In this episode, Front Running looks at the promises of draining the swamp that President Trump made and failed to implement. Lobbyists continue to write legislation and get whatever it is they want, often over the will of the people.
For this episode of Front Running, Max and Stacy’s guests are Josh Crumb, a former banker turned entrepreneur, and Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and Levy Institute researcher. They discuss one of Elizabeth Warren’s signature issues, the busting up of some of the social media and data monopolies like Facebook. They review the data, such as the decline in company formation and productivity, which suggests that monopoly and oligopoly are indeed harming the overall economy. Whether or not we need a trust-buster like Teddy Roosevelt, however, is another matter when the fact is there are perhaps deeper underlying issues in a world of negative interest rates. Time is a fundamental scarcity in economics, but negative interest rates remove the risk of time scarcity for the very select few who are able to access credit from the central banks on those terms, thus giving them the freedom to leverage their market power and outcompete any company that has to borrow at real rates. As big companies get to use cheap credit to expand, they are also consolidating this knowledge base into private companies fueled with monopoly credit, which is very dangerous. Tune in to hear what Front Running has to say about breaking up these powerful entities and rescuing the economy.
