Haters sometimes accuse the Federal Reserve of being a shadowy cabal of private bankers that slipped loose from democratic oversight. But we at The Sling trust our patriotic central bankers, who have never had anything to hide. To help the Fed tell its side of the story, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)... Read More
By Laurel Kilgour
November 22, 2024
Image: For the coming merger wave, here’s our antitrust affirmative defense starter pack.
Many Americans are still in shock because our worst fears just came true: European regulators fined an American Big Tech firm a whopping one half of one percent of its annual revenue for violating some kind of “law.” To add insult to injury, radical American enforcers slipped loose from the adult supervision of the defense... Read More
By Darren Bush
November 6, 2024
Image: Judicial power has contorted progressive law to support powerful business interests. The Court stands ready to do so again. Credit: Fred Schilling
“When the best reading of a statute is that it delegatesdiscretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits.” –SCOTUS, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The quote above raises a tension between consideration of what Congress... Read More
Image: Many have credited the Federal Reserve with achieving the once-mythical soft landing.
After years of inflation-driven concerns over the state of the economy, it seems that the mythical soft landing has been achieved; things aren’t perfect but inflation is down without the United States hitting a recession. The labor market has weakened some in recent months, but is still largely okay and the Federal Reserve has started... Read More
By Hal Singer
October 27, 2024
Image: JP Morgan’s Jaime Dimon is the Chairman of BPI, a bank trade association that sued the CFPB. Photo Credit: Al Drago for The New York Times
It’s always better to be a monopolist. “Ruinous competition” is a drag on a company’s profits, particularly when slothful incumbents are forced to compete on the merits. In the case of banks, competition on the merits means increasing rates on deposits for customers with sizeable savings or decreasing overdraft fees for customers with limited funds.... Read More
By Emily Peterson-Cassin
October 20, 2024
Image: YouTube has been recognized as “the world’s second-largest search engine,” handling an estimated 3 billion searches per month.
As Google faces aggressive scrutiny from the Department of Justice—with the search trial moving to the remedies phase and the ad tech trial moving to closing arguments—there’s an elephant in the room that many antitrust watchers are failing to see: YouTube. With the platform’s presence on our phones, the part it plays in our online... Read More
Each semester at universities around the world, students in introductory economic classes are generally told the same stories. Perhaps to the surprise of some students who have met human beings, economists teach their classes that human beings are rational creatures who primarily seek to maximize their own utility in making choices. These students are also... Read More
Image: The DOJ sued RealPage for its information collection, processing, and rent recommendations to landlords. Photo by Sipa USA via AP Images.
In February 2023, Doha Mekki, the Principal Deputy AAG for Antitrust announced the withdrawal of the FTC-DOJ guidelines on information exchange. It had become painfully apparent that oligopolists had found exchanges of confidential business information to be an effective means of restraining competition without entering into overt conspiracies. In December of that year, we published... Read More
Image: This week, the DOJ is expected to file its proposed remedy in the Google search case.
In August, Judge Mehta of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., concluded in a careful and detailed opinion that Google had a monopoly in both the internet search market and the associated text advertising market. Google was found to have abused its market power by engaging in exclusionary conduct, including paying large sums of... Read More
By Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
September 30, 2024
Image: The Washington Post has assembled a lineup of neoliberal pundits, including Eduardo Porter and Catherine Rampell.
Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter, in his recent piece, “Corporations are not destroying America,” seems to be taking cues on economic policy from his colleague Catherine Rampell. To Porter’s credit, he, contra Rampell, seems to actually read the materials he’s writing about. Yet the entire piece is emblematic of columns favored by the Post: ones... Read More
Haters sometimes accuse the Federal Reserve of being a shadowy cabal of private bankers that slipped loose from democratic oversight. But we at The Sling trust our patriotic central bankers, who have never had anything to hide. To help the Fed tell its side of the story, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)... Read More
Many Americans are still in shock because our worst fears just came true: European regulators fined an American Big Tech firm a whopping one half of one percent of its annual revenue for violating some kind of “law.” To add insult to injury, radical American enforcers slipped loose from the adult supervision of the defense... Read More
Image: For the coming merger wave, here’s our antitrust affirmative defense starter pack.
“When the best reading of a statute is that it delegatesdiscretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits.” –SCOTUS, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The quote above raises a tension between consideration of what Congress... Read More
Image: Judicial power has contorted progressive law to support powerful business interests. The Court stands ready to do so again. Credit: Fred Schilling
After years of inflation-driven concerns over the state of the economy, it seems that the mythical soft landing has been achieved; things aren’t perfect but inflation is down without the United States hitting a recession. The labor market has weakened some in recent months, but is still largely okay and the Federal Reserve has started... Read More
Image: Many have credited the Federal Reserve with achieving the once-mythical soft landing.
It’s always better to be a monopolist. “Ruinous competition” is a drag on a company’s profits, particularly when slothful incumbents are forced to compete on the merits. In the case of banks, competition on the merits means increasing rates on deposits for customers with sizeable savings or decreasing overdraft fees for customers with limited funds.... Read More
Image: JP Morgan’s Jaime Dimon is the Chairman of BPI, a bank trade association that sued the CFPB. Photo Credit: Al Drago for The New York Times
As Google faces aggressive scrutiny from the Department of Justice—with the search trial moving to the remedies phase and the ad tech trial moving to closing arguments—there’s an elephant in the room that many antitrust watchers are failing to see: YouTube. With the platform’s presence on our phones, the part it plays in our online... Read More
Image: YouTube has been recognized as “the world’s second-largest search engine,” handling an estimated 3 billion searches per month.
Each semester at universities around the world, students in introductory economic classes are generally told the same stories. Perhaps to the surprise of some students who have met human beings, economists teach their classes that human beings are rational creatures who primarily seek to maximize their own utility in making choices. These students are also... Read More
In February 2023, Doha Mekki, the Principal Deputy AAG for Antitrust announced the withdrawal of the FTC-DOJ guidelines on information exchange. It had become painfully apparent that oligopolists had found exchanges of confidential business information to be an effective means of restraining competition without entering into overt conspiracies. In December of that year, we published... Read More
Image: The DOJ sued RealPage for its information collection, processing, and rent recommendations to landlords. Photo by Sipa USA via AP Images.
In August, Judge Mehta of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., concluded in a careful and detailed opinion that Google had a monopoly in both the internet search market and the associated text advertising market. Google was found to have abused its market power by engaging in exclusionary conduct, including paying large sums of... Read More
Image: This week, the DOJ is expected to file its proposed remedy in the Google search case.
Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter, in his recent piece, “Corporations are not destroying America,” seems to be taking cues on economic policy from his colleague Catherine Rampell. To Porter’s credit, he, contra Rampell, seems to actually read the materials he’s writing about. Yet the entire piece is emblematic of columns favored by the Post: ones... Read More
Image: The Washington Post has assembled a lineup of neoliberal pundits, including Eduardo Porter and Catherine Rampell.
Subscribe now to get email updates about The Sling
© 2024 The Sling