Michael Milken, private equity, and a salt roll-up are showing we're in for shortages and price spikes. | Continue reading
Essential hiking tool Gaia GPS might become an exclusive to a media empire. | Continue reading
The founder of Waze now publicly notes that mergers are inefficient. | Continue reading
Facebook is engaged in a giant crime spree to steal ad money. A battle over speech in Australia shows what top executives really think of the rule of law. | Continue reading
The defense industrial base is collapsing. Blame monopolies and Wall Street, writes the DOD. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's Deputy Secretary expresses concern over "extreme consolidation." | Continue reading
Why our politics centers around the unreal world of finance. | Continue reading
Censorship isn't the right approach. Just stop letting Facebook earn money fostering violence. | Continue reading
Private equity monopolist Orlando Bravo made billions by putting our whole society at risk. | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai need to be indicted. | Continue reading
A significant set of antitrust suits is ending the lawlessness at the heart of our economy. | Continue reading
Salesforce-Slack and Penguin-Simon & Schuster both show a failure to enforce antitrust laws creates monopolies. | Continue reading
The DOJ Antitrust suit is tight and aggressive, and the start of a new era. | Continue reading
Boom. David Cicilline's investigation into big tech is about to yield big results. | Continue reading
From cheerleading to video games, business leaders are saying "Enough!" | Continue reading
Dave Dayen's new book "Monopolized" shows how Buffett has normalized monopoly power. | Continue reading
Yes we need protection from TikTok and WeChat. But we also need protection from our own tech giants. | Continue reading
Democracy on Wednesday, Monopoly on Thursday, National Security on Friday. | Continue reading
Amazon's algorithm goes crazy, and Facebook accidentally weaponizes Chinese counterfeiters during the Black Lives Matter protest. | Continue reading
7-Eleven franchises are the canary in the coal mine. | Continue reading
Private equity 'roll-ups' hit virtually everything in the economy, from mail sorting software to mixed martial arts to portable toilets to dentists... | Continue reading
A change by Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia lets ordinary investors put their money into PE. Should they? | Continue reading
Google, Apple, and Facebook all made missteps or lost important political allies. | Continue reading
Google, Apple, and Facebook all made missteps or lost important political allies. | Continue reading
How the Department of Transportation Is Beginning to Make Post-Pandemic Flying Miserable. | Continue reading
How the protests and riots of 2020 reflect a lack of legitimacy in our economic and political institutions. | Continue reading
Spotify is trying to do to the open podcast world what Google did to publishers. | Continue reading
As French and Australian enforcers try to get Google and Facebook to pay newspapers, cities crack down on food delivery apps. | Continue reading
The Federal Reserve just bailed out Boeing, and served as a ventilator for the economy. | Continue reading
The pandemic has clarified a lot about America and the West. Now comes the political reaction. | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about how private equity is reacting to the pandemic and the bailouts. PE is heavily indebted, and therefore is at high risk in … | Continue reading
How a new conservative thought collective is responding to the pandemic. | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to try and explain why the Fed and Congress, while attempting to throw money at everyone, disproportionately tends to aid certain narrow … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to try and explain why the Fed and Congress, while attempting to throw money at everyone, disproportionately tends to aid certain narrow … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to offer a few thoughts about why we lack medical supplies, based off an excellent story in the New York Times on a merger of two ventil … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. This is a special edition. I need you to take this newsletter and repost it, forward it, and contact anyone you know in politics. Here’s why. Congressional leaders are likely to put a very ugly deal in front of the … | Continue reading
How important are 'economies of scale' in production and innovation? | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about Debbie Feinstein, the Obama-era head of antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission responsible for our current … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… I was going to write about the big tech investigation in Congress, but today a New York judge, Victor Marrero, approved the merger between Sprint and T- … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about podcasting, with some observations on how a media market that is far healthier than online publishing functions. But firs … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about my industry, which is Democratic party politics. Also, for those in D.C., I’ll be speaking at Solid State books tonight a … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’ll go over an important story in the New York Times by Ellen Gabler about the giant American drug store chain and health care company CVS. First … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… I write a lot about the problem of concentration. Today I have something that you can actually *do* about it. One thing I keep hearing over and over fro … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to discuss some quiet but potentially significant problems hanging over Facebook and the big tech ecosystem in general. The big tech sto … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about Varsity Brands, the Bain Capital-owned corporation which controls the sport of cheerleading. I love this monopoly because … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… This morning on Bloomberg TV, I watched a clip of economist Larry Summers making an argument for what to do in the event of a recession. Couched in the … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about the Trump administration’s surprising rejection of the traditional Republican free market orthodoxy. He is embracing a mo … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about the way Boeing does accounting, and how the corporation has been hiding its costs. But first, newsletter housekeeping. Th … | Continue reading
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about Google’s exceptionally dangerous decision yesterday to de facto cut off Turkey’s access to Android phones. | Continue reading