Right now, Instacart is quietly running experiments on millions of us while we shop for groceries online. They are trying to figure out exactly how much they can get away with charging you for breakfast cereal, lunch meat, pasta, and everything in between. How do I know? 1/9 The @Groundwork team, @KatieJWells, and I teamed up with @ConsumerReports & @MorePerfectUS to recruit more than 400 secret shoppers. We asked them to buy the exact same basket of groceries, from the exact same store, at the exact same time. You won’t believe what we found. 2/9

I'm headed to the @NatlEconClub later to hear @POTUS give a speech about the progress we've made on the economy. He deserves a lot of credit for this but especially for NEVER entertaining the dangerous position that you had to torch the labor market to bring down prices. 🧵1/8 This wasn't easy--the critics were loud, self-assured, condescending, and everywhere. It was academic economists, wonks, and Wall Street analyst types like @AB_insights who said that "It is going to take a meaningful weakening of the labor market to bring inflation to heel." 2/8

🧵Ok I'm someone who has followed the @RealPage price fixing conspiracy in the rental market closely, but this weekend I read the full @TheJusticeDept complaint and my jaw hit the floor. This was flagrant, far reaching and deliberate. Let's dig in. 1/7 justice.gov/opa/pr/justice… First, this wasn't just a computer program spitting out high prices (though it def does that too!), the human scale is tremendous and includes a) in person "user groups" between competitors (giant corporate landlords) to swap info and hear lectures on how to "push up pricing" 2/7

🧵Price gouging, price fixing, & plain old profiteering are rampant in the food and grocery sector. @VP is exactly right to focus on this in her first 100 days. There are too many examples for one thread but let's hit some of the worse offenders. 1/8 nytimes.com/2024/08/14/bus… There are only 4 big meatpackers in this country and boy do they play dirty. One of them, JBS, is run by two brothers that did a stint in prison for bribery. Their price fixing is costing you at the checkout line but they are worth billions. 2/8 startribune.com/brazilian-brot…

Today the @linakhanFTC & @FTC launched an inquiry into personalized pricing, the latest frontier in price gouging. A personalized price might sound nice, but it is actually a 3-part corporate strategy to spy on you, isolate you, & overcharge you. A 🧵1/6 ftc.gov/news-events/ne… 1. Personalized pricing starts by spying on you, which is why @ZephyrTeachout is right to call it surveillance pricing. In order to figure out how much money they can take from your wallet, companies first need to take a peek inside. Is it pay day? Great, you are flush! 2/6

This @SenWarren speech at @equitablegrowth is fire! People will look back on this speech as the moment the Democrats finally got serious about not getting rolled by corporate America in a tax fight. She’s laying down a marker for 2025: there won’t be Dem votes for a bad deal. 1/ Says Democrats have been weak-kneed on taxes for decades and our “nation has paid dearly for this decades long gold rush of tax cuts.” Blaming the decline in revenue for why America doesn’t have safety net and investments peer countries have. Calls status quo a “doom loop.” 2/

Why isn't Congress delivering solutions that help families & workers? Because policymakers write bills to satisfy the scorekeepers, not their constituents.

I close out this month's @TheProspect issue with a personal story & some solutions. A thread 1/11

prospect.org/economy/2023-0… My first brush with the power of the scorekeepers came before I even stepped foot on Capitol Hill. One of the skills tests I took to get a job in Congress made it plain: to be an effective legislative staffer, you must be able to clear the primary gatekeepers at CBO and JCT. 2/11

Drop everything you’re doing and watch this clip of @jonstewart taking Larry Summers to the cleaners on his cruel inflation cure: obliterating a labor market that is finally starting to work for workers. Three thoughts on what Larry gets so wrong. 1/4

https://twitter.com/TheProblem/status/1636668703692697605

1. Larry says he's happy to see workers finally have power to command higher wages & walk away from poorly paying jobs. But Jon does a TERRIFIC job of explaining why Larry's preferred inflation fighting strategy, interest rate hikes, works in direct opposition to that goal. 2/4

If you noticed that corporations' costs are down & they are *still* jacking up their prices for consumers... it's not just you. We've got the receipts. And their secret plans may enrage you. Read my new op-ed ⬇.

And here's a 🧵 1/12
bostonglobe.com/2022/10/26/opi… Remember the claim that corps had to raise prices because their costs had gotten so high? We were curious to see if they'd drop prices now that costs on everything from energy to lumber have fallen. Listening in to their earnings calls I can tell you the answer: Not at all. 2/12

🧵Want to know why rents have been skyrocketing? This jaw dropping @propublica investigation has one answer--collusion. @RealPage's YieldStar proprietary software is helping the nation's biggest landlords and property managers jack up prices together. 1/10 propublica.org/article/yields… "Experts say RealPage...invites scrutiny from antitrust enforcers bc of their use of private data on what competitors charge in rent and creation of work groups that meet privately and include landlords who are otherwise rivals, a red flag of potential collusion." 2/10

This morning @politico dropped a piece giving Larry Summers credit for the major tax legislation in the Inflation Reduction Act. One problem—Larry didn’t propose them, Elizabeth Warren did. A thread with the fact check. 1/5 politico.com/amp/news/2022/… Here is @mattyglesias covering Warren’s Real Corporate Profits Tax in 2019. After she proposed it, she landed a spot on the Senate Finance Committee & recruited Wyden & moderate Angus King to the effort. Then she got Manchin & Sinema to support. 2/5 vox.com/2019/4/11/1830…

"Rationing" scarce goods by price gouging is still price gouging. It's ok to be fine with that, and to write snide op-ed's defending it. But know this: CEOs are not acting as efficient stewards of scarce resources. That's a fiction. A thread: 1/6 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… 1) Firms are actively throttling production to keep prices high. The @Groundwork team has seen it in dozens of earnings calls. An example from housing, Lennar's CEO, "We could sell another 1,000 homes in the quarter if we wanted to. It just doesn't make sense to do that.” 2/6

📢📢📢 Want to know why prices are so high? The @Groundwork team is on it & today I published some of our findings in this @nytopinion piece. Be warned--it's not pretty. But to stop companies from price gouging during crises--we must listen & learn. 🧵1/15
nytimes.com/2022/05/05/opi… We listened in on 100s of quarterly earnings calls with Fortune 500 companies, where, by law, companies have to tell the truth. What was striking in the calls wasn't the supply chain shortages or companies’ typical profit motives; it was the plain old corporate profiteering. 2/15

🧵Today's numbers don't come close to reflecting the full geopolitical impact of oil & food prices. But if we listen to recent remarks from CEOs, we can get a good sense of what to expect in the weeks ahead & who the big winners will be: oil companies and their shareholders. 1/8 While “It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe," said Jack Fusco, CEO of Texas based Cheniere “if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security & long-term contracting.”
They grabbed $16 billion in revenue in 2021. 2/8 newrepublic.com/article/165487…

As you read today's inflation report, pay close attention to what the CEOs who set prices are saying. We got our hands on the latest batch of earnings reports, and it's a doozy. They're literally bragging about hiking prices while hiding behind "inflation." The receipts...(1/7) CEOs often speak more candidly on earnings calls (held when a new report comes out), in an effort to impress investors, by bragging about their ruthless profit-rigging schemes. It apparently doesn't occur to them that the public might find out about them! For instance... (2/7)

I'm less interested in talking about the baldfaced partisan hypocrisy of this debt ceiling vote & more interested in talking about what this cruel vote means for YOU.

A 🧵, courtesy of @CenterOnBudget.

1. 65 million Social Security beneficiaries could see benefits delayed. 2. 6 million veterans and survivors of veterans receiving compensation or pensions and 22 million low-income households receiving SNAP benefits could have their benefits held up for weeks or months, even as they need to pay their bills and put food on the table.

Cutting UI is political suicide, yet Republicans are trying to do just that.

As a sociologist who studied attitudes toward the safety net (and former Hill staffer who fought to expand it), we can offer a simple explanation: Republicans believe the safety net should punish. 1/7 The idea that some unemployed Americans are bringing in a little more in weekly benefits than they did in wages angers many Republicans & cuts against their deeply held belief that only work is valuable. It’s as old as capitalism itself & rooted in the Protestant work ethic. 2/7

New from me in @GDI_Policy: Climate change is bearing down on the residential real estate market--and another housing crash is just over the horizon. If policymakers don’t step up soon, we’ll all be soaked. 🌊🌊🌊1/11

greatdemocracyinitiative.org/document/soake… As more neighborhoods in the United States become uninhabitable, and as increasingly frequent floods and flames swallow billions in property values, policymakers must begin to view climate change as the systemic economic threat that it is. 2/11

nytimes.com/2020/06/19/cli…

NEW in the NYT from @BharatRamamurti and me: unless Congress acts, millions will take a paycut as they return to work. Our Fair Wage Guarantee would parlay the $600 UI boost into a wage hike, increasing demand and helping low-wage workers most. 1/9 nytimes.com/2020/07/05/opi… The $600 has been a lifeline for unemployed Americans during the pandemic. It’s kept poverty rates from spiking and the bottom from falling out of our economy. Because many laid-off workers have low wages, 68% of unemployed workers have actually seen their incomes increase. 2/9