Also Dana White hasn't been run out of town yet and everyday I wonder how that is still possible.
Natural entertainment monopolies...interesting concept.
I agree with your statement though, I've written about it before back when XFL was going on. I think there is some potential for multiple fighting orgs however. But first they need to take away some market share from UFC. Once they get on more even grounds we might see cross-promotion fights, something that is normal in boxing. As it stands though, UFC has nothing to gain from that, but Bellator/OneFC cross promotion has been floated in the past.
Because UFC makes fights happen. How long did it take for Manny and Floyd to finally go head to head?
I sympathetize with his general position (as life gets complex, barriers to entry rise and markets of many small companies are replaced by one's of a few big companies.
But then he gets lost in his own prejudices/conspiracy theories about harvard, financial engineering etc. Not really helpful to his wider point...
>He also dismisses economics of scale as an accounting fiddle
He proposed on Twitter to make bulk discounting illegal for the entire US economy, on the theory that any kind of discounting is just predatory pricing. In other words, whether you buy 1 computer server or 10,000, 2 avocados or 2 million, the price per unit would be exactly the same. He thinks this would harm large companies and help smaller ones
Is this a real thing? I follow Stoller on Twitter, and have never heard him say anything like that. Just that predatory pricing is often snuck in under the guise of "discounting" (which is true).
He's definitely a centrist on economic policy, which turns a lot of people away (most Americans have never heard of a centrist view of any policy of any kind, and most Americans are far more conservative than they'd ever actually admit to). But nothing about him seems ideologue-ish, and he's certainly not anywhere near left-wing on economic policy.
[...]
"Doing a roll-up is designed to take advantage of how capital markets value bigger companies versus small ones, or what is called multiple expansion.
Buying a small family owned business for three to four times its cash flow
(or what is known in annoying accounting-speak as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, abbreviated as EBITDA), putting it into a conglomerate that financiers then call a ‘platform’ or ‘market leader’, means you can often
sell the much bigger company for eight to ten times that cash flow later on."
My comments:
Buy low, sell high...
Makes sense from a pure business perspective...
I remember (2014 or so) looking for apartments in some places in NYC - I went to multiple buildings before it struck me that they were all owned by the same company. I've been a renter all my life and the situation is not good for renters.
I don't care if the super rich have mega mansions and million dollar cars. It is when they start monopolizing essential resources like water, housing etc that it becomes a serious issue.
Another thing I noticed on HN - HN doesn't seem to like landlords being criticized, I guess many people here are well off and are landlords themselves. I do not understand why a person should be allowed to own multiple houses, just because they can afford it.
There is a German town that bought apartment buildings from private companies to take charge of the out of control rent. Maybe it is time for such measures.
After healthcare, housing (mortgage or rent) is how you keep a large percentage of the population chained to their jobs and control them easily. It is also the reason tiny house movement is taking off in other countries. In the US, legislation is a bottleneck for tiny houses. Who wants to be a slave to banks for 30+ years just to have a roof over one's head (assuming one can get a loan in the first place)?
It’s not just tiny houses. On average, large developers in San Jose pay > 20% of the price of new home construction for government overhead (unnecessary work, permitting fees, rubber-stamp yielding consultants, etc).
On top of that, they often add a year or so delay to projects because they intentionally understaff the permitting offices, and created a system designed to block new construction.
We’re building a house, and it took over a year to go from architectural plans to permit. Twelve offices had to approve the plans.
All in, it will cost >2x the price of the house to complete construction. Of course, now we’re up to our eyeballs in debt and have pushed retirement out about 10 years. (Backing out by the time we realized we had been trapped would have been even worse, financially.)
If you're a billionaire, you quickly run out of mansions and cars to buy for yourself and your money has to go somewhere. This is why you hear statements like "billionaires shouldn't exist" - mass acquisitions are an obvious use of that kind of capital and allow for rent-seeking behaviour on owned assets.
From 2013:
Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/behind-the-rise-in-h...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho... (paywalled)
Private Equity USA — Your friendly local parasite, serving you with a smile!™
Is this the last stage of US Imperialism? Will US foreign military bases be used to show up on behalf of our new landlord to say: 'pay your rent now, bitch' [1]?
[1] https://twitter.com/funnyordie/status/1167799200538484736
Warren Buffet has had a near monopoly on new mobile home construction, sales and leasing.
https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...
I pay something in the range of $15k-$20k in property taxes and mortgage interest, but receive zero deduction/exemption on my federal taxes for it.
I don't think the UFC should have been allowed to buy Strikeforce, and I think many of their restrictive contract provision should be struck down in court. But it's not the government's fault that none of the UFC's competitors are unable to turn a profit, and I don't really see a role for government there overall. If some business models don't work in practice, they don't work
When saying this is bad, what is the author optimizing for?
This market consolidation should decrease consumer prices, as long as actual monopolies are not in place and price fixing doesn't occur. At the same time the individual owners are getting buy-outs they are happy with. Seems fine to me.
What am I missing?
That is literally the definition of monopolizing...
> market consolidation
Again, that's just another word for monopolizing...
It reminds me of people who say "I, as a man, like having sex with other men — but no, I am not gay or bisexual"
It's like society has become 'definition phobic'? Or maybe some words have lost their old definitions and have taken on new ones? Or it's just Doublespeak and everyone is fragmented and we lack decent complex adaptive systems?
The rules for what consists of a monopoly are somewhat arbitrary anyway. I think we should have worker coops everywhere, instead of this American/English-style Neoliberal Corporatism, which often takes away people's autonomy and creates a whole array of bureacratic corporate hierarchies. A company in the Netherlands called Buurtzorg is having a lot of success organizing themselves very differently than the hyper-consolidation that we have seen the healthcare systems in the West become victim to. [1]
-
> What am I missing?
I don't even know where to start...
Have you been in therapy or sought professional help? Many therapists now have to work within one size fits all models. For example: in some countries patients get therapy sessions in blocks of 12. Regardless of wether they would benefit from just 2-3 sessions. Or maybe around 25, spread out over a year, is what would best support them. This cookie-cutter standardization approach completely destroys equitable and personalized healthcare options, and takes away the autonomy of therapists.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/20/radical-plan...
Its like worrying about “real estate investors” getting a “monopoly” on the ownership of houses - it’s not going to happen. Real estate investors are part of the market, and having an additional source of demand tends to raise prices, which is bad for new buyers and good for existing homeowners. But there is no monopoly.
[0]https://www.alta.org/business-tools/title-insurance-mergers.... [1]https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-c...
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail."
the examples enumeration is good information, but to me, this quoted bit would have been a better jumping off point for an article.
what are the precedents and barriers to private antitrust suits?
monopolies are a scourge and a bane to free markets.
