* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Why Starz Entertainment Stock Soared Today – The Motley Fool

    Unpacking the Surge: What Fueled Starz Entertainment’s Stock Explosion Today!

    Unveiling the Enigmatic: First Looks at Destruction and Puck in ‘The Sandman

    Jackie Chan Reveals This Family Member ‘Never Watched’ The Whole Of Any Of His Movies – Yahoo

    Jackie Chan Reveals This Family Member ‘Never Watched’ The Whole Of Any Of His Movies – Yahoo

    Mavs CEO holds firm on new arena, entertainment district in Dallas – Dallas News

    Mavs CEO Stands Strong on Vision for New Arena and Entertainment District in Dallas

    Entertainment: On Your Marks, Get Set, Beer Run! – Urban Milwaukee

    Get Ready to Race: The Ultimate Beer Run Experience Awaits!

    Rachel Guttman Launches Entertainment Law Firm Gutt Law, PLLC [Exclusive] – MusicRow.com

    Rachel Guttman Unveils Exciting New Entertainment Law Firm: Gutt Law, PLLC!

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    This giant microwave may change the future of war – MIT Technology Review

    Revolutionizing Warfare: The Impact of a Game-Changing Giant Microwave

    Bajeed Pattan Joins Forbes Technology Council as Innovation Leader – PRWeb

    Bajeed Pattan Takes the Helm as Innovation Leader at Forbes Technology Council!

    Lafayette Regional Technology Council – Tech Leadership That’s Homegrown and Future-Focused – Discover Lafayette

    Lafayette Regional Technology Council – Tech Leadership That’s Homegrown and Future-Focused – Discover Lafayette

    Drone technology demo in Cambria County showcases future of lifesaving medical deliveries – local21news.com

    Revolutionizing Healthcare: Drone Technology Takes Flight for Lifesaving Medical Deliveries in Cambria County

    Revolutionary Harvesting Technology Promises to Slash CAR-T Manufacturing Costs!

    Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism – International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – ICCT

    Unplugged: The Surge of Anti-Technology Extremism

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Why Starz Entertainment Stock Soared Today – The Motley Fool

    Unpacking the Surge: What Fueled Starz Entertainment’s Stock Explosion Today!

    Unveiling the Enigmatic: First Looks at Destruction and Puck in ‘The Sandman

    Jackie Chan Reveals This Family Member ‘Never Watched’ The Whole Of Any Of His Movies – Yahoo

    Jackie Chan Reveals This Family Member ‘Never Watched’ The Whole Of Any Of His Movies – Yahoo

    Mavs CEO holds firm on new arena, entertainment district in Dallas – Dallas News

    Mavs CEO Stands Strong on Vision for New Arena and Entertainment District in Dallas

    Entertainment: On Your Marks, Get Set, Beer Run! – Urban Milwaukee

    Get Ready to Race: The Ultimate Beer Run Experience Awaits!

    Rachel Guttman Launches Entertainment Law Firm Gutt Law, PLLC [Exclusive] – MusicRow.com

    Rachel Guttman Unveils Exciting New Entertainment Law Firm: Gutt Law, PLLC!

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    This giant microwave may change the future of war – MIT Technology Review

    Revolutionizing Warfare: The Impact of a Game-Changing Giant Microwave

    Bajeed Pattan Joins Forbes Technology Council as Innovation Leader – PRWeb

    Bajeed Pattan Takes the Helm as Innovation Leader at Forbes Technology Council!

    Lafayette Regional Technology Council – Tech Leadership That’s Homegrown and Future-Focused – Discover Lafayette

    Lafayette Regional Technology Council – Tech Leadership That’s Homegrown and Future-Focused – Discover Lafayette

    Drone technology demo in Cambria County showcases future of lifesaving medical deliveries – local21news.com

    Revolutionizing Healthcare: Drone Technology Takes Flight for Lifesaving Medical Deliveries in Cambria County

    Revolutionary Harvesting Technology Promises to Slash CAR-T Manufacturing Costs!

    Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism – International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – ICCT

    Unplugged: The Surge of Anti-Technology Extremism

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

Lina Khan vs. Amazon: Excessive Bigness Has Got to Stop

October 3, 2023
in News
Lina Khan vs. Amazon: Excessive Bigness Has Got to Stop
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

One great achievement of Bidenomics that you may not have seen celebrated is the private equity drought. Private equity is very possibly the most despised industry in America (the titles of two recent books about it were Plunder and These Are the Plunderers), and it’s in a slump. Credit goes to the chairs of two independent agencies, over whom President Joe Biden has no direct control. But Biden appointed one of them, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, and he reappointed the other, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Thanks in part to Khan and a third key player, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kantor, who heads the antitrust division, the dollar value of merger activity fell, on an annualized basis, by 41 percent during the first half of 2023. Khan and Kantor’s role was to increase the heretofore largely nonexistent threat of antitrust enforcement. Powell’s role, which was more decisive, was to increase the cost of borrowing by raising interest rates. Mergers are often funded through debt. “Private equity” is really just a euphemism for “leveraged buyout,” an industry moniker discarded after its most famous practitioner, the junk-bond king Michael Milken, went to jail. Leveraged buyouts finance more than one-third of all mergers. When leveraging (i.e., borrowing) gets more expensive, private-equity firms perform fewer leveraged buyouts and—voilà!—you get fewer mergers. Which, contrary to what you might read in the financial pages, is a good thing.

Unfortunately, the merger dropoff and the private-equity drought won’t last forever. Indeed, last week we learned that in the third quarter of 2023 mergers rose 35 percent on an annualized basis. This was reported in the financial pages as good news, when really it’s bad news because the result will be more industry concentration. As even the Fed starts to realize inflation really is coming under control—its favorite inflation indicator, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index, fell in August from 4.3 to 3.9 percent on an annualized basis when you strip out volatile food and gas prices—it will likely lower interest rates sometime next year. That means it will be up chiefly to Khan and Kantor to keep mergers down and private equity parched.

The FTC filed a complaint last week against the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe regarding its consolidation of anesthesia practices across Texas, which it says is raising prices. This is part of a stepped-up effort at both the FTC and the Justice Department to scrutinize private equity’s multiyear binge of buying up and consolidating all sorts of health care businesses, from nursing homes to hospices. But Khan’s most significant effort to discourage corporate gigantism isn’t about mergers or private equity at all. It’s an antitrust lawsuit brought last week by the FTC and 17 state attorneys general against her longtime bête noire, Amazon.

Khan got the job of FTC chair largely on the strength of an influential paper she wrote in 2017 for the Yale Law Journal when she was still a law student. In the article, Khan argued against an antitrust standard, favored by the courts after publication of Robert Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, that said antitrust law existed only to protect the interests of the consumer. In her paper, titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Khan argued that this standard “fails to capture the architecture of market power in the twenty-first century marketplace.” Instead of just looking at prices, she argued, antitrust regulators should also look at the effects of economic concentration on such factors as the pace of innovation, the ability of competitors to remain in or enter the market, and the ability of suppliers to earn a profit. In essence, Khan was arguing to return to the antitrust standard that preceded Bork—a standard invented to check the economic power of the railroad, banking, and oil trusts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Khan’s paper didn’t say so, Amazon is basically the Standard Oil of our time.

The FTC’s lawsuit points out that Amazon takes close to half of every dollar on every third-party sale, with one seller saying, “We have nowhere else to go, and Amazon knows it.” Farmers said much the same thing about railroads in the 19th century. Until 2019, Amazon bound suppliers contractually from selling their products at lower prices on other platforms. Now Amazon just puts such products at the bottom of its search results. Amazon’s search function, the lawsuit argues, is a mess, choked with advertisements and prioritizing its own often-inferior products. I’ve actually noticed this. Searching for a product on Amazon these days is like shouting at a very deaf store clerk “Please get me X” only to have the clerk show you three entirely irrelevant items because he can’t hear a word you say.

One difficulty with the Amazon lawsuit, as Camilla Hodgson pointed out last week in the Financial Times, is that although sellers, with good reason, hate Amazon, consumers love it. “You just could not be going after a more popular corporation,” David Balto, a former FTC policy director, told Hodgson. It’s true! Even granting that its search function is all crapped up, I still love Amazon, and I use it a lot. This is hard on my conscience, because Amazon is right up there with Starbucks, Apple, and Walmart as one of the worst union-busters in the country.

Interestingly, neither Khan’s Yale Law Review article nor the FTC lawsuit mentions unions or wages. To the extent either includes any discussion of monopsony (i.e., a circumstance where there is only one buyer) it’s to consider the impact on sellers, not on warehouse or contract labor. Perhaps that’s because labor disputes at Amazon warehouses tend to be not about wages (average pay exceeds $20 per hour) but about working conditions; among other things, Amazon warehouses have a miserable record on worker safety. Or perhaps it’s because antitrust law, even in the distant past, has never been terribly effective at addressing labor monopsony, or at helping labor unions in other ways. Indeed, monopoly and oligopoly can be very pro-worker under the right circumstances. Think U.S. Steel in the 1960s, or (to a diminished extent) the Big Three auto companies today, wherein unions secure workers their fair share of of the spoils from market concentration. Still, we regulate the economy we have, not the economy we used to have and wish to return. When only 6 percent of the private sector is unionized, increasing competition for labor through antitrust is not a bad strategy to empower workers.

Even without that potential benefit, the Amazon lawsuit justifies itself on its own merits, which emphasize that Amazon is amassing a dangerous quantity of economic power in relation to other businesses. And along with Khan’s lawsuit against Google, it sends the message to other large corporations and to private-equity firms that the cost of excessive bigness will remain high even when interest rates come down. Let’s hope they heed it, and that the merger recession extends into 2024.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : New Republic – https://newrepublic.com/article/175918/lina-khan-vs-amazon-excessive-bigness-got-stop

Tags: AmazonExcessivenews
Previous Post

Joan Didion vs. the Political Insiders

Next Post

Ottawa man says his mother was billed by her retirement home for services provided through the health-care system

Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump’s research funding cuts – Space

Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump’s research funding cuts – Space

June 1, 2025
YouTube Science Star Derek Muller Confronts PFAS “Forever Chemicals”—In His Own Blood – Scientific American

YouTube Science Sensation Derek Muller Takes on PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Found in His Own Blood!

June 1, 2025
The 17 Recipes We Can’t Wait To Make This June – Yahoo

17 Must-Try Recipes to Savor This June!

June 1, 2025
Blaze, Duke, Lockett, Rademacher headline men’s freestyle champions at U20 World Team Trials – USA Wrestling

Rising Stars Shine: Blaze, Duke, Lockett, and Rademacher Claim Victory at U20 Men’s Freestyle Championships!

June 1, 2025
Looking Back at the Good Old Days of Growth Under Biden – Bloomberg.com

Looking Back at the Good Old Days of Growth Under Biden – Bloomberg.com

June 1, 2025
Why Starz Entertainment Stock Soared Today – The Motley Fool

Unpacking the Surge: What Fueled Starz Entertainment’s Stock Explosion Today!

June 1, 2025
White House acknowledges problems in RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report – AP News

White House Admits Flaws in RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Report

June 1, 2025
N.Y. landlords, lawmakers to face off over expanding upstate rent control – Spectrum News

Showdown Ahead: N.Y. Landlords and Lawmakers Clash Over Expanding Rent Control Upstate!

June 1, 2025
This giant microwave may change the future of war – MIT Technology Review

Revolutionizing Warfare: The Impact of a Game-Changing Giant Microwave

June 1, 2025
EA SPORTS™ College Football 26 Launches Worldwide on July 10 Celebrating Emerging Stars, Real-world Coaches and the Spirit of College Football – Electronic Arts Home Page

Get Ready for EA SPORTS™ College Football 26: Launching Worldwide on July 10 to Celebrate Rising Stars and the Heart of College Football!

June 1, 2025

Categories

Archives

June 2025
MTWTFSS
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 
« May    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (656)
  • Economy (672)
  • Entertainment (21,578)
  • General (15,254)
  • Health (9,714)
  • Lifestyle (674)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (673)
  • Politics (680)
  • Science (15,892)
  • Sports (21,176)
  • Technology (15,659)
  • World (660)

Recent News

Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump’s research funding cuts – Space

Climate scientists are hosting a 100-hour YouTube livestream in response to Trump’s research funding cuts – Space

June 1, 2025
YouTube Science Star Derek Muller Confronts PFAS “Forever Chemicals”—In His Own Blood – Scientific American

YouTube Science Sensation Derek Muller Takes on PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Found in His Own Blood!

June 1, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version