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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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)
Facebook’s latest scandal leads lawmakers to proclaim: “Big tech can no longer be trusted”; New Yorkers vow to resist Amazon’s HQ2 deal; monopolization is undermining public faith in capitalism; and why are US drug prices so high?
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Subsidies to Amazon Are Uneconomical, Un-American, and Unconstitutional
Corporate subsidies are a negative-sum game. They foster crony capitalism, hurt productivity growth and inflict great harm on product market competition.
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Ten Years After the Financial Crisis: “We Are Safer, But Not As Safe As We Should and Could Be”
Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, whether the actions that were taken since seem sufficient, and the risks that might forestall a new crisis.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (October 27-November 4)
Facebook is still open to manipulation by malicious political actors; the dialysis industry has spent over $100 million to fight a ballot measure that seeks to regulate it; AT&T does everything it promised not to do in its defense of the Time Warner merger; and can tech workers help police their own employers?
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (October 14-20)
Facebook’s WhatsApp finds itself at the center of Brazil’s political upheaval; the EU is pushing ahead with its planned tax on tech platforms; Trump’s replacement for NAFTA entrenches tech monopolies; and why does Uber love economists?
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“In the Wake of the 2008 Crisis, You Can’t Ignore the Influence of Big Business on Economic Policy”
Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (October 7-14)
The DOJ approves the CVS-Aetna merger, radically altering the landscape of US health care; Sheldon Adelson pumps millions into GOP races; Silicon Valley’s Saudi Arabia problem; and who has the right to compete in America?
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Implicit Government Involvement In The Puerto Rican Debt Crisis
Why were Puerto Rico’s economic and financial troubles not reflected in its bond yields prior to its 2016 default? A Stigler Center working paper explores the possibility that this puzzle is related to government involvement in financial markets.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (October 1-7)
Brazil’s business community rallies around far-right authoritarian; Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh enters the Supreme Court; Amazon raises its minimum wage to $15 an hour; Germany expects to take antitrust action against Facebook this year; and the IRS’ pursuit of tax crimes reportedly faces collapse.
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Is Liberal Democracy Doomed? A Q&A With Yascha Mounk
Mounk, author of the recent book The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, talks to ProMarket about populist authoritarians and undemocratic liberalism.
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