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Matt Stoller Profile picture
Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
Researcher at https://t.co/2sa8IVbyFk Publisher of BIG: https://t.co/8QDW3bGtIv Co-host of Organized Money: https://t.co/nyRbG31qns
67 subscribers
Jun 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Obama was a malevolent leader and as a person is a mean spirited greedy narcissist. The authoritarian turn we are experiencing now is directly his doing, though not solely his doing.

So is our gruesomely dishonest conversation on race and identity. I worked on the financial crisis and I remember hearing from people in the White House mockery of the ‘deadbeats’ who couldn’t pay their mortgages. It’s hard to convey the meanness of the Obama insiders.
Jun 3 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
1. Since Yglesias won't address the argument @musharbash_b made about housing, I will. His argument is that Texas, which Abundance authors @DKThomp and @ezraklein point to as a model, has the same housing cost inflation they ascribe to blue areas. Why? thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with… x.com/mattyglesias/s… 2. It's corporate power among homebuilders. Don't just take @musharbash_b word for it, it's a well-known story. Here's a shockingly good CNBC report on how big homebuilders withhold housing supply.
Apr 14 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Mark Zuckerberg is on the stand, the FTC lawyer is grilling him on documents showing the point of the service is to connect to friends. This is about market definition. #ftcvmeta FTC asks if Meta is still built on a 'social graph,' Zuckerberg says he's not sure what that means but that it's a 'core concept' of Facebook.

"The friend part has gone down quite a bit."

He wants the judge to see TikTok as a rival.
Feb 20 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The basic problem with America is that nearly all of our major institutions are led by vastly overpaid incompetent greedheads who all have agreed to not snitch on each other. It's easy to explain how to fix it once you get this basic diagnosis. Here are a few ideas. 1) Corporate boards are full of lazy kiss-assers who get $100k to show up to a meeting a few times a year. So how about this? No board members of a company can get paid while there's a strike going on at their company.
Jan 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Deepseek is forcing the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem to recognize that Lina Khan was right, even if they won’t admit it. Here’s the point. ftc.gov/system/files/f…
Jan 25 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image Link: thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-privat…
Jan 23 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
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. Image 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. Image
Jan 17 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
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. Image 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. Image
Jan 6 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
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. Image
Dec 28, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Dec 18, 2024 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
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.

whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
Nov 28, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1. This is a useful response in terms of how to understand the Abundance theory of politics. Yglesias is making a *policy* argument about private equity. It's not bad! It depends! We have to be nuanced! Ok, that's true. So what's the problem? 2. People increasingly hear 'private equity' and associate it with pillaging. It's not always true; KKR has done a great job with Simon & Schuster. But it's often true. So demonizing private equity is like demonizing Wall Street - it's a symbol of a society with haves/have nots.
Nov 27, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
1. There's a fascinating dynamic among Trumpy venture capitalists trying to manipulate the right-wing for their own purposes. For example, here's vc Marc Andreesen saying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau forces conservatives to lose their bank accounts. 2. Andreesen says the CFPB 'terrorizes' financial institutions and denies them access to the banking system, and says it is going after conservatives. But is that true? Well, as @dorajfacundo points out, the CFPB is doing the opposite.
Nov 22, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Trump is a lot like Obama. He is about to destroy the Republican Party as badly as Obama destroyed the Democrats, and for the same reason. He's promised a realignment for the people, he's going to deliver a realignment for Wall Street. Trump is also a godsend for Democrats the way Obama was for the Rs. In 2024, the Democrats are a spent force, dominated by horrible Obama retreads. By 2028 MSNBC will be gone and a wave of populists will have redefined the Dems as a renewed faction.
Nov 20, 2024 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
1. Identity politics is bad because it's fundamentally a con, a way of ensuring plutocrats control our society. It's the inversion of 'rights' to support authoritarian corporate power. Here are some examples.

*Stopping offshoring is racist.* 2. Regulating trillion dollar social media and search monopolists to protect children from addiction is actually an attack on gay people. wsj.com/politics/polic…Image
Nov 19, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
1. Since the new line on why antitrust is bad is the Spirit Airlines bankruptcy, let's talk about what is really happening. Here's a hint. The CEO of Spirit was paid a $3.8 million bonus the week before the bankruptcy. But you don't hear about that. wlrn.org/business/2024-… 2. What's really going on isn't a bad enforcement regime, it's a bunch of greedy incompetent airline executives blaming the government for not letting them violate the law for money. Let's start at the beginning.
npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-…
Nov 17, 2024 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
I dislike the nonprofit industrial complex because the feedback loop has fundamentally distorted both parties. Paul Sabin's history here is very good. But let's be clear, the legacy is Hillary Clinton and a bank-dominated society.
history.yale.edu/publications/p… The nonprofit industrial complex is a Ralph Nader created world on top of which built most boomer politics. Example, Hillary Clinton got her start at the Children's Defense Fund. But the whole right-wing built their apparatus on top of it in the 1980s.
Oct 25, 2024 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
1. Let's talk about Jeff Bezos's manipulation of the Washington Post for political purposes to help Trump and what this choice is causing Democrats to realize. For a long time, there's been a debate over the merits of big business and billionaires. 2. Writers like Matt Yglesias and @EricLevitz see Amazon as generally good. Here's Yglesias: "Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” slate.com/business/2013/…
Oct 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's not just a white young male problem, it's a young male problem, period. Part of the answer is progressive elites dramatically overvalue civility and order, and thus disdain much of the cultural stuff that young guys enjoy. I once attended a Young Dems conference, and there was an hour when all the different caucuses met. Disability caucus, black caucus, women's caucus, LGBT caucus, et al.

What was left were a group of straight white guys just standing around, awkwardly. What kind of shit is that?
Aug 27, 2024 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
1. Since 2008, Google has systemically destroyed evidence relevant to antitrust investigations. And judges are beginning to hold Google accountable. Today I was a courtroom to watch Judge Leonie Brinkema, the latest judge, who is presiding over Google's third antitrust trial. Image 2. Why so many trials? Well Google has many lines of business! One trial was on its control of app stores. Another trial was about search. This one's on its power over online ad software that manages publishing sites and ad buying. All involve Google's document destruction.
Aug 23, 2024 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
"Our tool ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”

BOOM. That's illegal, and antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter just dropped the hammer. "In its pitch to prospective clients, RealPage describes AIRM’s and YieldStar’s access to competitors’ granular, transactional data as a meaningful tool that it claims enables landlords to outperform their properties’ competitors by 2–7%."

Interesting.