The follow-up question for journalists should be: is Intel still on track to build the manufacturing facilities that Congress appropriated that money to fund ?

Recall that, in buying an equity stake in Intel, the Trump admin removed the conditions placed on the Biden CHIP grants requiring Intel to use it to boost domestic manufacturing Intel then announced they planned to pay off their debts with the $ www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

Yet another letter from members of congress urging the FTC and DOJ to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act. Good! www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/re... (this is, by my count, the fifth letter from lawmakers advocating for RPA enforcement).

The wood wide web: horizontal economic coordination at its finest

screenshot in case the post gets taken down or deleted

Ever wonder about how PE took over so many public service sectors? Look no further than this classic cycle: "Privatize services, let private companies run amok, and then declare that the gov't is the problem. Then, privatize more services..." and repeat.

Katharina Pistor’s new book The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It is fantastic and a must read. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Crassly dipping my toe onto this platform with self-promotion: My book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy now has a beautiful cover, and a release date: April 20th. So you'll have something to enjoy with your 4/20 Taco Bell order! bookshop.org/p/books/chai...

🚨 New report out today from Garphil Julien and me on the hidden risks of US dependence on Chinese manufacturers of active pharma ingredients (API) — the basic inputs for making our essential medicines 🧵 1/

1. For at least 10 years, Pepsi has conspired with Walmart to force up grocery prices. That’s the shocking evidence made public today in an unsealed FTC lawsuit. The suit was abandoned in May by the Trump FTC just before it was to be un-redacted. We went to court to get it unsealed & won.

To give credit to where credit is due, in January, @basel.bsky.social did a great job unearthing this problem. www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-priv...

Private equity: is there anything it can't ruin? (gift link)

📢 Join us Dec. 15 at 1 p.m. ET for a talk with @danielahanley.bsky.social (@openmarkets.bsky.social) and Katherine Wyszkowski & Michael Murray (Mission:data) on the antitrust risks posed by U.S. electric utilities and their control over consumer energy-usage data. thecapitolforum.com/events/?utm_...

I’m excited to announce that today @openmarkets.bsky.social and Mission:data are jointly releasing a new report co-authored by Michael Murray, Sandeep Vaheesan, Katherine Wyszkowski, and myself. A Thread and links below. www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

In collaboration w/ @groundwork.bsky.social & @moreperfectunion.bsky.social, we convened hundreds of volunteers from across the country to investigate Instacart’s AI-assisted pricing experiments at popular grocery stores like Target & Kroger. Read our full investigation below:

I’m excited to announce that today @openmarkets.bsky.social and Mission:data are jointly releasing a new report co-authored by Michael Murray, Sandeep Vaheesan, Katherine Wyszkowski, and myself. A Thread and links below. www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

You have two bids for Warner brothers. Both are illegal. The fact that one deal is extremely illegal doesn’t make the other deal legal

Growing backlash — It turns out a lot of people are not happy with their local school district and city spending millions with Amazon under sham contracts that specify dynamic pricing and shutout competing local suppliers.

A good heuristic to determine if antitrust scholarship is worth reading is if there is a favorable citation to Senator Sherman's quote about not tolerating "a king over...the necessaries of life." 21 Cong. Rec. 2457 (1890).

We too often look at prices when talking about affordability & not enough at wages. As Harold Meyerson explains, had the bottom 90% earned the same share of national income they did in 1975, by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion! prospect.org/2025/12/03/7...

Given the recent Epic Games ruling and controlling law, Google’s (attempted) move to kill all alternative methods of installing apps on Android and to require all applications to go through its exclusive system would violate antitrust laws. tuta.com/blog/google-...

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

Meet the Big Money backers of the so-called "Abundance" movement.

Corporations want our entire society to bend to their will. Delaware gave corporations basically everything just short of complete control and has an entire legislative apparatus devoted to appeasement—and that's apparently just not enough. www.wsj.com/opinion/why-...

A govt shutdown is like a strike in the sense that before you start it you MUST have a concrete idea of what your leverage is and what will cause your opponent to fold. Ironically the Dems' strongest leverage point was probably "fucked up Thanksgiving travel" and they folded just before it came.

Chuck Schumer's inability to say whether he voted for the Democratic nominee in a general election in his city is the final straw for @ryanlcooper.com. prospect.org/2025/11/06/c...

The Supreme Court once again butchers equity and the law of stays in the course of making the world a worse place. And Justice Jackson is once again there to call them out on it with an opinion that will be a must-teach in any Remedies class www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

FYI. We don’t have to accept efficiency as a synonym for firing workers. We can block/limit job-cutting strategies and incentivize firms to pursue efficiency built on skill and human input.

I think the AWS outage is a warning shot. It’s clear the cloud must be regulated as a public utility and Signal must be updated to support decentralized, user-operated servers to break free from dominant cloud providers. What do others think?

Concerning, bc it indicates that the extent of the concentration of power in the hands of a few hyperscalers is way less widely understood than I’d assumed. Which bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration & solving the real problem. 2/

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Reminder: SCOTUS asked the Solicitor General for their input on the Duke Energy Carolinas lawsuit—a incredibly important case that could kneecap yet another aspect of Section 2. www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-f...

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles. Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

I cannot think of a more perfect moment for Linux and Apple than right now. Software developers should use Microsoft’s purposeful abandonment of Windows 10 (and the hundreds of millions of PCs that still run it) to free themselves from the company’s control. www.tomshardware.com/software/ope...

Many excellent amicus briefs in the Scotus tariff cases. Do they attest to the belief the system still works - or is it because no matter how small the hope scotus will do the right thing it’s still hope? Let me highlight some

“Half of the 136 newspaper closures in America over the past 14 months have been from independent, for-profit newspaper chains that own five or fewer for-profit papers," Full story: www.axios.com/2025/10/21/l...

Excited to share my new @openmarkets.bsky.social expert brief: “The Enduring Force of the Federal Antitrust Laws.” As I detail in this new paper, despite decades of judicial retreat, the federal antitrust laws remain powerful tools to fight monopoly power and corporate domination.

NEW today: Daniel Hanley's very compelling brief on how antitrust laws are some of the best tools we have to reduce prices, lower rents, boost wages, expand consumer choice, and help small businesses. www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

Excited to share my new @openmarkets.bsky.social expert brief: “The Enduring Force of the Federal Antitrust Laws.” As I detail in this new paper, despite decades of judicial retreat, the federal antitrust laws remain powerful tools to fight monopoly power and corporate domination.

I used to focus on left versus right. Now I’m much more worried about the money at the top. But while it might seem strange to say it, I think this is a hopeful way of looking at the world that opens the door to coalitions that seemed impossible before. My first for the @newrepublic.com:

In an interview with PBS marketing his new book, former Justice Anthony Kennedy expresses no remorse about his Citizens United decision and instead "hopes" voters take into consideration which candidates are receiving lots of money. 🤬 youtu.be/jMneFUWkWJI?...

Read our response:

This actually is important. The (modified) per se rule on tying does constrain Big Tech behavior to some non-trivial degree. No accident Microsoft filed an amicus brief for defendants (whose petition failed)

CA just banned price fixing via algorithm across the economy! As corporations weaponize this technology to rip off consumers and hurt competition it's great to see @governor.ca.gov sign AB 325 to stop this practice! Here's our own Lee Hepner testifying in support of the bill earlier this year👇

Harold Meyerson sat in on a court case in LA which made clear that Amazon controls every aspect of the work experience of delivery driver "contractors" while claiming they are not a joint employer. It would be devastating in a world with actually functioning labor law.

Finally, a decent decision from the Supreme Court. Today, the Court denied a petition to get rid of the per se rule on tying. This is incredibly important (E.g., Google ad tech district court decision!). www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?...

3. Finally, we should reconsider the self coordinating market as a starting point because economic coordination is not a small exception or add-on to the basic picture: it is fundamental to economic life, in any form. It should get equal billing as a basic building block of any theory of the economy