Hal Singer
@HalSinger
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MD @ EconOne | Prof @EconUofU | ED @ UtahProject | NYTimes: "one expert for the plaintiffs" | Prospect:"preeminent watchdog of The Economist's most wrong takes"
Washington, D.C.
Joined December 2011
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A monopolization case against SpaceX seems strong. In my latest for
@TheSlingUtah
, I review the publicly available evidence on SpaceX’s dominance, entry barriers, and three types of exclusionary conduct that could run afoul of the antitrust laws. 🧵
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Why have housing costs skyrocketed?
Progressives: Hedge fund/private equity have been buying up hundreds of thousands of homes. Pricing algorithms allow landlords to coordinate price hikes.
New York Times Op-Ed: No no. It's the high cost of elevators and the elevator union!
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Wow go listen to
@owenslindsay1
explain how prices are actually set on earth to this CNBC host, who naively believes that “supply and demand” exonerates large companies from any culpability in fueling inflation. (I hope the Harris campaign is paying attention to her!)
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The food industry “pushes back” against Harris’s price gouging plan by asserting … checks notes … that record profit margins are needed to “fund the development of new products” such as meats and eggs and potato chips.
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👀
NY Times: "But she has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers, according to a donor who has spoken privately with the vice president."
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U.S. airlines are suing, as a collective, to preserve their rights to withhold information on additional fees for luggage and changing flights at the point of initial sale. Had any of them sued individually, passengers would have switched to a rival carrier, in complete disgust.
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@KevinTartis
First, it's a fixed cost, which shouldn't enter the pricing calculus. Second, ignoring pricing theory, it's a trivial component of total construction costs. Third, come on, this is the dumbest YIMBY theory ever, meant to distract from the true culprits behind housing inflation.
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Peter Coy: Greedflation isn’t a helpful lens in understanding inflation.
Also Peter Coy: “Companies took advantage of shortages to raise prices.”
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First they told us inflation was always a monetary phenomenon. Then they said inflation was driven by wage demands by workers—the wAgE-pRiCe SpIrAl. Now they’ve moved on to demand-based stories, blaming consumers. It’s *never* about the companies actually setting prices.
Corporate collusion via smoke filled backrooms is being replaced by algorithmic price fixing.
Companies are outsourcing their price setting functions to the same third-party software to coordinate price hikes in housing, food, healthcare, and hospitality
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Ten years from now, economists will be writing papers estimating the extent to which price fixing contributed to post-pandemic inflation. And non-economists will be asking how economists missed it while it was happening.
Via
@matthewstoller
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Great natural experiment here in Cali. Starting July 1, all mandatory hotel fees—resort fees, destination fees, facility fees, cleaning fees, service fees, host fees, and AC fees—must be shown as part of the advertised price. 1/3
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Some quick thoughts on that godawful WSJ editorial attacking Lina Khan and the FTC’s challenge to the merger of accessible luxury handbags …
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Just read Yglesias’s antitrust essay in Bloomberg. And I have some feelings. Very short 🧵
tl;dr Matt needs to speak with some antitrust folks outside of the consumer welfare bubble
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This finding in a new paper by econs at Stanford and the Bank of England is consistent with the claim (peddled by an obscure econ) that firms use general inflation as a pretext for raising their own prices.
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Some crazy late-stage capitalism right here—private mountains. $2M plus for a home plus $30K-100K annual membership fee. With a little more income inequality, we can expect private lakes and rivers next!
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Holy monopsony, Batman.
Yesterday’s FTC’s letter to the Ninth Circuit explains how Microsoft’s mass layoffs of programmers reflects the “hallmarks of a firm, exercising market power post-merger.”
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Yeesh. The only “losers” here are employers with buying power that are now forced to share more of their profits with their workers. (Doing my breathing exercises before reading this gem.)
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Shout this from the rooftops. We have isolated the source of inflation (we’ve actually known this for a while) and the cure is NOT higher interest rates. Everything should be on the table, including strict rental ownership limits within a neighborhood and even price controls.
The point is not that all is well. The point is that the categories with high inflation are largely outside the Fed’s control.
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StubHub charged me a $75 service fee per ticket on a $175 ticket to the tennis tournament in DC. (My son is a Ben Shelton fan.) That comes out to a 30% take rate (equal to $75 divided by $250 spend) or 43% tax. The fee is not revealed until checkout. Seems ripe for investigation.
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Set aside his inapt analogy & ad hominem attack on Lee, this tweet is economically vapid. Taxi drivers used to be able to put their kids through college. Uber drivers can’t. The goal is not to design a system that produces the cheapest ride at any cost, damn the drivers’ welfare.
A lesson in critical thinking I got in undergrad:
Econ 1 prof hands us an article about airlines overbooking & offering money at the gate to bump passengers. Article argues we should ban this. Reasoning is that it’s exploitative: poorer people overwhelmingly more likely to get
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Breaking: The Economist recognizes the existence of a monopoly in America.
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Big Tech has figured out how to structure AI acquisitions—licensing the tech and hiring top employees—to avoid antitrust scrutiny AND deprive lower- and mid-level employees from partaking in the financial spoils and fruits of their labor. How regressive! What’s not to love?
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In a competitive insurance market that is functioning properly, premiums per policy should fall as the number of claims decline. But at Geico, the premiums per policy reportedly increased as the number of claims declined. This firm/industry seems ripe for regulatory scrutiny.
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CEOs concerned that the poors are cutting back purchases due to price hikes imposed by the CEOs.
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Two quick thoughts on that new
@RonBrownstein
story in The Atlantic. Summers is still wrong about what caused inflation. It wasn’t the stimulus. It was the supply shock plus firms in concentrated industries exploiting the supply shock, with many outright colluding to raise prices
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In light of that Yglesias piece, I needed to explain what the antitrust hipsters are really up to, and why abandoning the consumer welfare standard does not mean abandoning consumers.
My latest via
@TheSlingUtah
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Shocker. Nick Saban, who championed the idea of exploiting college football players—while he personally made millions off their backs—under the pretext of “amateurism,” also opposes unionization by auto workers. Higher profits for his Mercedes dealerships!
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Sigh. NYT story on the evidence behind the role of corporate behavior for grocery inflation assiduously avoids mentioning price fixing cases being pursued by DOJ in meat industry and cites Jason Furman as (corporatist) authority offering some real nuggets of wisdom like this 👇
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We really must abandon the (neoliberal) notion that lower prices is the loadstar of all policy. It's the same defect with the consumer welfare standard in antitrust. We are trying to build a society--with opportunities for workers to thrive--not a Walmart.
This Economist arg against Biden’s steel tariffs—they are inflationary and therefore regressive—is not persuasive. If a foreign firm were selling goods below costs or with slave labor, then a tariff relieving domestic firms of pricing pressure could be deemed “inflationary.” 1/3
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Whoa. A really important admission by The Economist about the *benefits* of beefed-up merger enforcement: Unable to acquire upstarts, dominant platforms are now forced to grow internally, which benefits consumers (and workers) by preserving competition.
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Excellent piece by
@ddayen
on the real causes of the spike in auto insurance rates. Nothing to do with excess demand. Potentially worsened by higher rates. And possibly owing to otherwise illegal coordination by the carriers, per one obscure economist!
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My goodness the number of Summers and Furman quotes in the NYTimes since 2020 is stunning. Expand your rolodex!
My latest is out in
@TheSlingUtah
today! It's a quick read about Ken Rogoff that ponders why he's still quoted as an authority in the media. Give it a read! 1/
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This is a horribly biased inflation piece, per usual in the Times corporatist business section. The causation paragraph cites all factors *except* price gouging. Then it falsely suggests that economists generally reject this theory, citing libertarians as authority. Major fail.
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Corporatist Catherine Rampell, who famously declared greedflation aka price gouging a leftist conspiracy theory, punches left again, this time attacking “lefty groups” like Accountable and Sen. Warren for criticizing Costco’s recent price hikes. Corporations can never do wrong.
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The Economist cites an “independent analyst” for the proposition that minimum wage hikes caused fast-food prices to rise in Cali. A quick search reveals he is a consultant to the restaurant industry. More importantly, what explains the higher price of fast-food *outside* of Cali?
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If you’re a business reporter doing a story on rental inflation and you assiduously avoid mentioning the contribution of explicit (or tacit) price coordination among landlords to higher rents—sticking instead to demand-side factors—you are doing a disservice to your readers.
FBI raid thrusts antitrust claims against Atlanta landlords into spotlight
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Furman is just as wrong about antitrust as he was on much unemployment would be needed for inflation to fall. Furman’s outmoded (and reactionary) thesis is that antitrust is impotent at addressing income inequality. A short thread.🧵
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Not all economists, Felix Salmon. Also note how Furman, Barro and Rampell are characterized as “mainstream left-leaning economic pundits.” That gives them license to punch left on behalf of corporate benefactors.
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If we follow Yglesias’s neoliberal advice and require that all policy, including antitrust, be guided by a goal of lower prices, then the Labor Department should abandon its efforts to police child labor, as child labor means lower labor costs which means lower prices!
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