dd36

Isn’t that a similar argument against AI?

End consolidation. Go back to pre-1980s antitrust policy. Encourage competition and bust the trusts.

That sounds toxic.

Single family used to act as a check on greed. Careless institutional investment was limited to multi family. They couldn’t push multi family rents beyond single family. Once institutional got into single family, everything became uncapped. It’s harder for millions of small landlords competing for tenants to act as a cartel than it is for a few large landlords taking up marginal supply.

It’s stock manipulation.

It’s good for the fossil fuel industry and that’s why it was done.

Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.

Probably has loopholes to help Apple. Can’t trust anything.

Musicians used to not let their songs be used in commercials.

*Perfect

Or they’re aiding it.

Can’t you just have it login?

And, historically, CEOs only were the CEO of one company and had one job.

Google was literally declared a monopoly by a court recently. Facebook and Apple both are oligopolies or monopolies in certain market segments. Apple has a monopoly on app store and on device payments. These things are bad enough that they’re being litigated.

But those extra dollars aren’t with consumers. Otherwise, yes. That’s where the money supply causes inflation argument falls apart — at least for this case.

More like the shenanigans aren’t new and can move up and down. And there’s coordination between the segments in the chain. How is it that farmers are making less than ever before but the products are more expensive than ever before? Look at spot prices for food commodities like corn going back a decade or two. The price is flat. Why are prices of goods up? Why are companies now less efficient instead of more efficient? There are plenty of ways that middle men bloat costs. Profit margins are after expenses. Load up a company with debt. Sell all the real estate and pay rent. Bloat executive salaries. Play games with shell companies and other middlemen. It’s not rocket science.

Doubtful. Most deals aren’t financed with debt.

There are many but off the top of my head Kroger buying Safeway. Visa buying Plaid. Nvidia buying Arm. Didn't they block a cell phone merger? A mattress merger?

Does Israel make ChatGPT?

Because there is collusion in the supply chain as well. The grocery stores won’t place your product, the distributors won’t distribute it or will charge you more, the farmers will charge you more. This is why horizontal and vertical consolidation were made illegal a century ago. Anti-competitive behavior has to be policed at every level.

Margins aren’t an objective measurement. Margins are easy to manipulate through shell companies and other costs.

Just look at PBMs. They all supposedly have small margins. However, once you peel back the layers, you see rebates and kickbacks and all kinds of illegal schemes to hide the real income.

Many mergers were squashed. The M&A market shrank considerably. There’s only so much they can do as far as bringing and prosecuting cases in four years.

Lina Khan did a ton of anti-trust but corporations seem to have realized Trump is transactional/pay to play. One can hope the strong antitrust continues but there’s little reason for optimism.

For money supply to be inflationary it has to increase demand or reduce supply for a given product.

It sounds neat but there’s little evidence of that occurring on more than a temporary basis during covid. But covid also caused supply shocks.

It seems that what happened is covid showed companies what they could get away with both because of decades of consolidation and because of new ways of colluding.

The government does not make things cheaper, competition does. The government’s role is to protect competition. Otherwise companies will collude not to compete.

Google. Microsoft. Facebook. If it weren’t for antitrust, there’d be a lot fewer cell phone companies or airlines. I mean, it’s harder to name an industry where there hasn’t been consolidation. The only thing stopping it is the law. Consolidation was basically illegal until the 1980s. If you wanted to grow, you had to compete.

I’ve noticed “let us price it for you” appearing in ever more apps and services. Seatgeek most recently.

His work is so important.

Awareness.

Where am I?

It was perversion by the courts of a century old law that wasn’t made for unilateral consumer contracts. If the courts stopped reading that law so broadly, then the legislature could pass a law that allows it, if that’s indeed what was intended.