"Since the Trump administration moved to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, the bureau has dropped nine lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of consumers.

The actions effectively freed major financial firms like Capital One and the mortgage giant Rocket Homes from the threat of consequences for their alleged significant wrongdoing, shocking consumer advocates and raising questions about the future of America’s consumer watchdog. For their part, when the cases were dropped, the companies lauded the decisions, with a bank spokesperson welcoming the dismissal of the case, “which we strongly disputed,” and Rocket Homes calling the suit an “empty claim.”

But the administration’s new hands-off approach to enforcement at the CFPB extends far beyond those public lawsuits. Behind the scenes, dozens of ongoing investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance are now frozen at the agency, potentially denying accountability and financial relief for untold numbers of consumers, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Under a stop-work order issued by the agency’s new leaders, CFPB investigators have been unable to press forward on probes into companies whose products and services are used by tens of millions of Americans, including Carvana, the online used-car retailer; Mr. Cooper, one of the country’s largest mortgage servicers; and CareCredit, a leader in medical credit cards, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matters."

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-cfpb-investigation-capital-one-rocket-meta-carvana-greenlight

#USA #Trump #CFPB #ConsumersRights #Antitrust #BigTech

"The Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years’ worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

On the FTC’s website, the page hosting all of the agency’s business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden’s administration, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, tell WIRED. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws."

https://www.wired.com/story/federal-trade-commission-removed-blogs-critical-of-ai-amazon-microsoft/

#USA #Trump #FTC #Antitrust #ConsumerProtection #Privacy #BigTech #AI

"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.

I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.

Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.

But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens-collapsed

#USA #Walgreens #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Pharmacy #Antitrust

Probably the only acceptable choice made by Trump until now...:

"Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.

While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.

Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google."

https://www.ft.com/content/769709d5-f897-497d-a8f2-ce15a3c977ed

#USA #Trump #Antitrust #DoJ #BigBusiness #Competition #Monopolies #Oligopolies

Eyebrow raising article on #LaFires :

Why were so many firetrucks in California old and out of order?

Private equity consolidated the firetruck market, increased scarcity, and jacked up prices.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll

#Wildfires #California #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Climate #ClimateCrisis #AntiTrust #Economics #USA

"Replacing Chopra is hard for Trump in part because Trump has imposed a federal hiring freeze. That means that anyone who replaces Chopra has to already be working for the US government, and all the finance grifters are cashing out of the government to go work for giant financial institutions they've been carrying water for while drawing a public salary. Even the people who might take the job can't, because then no one could be hired to do their job – for example, there's a ghoul at the FDIC who'd fit the bill, but if he takes over from Chopra, then the FDIC will have just two members. If the GOP stooge on the FCC quits to take the job, then the Democratic commissioners will have a majority. You love to see it, really.

But – as Dayen points out – they're almost certainly gonna give Chopra the axe eventually. When they do, the CFPB will continue to do some enforcements. It's likely that Ferguson will eventually direct the FTC to do something apart from peering under their beds looking for "woke." When they do take action, they'll probably take action against companies that are wildly, lavishly corrupt. After all, that describes basically all of American big business, a sector that has festered thanks to 40 years of antitrust negligence.

It will be tempting for Trump's opponents to decide that if Trump hates these giant, evil companies, well, then, they must be good. Think of when "progressives" fell in love with the "intelligence community" just because a couple spooks decided they hated Trump. The FBI isn't your friend, folks – this is the agency that tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
(...)
The enemy of your enemy? Still your enemy, provided that they're a big, predatory monopolist. Boss politics is about punishing corruption – selectively. Trump-style antitrust is going to target a ton of bad businesses. That won't make them good."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

#USA #Trump #Antitrust #Competition #FCC #CFPB #BossPolitics #Plutocracy

"These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.
Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others’ business models. “Big Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,” says Richard Kramer, Arete’s founder. “We expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.”

That competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its “fake humanitarian mission”. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t actually have the money.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ffcd84d1-822c-492c-94e2-07785cfe3524

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Antitrust #Oligopolies #Competition

"The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly power over the repair market, which 404 Media has been reporting on for years.

The lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney generals of Illinois and Minnesota, is the latest and most serious legal salvo against Deere’s repair monopoly. Deere is also facing a class-action lawsuit related to its repair practices from consumers in Illinois that the Department of Justice and other federal entities have signaled they are interested in and support, as we reported last year.

“The Federal Trade Commission today files suit against agricultural equipment manufacturer Deere & Company, stating that it has illegally restricted the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combines,” FTC commissioner Lina Khan wrote in a formal comment explaining the decision."

https://www.404media.co/ftc-sues-john-deere-over-its-repair-monopoly/

#USA #FTC #JohnDeere #RightToRepair #Monopolies #RepairMonopoly #Antitrust

Jeff Bezos: Everything You Didn’t Know About his Shi*ty past

https://youtu.be/IDFM7j-44Tg?si=wq4pODxdFLm_IOI4

#antitrust #osha #retail #labor #dork #billionaires #books #walmart #AntiCompetitive #logistics #WashingtonPost #journalism

"From telecoms to groceries to pharmacies to the resource sector, Canada is a playground for a handful of supremely powerful men from dynastic families, who have bought their way to dominance, consuming small businesses by the hundreds and periodically merging with one another.

Hearn and Bednar tell this story and explain all the ways that Canadian firms use their market power to reduce quality, raise prices, abuse workers and starve suppliers, even as they capture the government and the regulators who are supposed to be overseeing them.

The odd thing is that Canada has been in the antitrust game for a long time: Canada passed its first antitrust law in 1889, a year before the USA got around to inaugurating its trustbusting era with the passage of the Sherman Act. But despite this early start, Canada's ultra-rich have successfully used the threat of American corporate juggernauts to defend the idea of Made-in-Canada monopolies, as homegrown King Kongs that will keep the nation safe from Yankee Godzillas."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

#Canada #Antitrust #Competition #Monopolies

This is a terrific piece tht traces how the #Reagan admin created policy tht increased #food prices, reduced #grocery store competition, killed 1000s of grocery store #jobs.

This Reagan #deregulation allowed corps to engage in unfair price fixing tht disadvantaged smaller grocers leading to reemergence of #FoodDeserts in the 80s to now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/

#poverty #racism #greed #antitrust #food #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter

"If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.

Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.

And that brings me back to the learned helplessness of the Democrats. The reason the anti-monopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of anti-politics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-the-democratic-partys-cult-of

#USA #Neoliberalism #DemocraticParty #Antitrust #Capitalism #Monopolies #Oligopolies

Legal and contracting experts say the administration’s deals with #Microsoft never should have come to pass, as they sidestep or even possibly violate federal procurement and #antitrust laws.

#News #Technology #Government #Biden #Tech

https://propub.li/4evDWGW

"Leaders at top big tech firms rushed to congratulate Donald Trump on his landslide election victory as they sought to rebuild bridges with the president-elect — and his most influential Silicon Valley booster, Elon Musk — ahead of a transformative period for the sector.

The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft posted supportive messages on social media on Wednesday, which stood in contrast to their more circumspect reaction to the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections. All of their companies have since faced significant regulatory probes and antitrust threats as part of a crackdown by Joe Biden’s Democratic administration.

They now stand to gain much from a more tech- and business-friendly attitude from Trump, if they can win over a mercurial politician who in the past has repeatedly clashed with what he considers a left-leaning constituency that has funded his opponents and censored him."

https://www.ft.com/content/79f87a7f-66b2-454e-8f58-8d5f535cce66

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Competition #Antitrust

Airline IDU: led Buttigieg to realize -corps. need⬆️oversight.

That led to a series of decisions he made as TRANS Sec -nudged along by #antitrust thinkers in the admin... calling for remaking the airline IDU *caused even some of his loudest critics to reassess him. No longer do they see him as too-cautious/centrist/poll-tested/corp-friendly; instead, some fmr critics say Buttigieg has become a real ally in the push to check IDUs that'd gotten too big/powerf-.

#HarrisWalz https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/03/pete-buttigieg-tough-on-airlines-00181436

Business leaders are worried about JD Vance and the future of the GOP https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/03/business-leaders-jd-vance-republican-populism-00186981?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication #NationalPolitics #publicaffairs #healthcare #Investment #Regulatory #Technology #Antitrust #Companies #Elections #Stability #Americas #Populism #Politics #BigTech #Markets #mergers #Tariffs #Energy #Policy #Rights #Banks #Labor #Media #Trade #Tax

US sues Ticketmaster owner Live Nation and seeks break-up of alleged monopoly https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/23/live-nation-ticketmaster-lawsuit
Promotion and ticketing company has faced scrutiny for years, particularly after it botched ticket sales to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour
#competition #antitrust #monopoly

We've fined Apple over €1.8 billion over abusive App Store rules for music streaming providers.

For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position by restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem.

This is illegal under #EU #antitrust rules.

More info: http://europa.eu/!yyFVPj

Republicans want to defund the (corporate) police

"The Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

-Matt Stoller

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

#antitrust #corruption