Amid the longest government shutdown in US history, and with no light at the end of the tunnel, the latest Financial Trust Index (FTI) survey shows decreasing trust in government, especially among Democrats.
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Paging Don Qixote: The Last Hope for American Merger Law
Of the eight or nine hundred antitrust claims each year, few are private merger claims, and almost all of them fail. That is why the case of Steves & Sons, a rare private merger challenge decided by a federal court in Virginia last year, holds larger significance for the future of US antitrust enforcement.
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The Greatest Anticompetitive Threat of Our Time: Fixing the Horizontal Shareholding Problem
Undisputed empirical studies confirm that horizontal shareholding poses a great anticompetitive threat. What can antitrust enforcers do about it? Quite a lot, in fact.
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Facebook, Extreme Inequality, and Globalization: ProMarket’s Top Stories of 2018
As 2018 draws to a close, we look back at ProMarket’s most-read and most-widely shared stories of the past year.
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“Short Sellers Don’t Exist to Fix the Problems. They Exist to Shed Light on the Problems”
In an interview with ProMarket, Fahmi Quadir, the short seller whose bet against Valeant in 2015 helped expose the company’s misdeeds, talks about short selling and its role in exposing corporate fraud.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (December 9-16)
Congress misses an opportunity to scrutinize Google; the IRS is on life support; Johnson & Johnson reportedly knew for decades that its baby powder contained asbestos; the British Labour Party considers a break-up of the Big Four accounting firms; and will Obamacare once again be upheld by the Supreme Court?
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One Year After the Net Neutrality Repeal: the FCC Has Abdicated Its Role Protecting Consumers and Competition
Every promise made by broadband providers and every reason cited by the FCC in its decision to eliminate the net neutrality rules has proven false in the past year, writes Gigi Sohn. Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism: “There will be net neutrality in this country within the next several years.”
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (December 2-9)
Documents released by British Parliament show Facebook’s attempts to stifle competition; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau no longer protects consumers; provider consolidation is driving up US health care costs; and how big really is America’s digital divide?
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“US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jonathan Tepper talks about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and how a passionate fan of free markets came to write a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism.”
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Mercenary Science: How Corporate Partnerships Can Corrupt Public Universities
UC Berkeley’s disastrous partnerships with Novartis and BP are cautionary examples of all that could go wrong when public universities allow private interests to lease vast swaths of their campus for years at a time.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 18-December 2)
New report reveals America’s “concentration crisis”; antitrust enforcers and regulators in Europe are going after Amazon, Facebook and Google; Facebook’s ongoing Soros debacle; and why is US life expectancy in decline?
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How the FTC Protects Strong Employers and Targets Weak Workers
Since the 1970s, the US has seen a growing power imbalance between workers and employers. This story was not inevitable, but the product of conscious legal and political choices.
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