone want to follow liberals or Democrats? I certainly don't. Most Americans don't.
3. Modern liberals and Democrats fell into an intellectual trap in the 1960s. They began to stop seeing concentrated financial power as a political threat, or even as political. Banks and monopolies became like the weather. Maybe a problem, but not a political problem.
I'm going to show you just who @Ocasio2018, Justice Democrats, and DSA beat tonight. it isn't @JoeCrowleyNY. It's the most powerful people in America. Here are Crowley donors Sheryl Sandberg, Sean Parker, Google NET Pac, and Facebook's PAC.
Crowley donors who lost tonight: Facebook, Google, Blackrock, Humana, Raytheon, Capitol One, AFLAC, Microsoft, CIGNA, TD Bank, H&R Block, Salesforce dot com, United Technology, Deloitte, Covington and Burling, Anheuser-Busch, Honeywell...
Crowley donors who lost tonight, part II: Intel, American Bankers Association, Citigroup, UPS, T-Mobile, Altria (Phillip Morris), ERNST & YOUNG, Florida Sugar Cane, Boeing, Constellation Brands, Altice, The Options Clearinghouse, Diageo, Cisco Systems...
1. Destroying vulnerable families is a specialty of the Trump administration. I will point out that @AjitPaiFCC at the FCC made a below-the-radar policy to do this to the families of prisoners.
2. One of the more evil policies in America is to fund prisons by withholding contact between prisoners and the families of prisoners unless those families can come up with a bunch of cash. This is how a lot of prison services work, including phone calls.
3. Prison phone services are not delivered by companies like AT&T or Verizon, but specialty contractors. These contractors offer to pay prisons for the right to offer phone services to prisoners at insanely inflated prices. It's a bidding war for the right to gouge the poor.
Why is single payer gaining steam? The last time Dems debated health care in a primary was in 2008. Then, the avg cost of health care for a family of four was $15,600. Right now it's over $28k. By 2019 it'll be $30k. This is no longer a leftie thing, and it's not about access.
Even the rich are getting mad. Like they go to a hospital and are like "I have to pay $6999 for an Advil?!?" Or their doctor goes concierge. This is not a poor sad tragedy problem for those without coverage. It's hitting people WITH insurance.
At this point, the political problem is increasingly health care experts defending their choice to implement the ACA to help 10% of the population instead of addressing the 85% of the population whose health care is rapidly deteriorating. Must not admit error! @JonWalkerDC
I guess I should explain why my fear of the Chinese Communist Party is not rooted in nationalism, and is actually a critique of US and Western policy for the last 20 years. Take this remarkable story. wsj.com/articles/how-c…
The CCP has improved the lives of the country, bringing hundreds of millions of out poverty. It did this by accepting the deal that Clinton and Bush cut, which was to move our industrial and tech base to China. Clinton and Bush were influenced by libertarians like Larry Summers.
This has been great for Wall Street but bad for the American middle class: lower wages, devastated rural communities, and an opioid epidemic. These are especially heightened problems in areas subjected to 'the China shock'. There used to be a lot of manufacturing in rural areas.
The allegation here vis-a-vis Facebook is explosive. I don't know if it's true.
The argument is that Mark Zuckerberg was using his control of data and violating the 2011 consent order to ensure that Facebook could transition its desktop social networking monopoly to mobile. That's why Cambridge Analytica happened.
It's hard to remember now since everyone assumes Facebook was a rocket ship from the beginning. But there was a real moment of utter panic from 2011-2013 as the mobile space took off. Was Facebook for real? Or was it another MySpace?
1. There's a political realignment going on, and it's not right-left. It's tech platforms versus everyone else. Let's start with Jim Cramer talking about all the CEOs freaking out about Amazon.
2. And then marketing guru Scott Galloway at the Digital Media Summit getting *a standing ovation* for calling for the break-up of big tech.
3. Now we'll go to @Yelp's forum on the 20th anniversary of the Microsoft case. Antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter discusses all the CEOs who can't understand why antitrust law is so weak against the platforms. c-span.org/video/?445473-…
1. I mentioned this last night, but this memo by new FTC Commissioner @chopraftc is really worth reading. It is a bad-ass and extremely important statement on corporate crime and has significant implications for Facebook. propublica.org/article/rohit-…
2. First, some context. This memo is about recidivism, or committing a crime again once you've been caught. In 2011, Facebook was caught in 2011 engaging in "unfair and deceptive" practices, and the FTC stated the company "violated federal law." Today's scandal is a repeat crime.
3. "FTC orders are not suggestions." <--- That's how law enforcer Chopra says it. And he footnotes that showing that the cost can be $41,484 per violation. Facebook has 87 million violations in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is a company killer.
Can we stop with the whole 'wage stagnation is a mystery' thing, economists? It's not. Simcha Barkai found that there's a simple cause: Corporation concentration --> $14k per worker per year. vice.com/en_us/article/…
He looked at concentration levels since the 1980s and found that it isn't just wages going down, it's also capital share going down even more. So less in wages, even more cuts in... robots! All going to profits. And this is worse in concentrated sectors. vice.com/en_us/article/…
And this is tied to trade. It turns out that the 'China shock' was worse in more concentrated labor markets. Think about it - Walmart organized the China shock. nber.org/papers/w24307
[warning: boring thread ahead]
1. Just reading a useful paper by @CompetitionProf on competition among big tech platforms, which he calls 'moligopolistic competition'. Moligopoly as a word is a combination of monopoly and oligopoly. These firms are both. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
1. Just reading a useful paper by @CompetitionProf on competition among big tech platforms, which he calls 'moligopolistic competition'. Moligopoly as a word is a combination of monopoly and oligopoly. These firms are both. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
2. His argument is that the economy straddling firms, FB, Google, Amazon, Msft, Apple, are not traditional monopolies. They have a core market with monopolistic positioning, but they also compete across many other markets. And they seek to disrupt their core market.
3. Tech monopolies compete, not always against actual competitors, but against what he calls ‘non-consumption’. This is what Zuckerberg's notes meant about FB not being a monopoly, as consumers have a lot of other things to do with their time (like sleep).
I both agree with @ddayen and am seeing a lot of reason for optimism long-term. This testimony was frustrating but it's because we are exercising muscles long-unused. Of course it's tentative and halting.
2. We have not truly thought about the relationship between corporate concentration and democracy since the early 1980s. We have been in thrall to economists and technocrats. This Facebook hearing, while frustrating, was different. Senators were trying to figure this stuff out.
3. Did Senators figure out what to do about Facebook? No. But did they talk about deregulation and the free market and expanding opportunity skill-building and other bullshit? No. They were like what the fuck is this Facebook problem and what do we do about it. That's good.
Facebook *wants* privacy regulations to entrench its monopoly power. This is why the company is orienting towards discussing privacy and protecting your data. Zuckerberg does not want to talk monopoly. Follow. The. Money.
In response to the scandal, Zuckerberg is going to hand over regulatory power on the use of data for academic research to, and I'm not making this up, the Charles Koch Foundation.
Facebook's data about the public is data to which the public has rights. A cartel of Facebook and large foundations over that data is... not good.
This is straight-up deception from a former Googler. Facebook and Google are both constantly mired in privacy scandals, and both companies have the same business model vis-a-vis data. The only difference is Facebook is in the headlines right now.
Remember when Fitbit accidentally revealed sensitive military information? It's because Fitbit uses Google's Android mobile operating system, and Google forced users to accept location tracking. washingtonpost.com/world/a-map-sh…
No privacy scandals for Google? 2012 FTC press release headline: "Google Will Pay $22.5 Million to Settle FTC Charges it Misrepresented Privacy Assurances to Users of Apple's Safari Internet Browser"
ftc.gov/news-events/pr…
ftc.gov/news-events/pr…
Democrats are bitterly split over a key policy question, which is whether to break the power of the tech monopolists. washingtonpost.com/powerpost/emer…
LA Mayor and possible Presidential candidate Eric Garcetti, asked about concentration in tech: "I don't fear it and I don't oppose it. I want to try to help guide it."
Schumer: “Facebook is a very powerful force,” he said. “I think, overall, it’s been a very positive force and now people are taking advantage of the openness of the net. And Facebook has an obligation to try and deal with it.”
"The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy." - venture capitalist @paulg in Jan, 2016 paulgraham.com/ineq.html
Fascinating how Silicon Valley vc @paulg has a pretty straightforward Marxist interpretation of the mid-20th century. He just thinks monopoly finance, not utopian socialism, is the end state of history.
Another business Marxist is @benthompson. Here he is noting an inevitabilist view of historical evolution, with Amazon Go-style automation with no need for labor being the end state. Strategy is so often just another word for anti-competitive tactics and monopoly planning.
As I've been noting, Facebook wants to frame the problem as a consumer privacy problem. It is not. It is about market power, about Facebook's use of data to monopolize the ad market, manipulate your attention, and dominate publishers.
Mark Zuckerberg pays off a bunch of newspapers with an apology note promising to protect (aka monopolize) your data. Nowhere does he talk about ending his multi-million lobbying and political efforts to block new privacy laws.
“You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time.” <--- We also may have heard about a genocide app you helped build in Myanmar.
1. #DeleteFacebook is well-meaning, and it is good to start with boycotts. But saying 'glad I never used Facebook' or 'I don't use Facebook' is missing the point. This is not a scandal of privacy. It is not a consumer rights issue, aka Facebook users having their data misused.
2. The Facebook scandal is an issue of *market power* overwhelming producers, NOT consumers. It is Facebook's use of data to dominate publishers, artists and ad buyers that is the key problem. All tech companies do not do this. Only Facebook and Google are this dominant.
3. The amount of data that many companies and entities know about you is significant. That is not the issue with regards to Facebook. Zuckerberg isn't interested in knowing whether you're cheating on your spouse. He is interested in dominating the New York Times with your data.