Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, or become a paying subscriber, you can do so here.

This is the last issue of 2022. I’m very excited for next year, because the move for more enforcement is picking up steam. Turning on enforcement is not like a light switch. It takes time, but it also carries momentum. Investigations can take months or longer, which means a bunch of stuff launched in 2021 and 2022 will bear fruit this year.

For this issue, I’ll look both back and forward. I’m going to trace the broad trends in monopoly-related commerce and policy over the last year, as well as offer some predictions for next year.

What’s the basic story of 2022? This Reuters headline says it all. For the first time in our lifetimes, it became harder for Wall Street to construct monopolies.

We’re part of this story, so first, let’s talk a bit about this newsletter, and what we accomplished together.

In 2022, BIG got big. At the end of 2022, 76,647 people were subscribed to this newsletter. That’s up from 50,080 at the end of 2021, 35,513 at the end of 2020 and 17,690 at the end of 2019. Our nerdy but useful articles were read millions of times, and BIG is now cited in antitrust cases and major publications, as well as read widely within the competition policy community around the world. State and city officials, members of Congress, entrepreneurs, journalists, students, workers, and engineers read and circulate what we do.

This size and reach has translated into influence. Last month, Politico’s Nancy Scola noted that our “ideas are dominant in Washington under President Joe Biden,” though we also have many allies on the right as well. One lobbying firm ranked us as #5 in the country in terms of being a super-influencer on antitrust (as well as political economy in general). I don’t know what a super-influencer is, but it sounds impressive.

While there are many people who have praised this work, I tend to see hostility from opponents as equally significant. So my favorite mention this year is from former Senator Phil Gramm, who attacked us in the Wall Street Journal for criticizing the use of economics in antitrust law. Gramm is responsible for the repeal of Glass-Steagall as well Ticketmaster’s market power, and once said, “When I am on Wall Street and I realize that that’s the very nerve center of American capitalism and I realize what capitalism has done for the working people of America, to me that’s a holy place.” If Gramm is unhappy with what we’re doing, then we’re on the right track.

In terms of paid subscribers, over 3000 of you signed up as paying supporters. With this revenue stream, we have a copy-editor and as well as a few guest-writers. I’ve been testing a podcast to see if it’s doable, and I am doing videos with Breaking Points on monopoly power. There’s also a Discord server for paying subscribers, where you can learn about everything from the nitty gritty of pharmaceutical pricing to finding old-timey anti-monopoly cartoons. Most importantly, you invested in making sure that I have the independence to offer the unvarnished truth. If you want to subscribe, you can do so here. If you are a student or otherwise can’t afford this newsletter but want to be a paid subscriber, get in touch.

So the big trend this year, according to both the Financial Times and the New York Times’ Dealbook, is the fall in merger activity. Wall Street bonuses are down, and private equity firms are pulling back from acquisitions.

There were two main reasons for this downturn. First, the crazy merger wave of 2021 finally crested, because the Federal Reserve stopped printing trillions of dollars, which had made it easy to borrow money to make acquisitions. In 2021, the total global value of mergers was a record $5.7 trillion. In the last six months of 2022, the rate dropped to $2.8 trillion a year, an eight-year low. Private equity lost its cheap financing, and the most obvious Ponzi schemes – such as crypto – collapsed.

Second, antitrust enforcement became real. The Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division started to bring merger cases more aggressively and more assertively than they had since the 1970s. Numbers tell the story.

The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have attempted to thwart 22 mergers since Biden came into office in January 2021… That outnumbers the antitrust challenges during the first two years of former President Barack Obama’s first term in office and is twice as many as in Donald Trump’s first two years, the Reuters analysis shows.

While comprehensive data going back decades is unavailable, Joel Grosberg, an antitrust lawyer at McDermott, Will & Emery LLP, said more mergers are entangled in U.S. antitrust litigation now than at any point in his 25-year career.

It’s not just mergers. Enforcers resurrected dormant areas of law, such as the Robinson-Patman Act against price discrimination and corporate bribery, a section of the Clayton Act that bars exclusive dealing, and a provision of antitrust law which bars having directors sit on the board of rival firms. In addition, Congress passed the first meaningful antitrust reforms since 1976, as well as gave significant funding boosts for the agencies. State attorneys general also ramped up their role. For instance, Washington state’s Bob Ferguson actually delaying the payout of a $4 billion special dividend by Albertsons to private equity owners.

Believe it or not, this newsletter played a role in this shift. We write consistently about monopolies. On a broad level, having a clear and persistent argument helps ensure policymakers act. It’s human nature that when people know they are being watched, they operate differently. Corporate lobbyists are watching policymakers all the time, which leads government officials to take their perspective into account. Now that policymakers know we are watching them, they are taking our perspective into account. The result is aggressive enforcers get more aggressive, and those who are unwilling to act feel more pressure to do so.

I want to highlight two particular accomplishments. The first is helping to revamp how