I’ve noticed “let us price it for you” appearing in ever more apps and services. Seatgeek most recently.
It's not a crime if we do it with an app
581–590 of 640 posts
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
The U.S. before antitrust laws existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Steel_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Pacific_Railroad
Standard Oil: Its monopoly was already crumbling before antitrust action. By 1911, market share had plunged from 90% to 64% as competitors like Gulf/Texaco emerged and new oil fields broke its grip. Carnegie Steel: Government intervention. The federal government imposed steep tariffs on imported steel, shielding domestic producers like Carnegie from foreign competition. Without those tariffs, cheaper British/German s…
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#583This is all a result of a lack of active market regulation. The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states. But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily. If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently.…
> If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently. The fallacy is assuming that the government will make everything cheap for consumers. In practice, government regulation of prices just changes the game. Look at any market with rent control: There are numerous meta-games around building or not building new supply, l…
The government does not make things cheaper, competition does. The government’s role is to protect competition. Otherwise companies will collude not to compete.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#584> Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade > Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL Algorithmic price fixing is certainly a not-insignificant part of the issue. But it's strange to see zero acknowledgement of the massive increase in money supply over the same time period. When doing causal analysis, we need to examine both the private sector and…
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is zero chance that this kind of Justice department actions will be continued in the current administration
Actually, there’s still a chance the current administration can do something about it. But there’s a zero chance the previous administration did anything about it.
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lina Khan led the most antitrust-focused DoJ in a century, which went after Apple, Google, Nvidia, Realpage, airlines, and dozens of other companies. MAGA give zero fucks about antitrust, and antitrust or lack thereof has nothing to do with the creation of MAGA. That's such an absurd argument I have no idea how to even respond to it. The cornerstone of MAGA has always been nativism & reactionary politics. I'm very, v…
What did Lena Kahn actually accomplish though? Maybe they had to pay some fines some traffic tickets essentially.
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL This graph is absolutely insane. As I am completely unfamiliar with what is represented, would you have some pointers on where to start to understand what it represents? I'm particularly intrigued by the very sharp rise during the covid time, when the global economy was in taters.
Go to the settings of the graph and set the graph to logarithmic. Growth is linear.
An upward line on a log graph represents exponential, not linear, growth.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#588> These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period The only one I found a time series for quickly is Lamb Weston: Their margins steadily went down after 2019, then surged quite substantially, and by the end of 2024 were more or less back at their 21/22 low points [1] Additionally there's apparently a class action suit against the compan…
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#589Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates? Its a question I keep coming back to because if the market were efficient then competitors should be able to use that same data to undercut big potato (or big whatever). This never seems to happen.
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.
Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app
#590> Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade > Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL Algorithmic price fixing is certainly a not-insignificant part of the issue. But it's strange to see zero acknowledgement of the massive increase in money supply over the same time period. When doing causal analysis, we need to examine both the private sector and…
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.
More dollars in circulation chasing the same supply of products = increased demand for those products, in dollar terms. I'm not looking specifically at the COVID spike (which, indeed, seems to be over from a monetary policy perspective), I'm looking at the longer term continuous exponential increase in money supply.