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Matt Stoller
mattstoller.substack.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Matt Stoller writes a newsletter on antitrust, monopoly power, and corporate consolidation in the US economy.
What HN saysCommenters recommend him for coverage of antitrust enforcement and monopoly issues, often alongside Lina Khan's work, and point to his weekly analysis.
231HN people shared it
104linked it in comments
286stories submitted
10Kstory points
3 years agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore25 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don't10 people · 69 points · first shared 2020 · 29 comments on HN
- 3The Coming Boeing Bailout?9 people · 330 points · first shared 2019 · 182 comments on HN
- 4Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare9 people · 11 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?7 people · 26 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 6WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism6 people · 1.2K points · first shared 2019 · 414 comments on HN
- 7Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting?6 people · 501 points · first shared 2020 · 367 comments on HN
- 8How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities6 people · 18 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
- 9Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor5 people · 829 points · first shared 2019 · 310 comments on HN
- 10Too Big to Sail: How a Legal Revolution Clogged Our Ports5 people · 51 points · first shared 2021 · 13 comments on HN
- 11Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace5 people · 15 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Should we save newspapers from Google?5 people · 11 points · first shared 2022 · 3 comments on HN
- 13It’s Time to Break Up Disney: Part One5 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 14The Cheerleading Monopoly Varsity Brands5 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 15The Slow Death of Hollywood4 people · 246 points · first shared 2019 · 255 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
passwordoops · 2023-05-02
The regulations already exist - don't buy the competition and don't use your market power to undercut the competition. Simple and worked excellently in the post-WW2 boom years.
But regulators stopped enforcing those regulations in the 1980s because of "efficiency" and each administration after Reagan doubled down. Luckily some politicians are starting to see the error of their ways and listening to thinkers like Matt Stoller:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
dabedee · 2023-01-24
I think your comment was valuable in that it suggested the work being done on antitrust by Lisa Khan. For those who are interested, I would also recommend reading the excellent Matt Stoller on Substack [1] who does a weekly analysis on antitrust regulation, monopolies, and more.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/
akira2501 · 2022-06-24
Matt Stoller has recently been doing a great job covering action in this space as well.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Super_Jambo · 2022-04-02
But monopolies are good for us and all regulation of companies is bad.
Might be worth telling Matt Stoller about this. https://mattstoller.substack.com/
poof131 · 2022-01-10
The rampant cynicism regarding corporations is increasingly unhelpful. We’ve had forty years of hands off antitrust regulation and enforcement. We’ve had a bifurcating justice system that doesn’t hold white collar criminals accountable. It hasn’t always been this way and doesn’t have to stay this way. For those interested in the challenges we’re facing with monopolies and individuals trying to effect change, I recommend Matt Stoller’s substack [1].
1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/
quadrangle · 2020-09-28
I agree almost fully.
But Capitalism is about the private ownership of capital and means-of-production as opposed to state-owned. And if the state is actually run democratically, then that non-capitalist approach could be a democratic economy. That has its own set of issues, but it's not exclusive of the free exchange of goods in markets with money. See, e.g. Market Socialism.
Capitalism does not equal markets. Markets predate capitalism. Capitalism can well have totally non-free dysfunctional markets controlled entirely by monopolists. That's today's situation. See https://mattstoller.substack.com for great reporting on this.
It's just as much a mistake to assert that Capitalism is synonymous with markets as to assert that it's synonymous with today's crony-capitalism with regulatory-capture etc.
apatters · 2020-09-22
I don't think that consolidation is inevitable at all, Americans are increasingly disillusioned with big business and there is a slowly growing anti-corporate sentiment being expressed (albeit opportunistically) by politicians as varied as Liz Warren, Ron Wyden, Marco Rubio and Trump. Matt Stoller's Substack is a great resource to learn more: https://mattstoller.substack.com/
leonroy · 2020-07-25
not the OP, but I find BIG by Matt Stoller and Notes on the Crises by Nathan Tankus a nice break from the mainstream press.
Insightful, well considered and non-dramatized writing on important subjects:
https://nathantankus.substack.com/
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
skmurphy · 2020-02-05
key paragraph:
"In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent."
This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ). I came across this https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting-games-the which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing.
Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.
euroderf · 2023-01-25
One will want to see what Matt Stoller[1] will have to say about this.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com
pwinnski · 2023-01-24
It turns out that the US government can do more than one thing at a time, and they are in fact acting in many cases simultaneously, including insulin.
They haven't been "limited" so much in the past as "unmotivated and inept," which has been changing over the last few years.
If you're actually interested in the changes, check out Matt Stoller's newsletter: https://mattstoller.substack.com
al3xandre · 2023-01-09
You should checkout Matt Stroller’s monopoly newsletter.
This is basically what he is doing except uncovering a monopoly in depth takes months, not a day. Amazing work.
E.g. here for cheerleading monopoly article he wrote
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-a-cheerleading-monopolist-playe…
jollofricepeas · 2023-01-08
Have you considered maybe reaching out to Matt Stoller?
It seems what you’re envisioning has a ton of overlap with his work covering monopolies.
I’m sure you two could work some magic together.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
codexjourneys · 2022-12-06
There's a good article from September on how Australia's similar bill worked pretty well: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers-from-goog…
Local news is in trouble, and it might be worth saving.
mistermann · 2022-12-01
Not that I'd ever expect it to happen, but the DOJ coming down hard on Apple like they did with Microsoft could go a long way to getting corporations to voluntarily rein in their aggressive business practices.
For anyone interested in the antitrust space, this is a pretty good (though excessively optimistic imho) newsletter:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
diordiderot · 2022-11-01
Also if you're interested worth checking out the cantillon effect
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-why-wall-stree…
I'm no economist but I have a sense that too much capital going to 'capitalists' inflates asset prices without increased productivity/growth/efficiency.
> goes nowhere interesting
:(
n4r9 · 2022-09-30
Matt Stoller certainly thinks it was good: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers-from-goog…
I haven't gotten round to reading that article in detail yet, but I find him pretty insightful when it comes to the harmful impacts of market consolidation.
zanek · 2022-08-29
This reminds me of counterfeit capitalism
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism
"Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal . Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.
What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else."
connor11528 · 2022-06-05
Haha ya straight up. In the original draft of this post I touched on how Florida real estate speculation fueled the great depression and the crash of 2008. Now it's crypto companies selling digital real estate. Don't hate the player hate the game I guess..
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/cryptocurrencies-a-necessary-scam?s…
kyletns · 2021-06-29
By far the best reporting on this I've found is Matt Stoller here: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/facebook-hits-1-trillion-in-market
Highly suggest a sub, he only writes about American monopoly power.
ScottBurson · 2021-05-23
You might find Matt Stoller's blog interesting: https://mattstoller.substack.com/
logicchains · 2021-05-14
America was in a deflationary environment for much of the 1800s and GDP grew at faster rate than the 1900s, with smaller crashes (nothing as big as the Great Depression or the GFC). Anti-deflationary propaganda is just FUD funded by an entire industry heavily invested in the current system: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-cantillon-effect-why-wall-stree…
yokto · 2020-10-20
> And why didn't Facebook get sued too?
"The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow" [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at exactly the same time.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-would-president-biden-approach
PS: Since it contains quite a bit of interesting and relevant information about the cases against GAFA, I submitted this particular newsletter at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837931
bretthowell · 2020-10-14
Slow burn of this topic, this deeper analysis looked at Netflix’s impact on Hollywood too. This[1] is from 2019:
“[Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third ... don’t do much...”
^1 https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood
wazoox · 2020-09-12
This is what he wrote about in a longer form here:
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135…
This is also what Matt Stoller is writing about, the "monopolisation" of the world, particularly in tech of course:
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Funnily, I've recently read "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" by Lenin. Multinational companies were called trusts, monopolism was called imperialism, and train, coal and steel was since replaced with telcos and internet but it's incredibly apt at describing our world. Even the "systemic banks" were mostly the same 100 years ago : BNP, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, JPMorgan...
daturkel · 2020-07-24
This is actually a very interesting point that I've come across on a few different platforms recently (Patreon, for example, [also targets their homepage to creators, not consumers](https://www.patreon.com/)). I wonder if Substack just doesn't want to deal with opening the door to some newsletters getting "free promotion" by being features on their homepage? Nonetheless, I'd love to see "trending" or "editors picks" or something.
Nonetheless, here are some I subscribe to:
Big, by Matt Stoller (about monopolies): https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Margins (about business and tech): https://themargins.substack.com/
Flow State (music): https://flowstate.substack.com/
Normcore tech (tech, data science): https://vicki.substack.com/
The Passion Economy (business): https://passion.substack.com/
toomuchtodo · 2020-07-16
> Can anyone recommend good writing on Substack to follow?
https://nathantankus.substack.com/
https://oversharing.substack.com/
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
https://sirota.substack.com/
https://gwern.substack.com/
voodootrucker · 2020-07-01
America has a lot of problems, but they all look strangely like anti-trust: https://mattstoller.substack.com/
bogomipz · 2020-05-28
No this is not how Boeing has always operated. Boeing had a great engineering culture for most of its' history. A fundamental shift happened around the time that the company merged with McDonnell Douglas, a merger that was shepherded largely by the Department of Defense. Around this time began the "Financialization" of Boeing. The following is a good read on the shift within the company and how that new culture enabled the Dreamliner and the 737 Max debacles.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-in…
Matt Stoller also talked about this cultural shift that enabled Boeings problems in an article a year ago.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout