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      Kamala Harris decries Trump’s abortion comments in first solo TV interview

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      Kamala Harris sat for her first solo interview as the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday, laying out her plan to boost the middle class and condemning her rival Donald Trump on his comments over abortion.During the interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the vice-president painted Trump as a candidate focused on the rich at the expense of the middle class, and herself as better equipped to handle the economy.“The top economists in our country have compared our plans and say mine would grow the economy, [and] his would shrink it,” she said during the interview.On his economic record, Harris said: “Donald Trump made a whole lot of promises that he did not meet.”Harris also showed disdain over Trump’s comments over abortion, expressing he needs to trust women to make their own reproductive decisions. Her comments came after Trump, at a Pennsylvania rally, called himself a “protector” of women, claiming American women will not be “thinking about abortion” if he is elected.“Donald Trump is also the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they, rightly, should be able to make about their own body and future,” Harris said.On a lighter note, Harris confirmed that she worked at McDonald’s, pushing back against Trump’s allegations that she did not.“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s who are trying to raise a family,” she said, alluding to her economic policy plan to help working-class families.“I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs,” Harris added.The interview comes at a time when Harris faces harsh criticism over the lack of media interviews she has done. Earlier this month, Axios reported that the Harris-Walz campaign has so far given fewer interviews than any other candidates in modern history.Trump and JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential pick, have used it as ammunition during their campaign speeches. On X, Vance responded to news of Harris’s interview by saying: “This is legitimately pathetic for a person who wants to be president. Ruhle has explicitly endorsed Harris. She won’t ask hard Qs. Kamala runs from tough questions because she can’t defend her record. If you want open borders and high groceries, vote for status quo Kamala.”In August, Harris was interviewed on CNN alongside Walz. The interview was hosted by Dana Bash and was aired as a one-hour primetime special. After the interview, Republicans criticized the joint interview with Walz for being pre-recorded and not live.Since then, Harris has given a handful of interviews, mostly with local outlets or more niche forums, including an appearance with Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis, a Spanish-language radio host and podcaster.Harris also appeared in a live-streamed “Unite For America” event with supporters hosted by Oprah Winfrey last week. More

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      Price-gouging is illegal in 37 US states. Let’s make it 50 | Bob Casey

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      Over the past few years, Erin Wiggle has approached every trip to the grocery store with a sense of dread. During each visit, the retired army veteran, small business owner and mother from Worcester Township, Pennsylvania, has seen her budget stretched thinner and thinner as prices keep ratcheting up for the goods her family relies on. Erin’s burden has grown heavier despite pandemic-related supply chain issues subsiding, and she has a growing sense that the companies making the products she needs are padding their profits at the expense of her family.Erin is right. Under the cover of inflation, companies have raised the prices of everyday household items to rake in record profits at the expense of American families. As my investigation into what I’ve called “greedflation” shows, from mid-2020 to mid-2022, corporate profits rose by 75% – five times as fast as inflation. In fact, corporate profits jumped so much that they played a major role in causing inflation – according to the Federal Reserve, corporate profits accounted for all the inflation from July 2020 through July 2021 and 41% of all inflation from July 2020 through July 2022.We should not let powerful corporations use a crisis to jack up prices way beyond what is necessary to make a profit. In fact, many states across the country have already steeled themselves to fight the most egregious examples of this shameful practice. Laws against price-gouging are on the books in 37 states and the District of Columbia, giving state attorneys general the power to investigate and prosecute companies that excessively raise prices during emergencies. In the US Senate, I’ve introduced legislation with my colleagues Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin to give the federal government power to do the same.In recent weeks, after Kamala Harris embraced our bill as a part of her economic agenda, the legislation has come under fire from various defenders of corporate greed. These critics appear to have missed the fact that the federal legislation is modeled on laws that are already in effect across the nation, where capitalism is still alive and well. In Texas, for example, where the attorney general has the power to take on companies that unfairly exploit state residents, the governor regularly touts the state as the best place to do business in the country.Similarly, the critics are ignoring the very real protections these laws have offered for consumers. In Pennsylvania, where a price-gouging ban was enacted in 2006, the office of the attorney general investigated hundreds of cases of businesses taking advantage of Covid-19 to price-gouge desperate consumers. The investigations ultimately led to fines and to restitution for many consumers who were taken advantage of in the early days of the pandemic, including hundreds of thousands from just one seller alone.Bans on price-gouging protect victims from companies that would take advantage of different crises to rip off scared consumers. In New York, the state was able to punish Walgreens for taking advantage of customers during the infant formula crisis when supply chain issues reduced the availability of baby formula across the country. In North Carolina, the attorney general won a series of cases against companies that gouged consumers following hurricanes. In both Kentucky and Idaho, companies were held accountable for artificially forcing up gas prices in the wake of pipeline closures.These laws don’t just prevent price-gouging on a case-by-case basis; they also send a message to companies about where and when to draw the line. In the 37 states with price-gouging bans, companies can still raise prices, and they can still bring in a healthy profit for their shareholders. It’s only when they seek to take advantage of a crisis to fleece consumers that they can expect the government to step in and stop them. Our bill would apply this standard to massive corporations that exploit consumers while specifically protecting small businesses under $100m in earnings that don’t have the same power to set prices.There are multiple factors that contribute to the high cost of living, but there is no question that corporate greed plays a role. While companies have a right to turn a profit – even a substantial one – American consumers deserve to pay fair prices. That means holding giant corporations accountable when they go too far to make a buck.Giving the federal government the power to investigate and prosecute large companies that price-gouge isn’t a campaign gimmick, nor is it the beginning of the end of capitalism in America. It’s simply a way of ensuring that when corporations are using a crisis as an excuse to jack up prices on consumers, we will not surrender – instead, we will fight back.

      Bob Casey is a US senator representing the state of Pennsylvania More

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      Black US voters’ economic priorities revealed in new advocacy agenda

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      Black Americans strongly support initiatives that would increase the minimum wage to $17, make affordable housing more accessible and create an equitable tax system, according to Black to the Future Action Fund, a political advocacy thinktank. On Thursday, the group released a 55-page economic agenda based on its 2023 survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states. The organization hopes that the report will serve as a roadmap for elected officials to address policy holes, and for advocates to generate campaigns that hold politicians accountable.“We have to start imagining what it is that we want and not be so afraid to break out of what is,” said Alicia Garza, founder and former principal of Black to the Future Action Fund, at a Thursday symposium in Atlanta.The agenda suggests a range of policy shifts around worker protections, housing, healthcare, childcare, higher education and taxes, along with examples of successful models already implemented by some state governments and municipalities. “Economic insecurity experienced by Black communities cannot be resolved solely by individual actions like working more hours, getting a college degree or saving money to buy a home,” the agenda’s authors wrote. “These issues are systemic, and government intervention is required to eliminate these inequities and improve outcomes for our people.”Along with increasing the minimum wage to $17, the authors also recommended that elected officials pass labor protections for domestic workers, many of whom are Black women. The expansion of paid family and medical leave laws would help workers care for their household. And on the topic of affordable housing, the thinktank recommended laws that ensure rent payments are incorporated into credit scores so that renters have greater access to obtaining home mortgages.Another suggestion for affordable housing included the development of shared equity programs, which use public or private investments to build or buy homes that are then sold at a reduced rate to low-to-moderate income homebuyers. There are currently 250,000 shared equity models mainly in New York City, according to the agenda. Christopher Towler, a political science associate professor at Sacramento State University and director of the Black Voter Project, called the programs “a really good model to try and get people into the housing market for there to be more first-time homebuyers”.The origins of the US’s persistent racial wealth can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade, when enslaved Black people were barred from accessing capital generated by their forced labor. During the Reconstruction period after the civil war, then president Andrew Johnson rescinded the 40 acres (16 hectares) of land promised to formerly enslaved Black people.When Black communities did secure economic freedom, they were sometimes violently attacked by angry white mobs, including during the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, where an estimated 300 people were killed. Additionally, banks often denied home loans to Black Americans from the early 20th century until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed housing discrimination.View image in fullscreen“The failures of Reconstruction have yet to be made up,” said Towler. “And a large part of that is the continued residential segregation and how Black Americans have been locked out, not only of the housing market, but of the resources, the wealth, the opportunity that comes along with where you live and your access to community.”The legacy of systemic inequality has a continued impact on Black workers today, who earn less than US workers overall, according to 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Pew Research Center. The median weekly earnings of Black full-time wage and salary workers is $878, compared to $1,059 for all US workers, according to Pew.During Thursday’s symposium, the actor and activist Kendrick Sampson, the singer and songwriter Trae Crockett, and the digital storyteller Conscious Lee spoke with Garza about the need for Black communities to brainstorm needed solutions and to band together to effect political change.“When it comes to healthcare,” said Lee, “a lot of us … have internalized the Black inferiority when it comes to that industry. So for me, it’s really reimagining what it looks like for my grandma to get affordable insulin.”Black census respondents listed a lack of affordable healthcare as their fourth most immediate economic concern. Expanding Medicaid to the 10 states that have not done so under the Affordable Care Act could help keep rural hospitals open. “The communities most affected when these rural hospitals close often have significant Black populations,” the report stated, “and closure means rural residents must drive 25 or more miles to access medical care.”While Towler lauded the agenda as the first one he’s seen that addresses the concerns of Black communities nationwide, he believes that it will be a “tough sell” to mobilize Black voters. “Any sort of policy promises right now are going to be looked at with some hesitations, simply because the Biden administration’s policy agenda, although very numerous in its accomplishments, is still in some ways misunderstood,” said Towler. “There’s not a lot of knowledge with the common voter about how the policies that Biden passed have actually affected their individual lives.”According to his research, Towler said that people are encouraged to be civically engaged when they’re taught how political institutions uphold the status quo to resist change: “If you even want there to be a possibility of reparations, we have to continue to vote, continue to be active and continue to put in place policy makers and legislators that are working towards that.”At the end of the symposium, organizers asked participants to share the agenda with their network and elected officials. In the eyes of the Black to the Future Action Fund, the electorate is capable of shifting policy through mass mobilization.“We are the power,” Sampson said toward the end of the symposium. “If we all are in alignment and we go in the same direction, now we are more powerful.” More

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      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

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      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

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      Is the US economy doing well? It depends if you ask a Democrat or a Republican

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      When he delivered his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden framed the state of the American economy as a true success story, pointing to the historically low unemployment rate and falling inflation as signs of the country’s robust recovery from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world,” the US president said. “And it takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it.”As Biden frequently boasts, 15m jobs have been created since he took office, and the unemployment rate now stands at 4% after 41 consecutive months of job gains, following the longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since the 1960s. Inflation has also cooled, after the annual consumer price index hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. Stock markets have hit new highs, with the Dow Jones industrial average passing 40,000 points for the first time ever. The International Monetary Fund predicted last month that the US economy was on track to grow at double the rate of any other G7 nation this year.But so far, many Americans are not buying what Biden is selling. According to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian last month, 56% of Americans wrongly believe that the US economy is in a recession, even though the country’s GDP has grown in recent months. Republicans were more likely to hold that belief, with 67% of them saying the economy is in a recession compared with 49% of Democrats and 53% of independents.The survey continued a trend of Republicans reporting higher levels of pessimism about the nation’s finances since Biden took office. But the relationship between political identity and consumer sentiment has actually been documented for decades, intensifying alongside partisanship in recent years.This political bias offers a partial – although far from complete – explanation for Americans’ persistently dour opinions of the nation’s finances. In recent weeks, the Guardian has dispatched reporters to key swing counties in battleground states, and voters representing a wide array of political views expressed disappointment with the higher cost of living.As LeMario Brown, a former city council member in Fort Valley, Georgia, and local pecan farmer, said: “It doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, we all got to eat.”With less than five months left before election day, Biden must find a way to break through the gloom and sell his vision of economic success.A partisan splitThe partisan skew in perceptions of the economy dates back at least to the Reagan administration, as the University of Michigan’s national consumer confidence data shows. With a Republican in the White House, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say the economy is strong, and the same principle applies when a Democrat takes office.Though the correlation between political identity and consumer sentiment has long been recognized by economists, it appears to have grown stronger in recent years. One study from the University of Florida, based on decades of data from the Florida Consumer Attitude survey, found that state residents reported notably higher levels of consumer confidence after their preferred party regained control of the White House. In the fall of 2016, after Trump won the presidential race, Republicans started expressing much more optimism about their personal finances.View image in fullscreen“Over time, [these shifts] have gotten bigger and bigger* … It’s true that, somehow, this kind of partisanship has been increasing,” said Hector Sandoval, director of the economic analysis program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.Sandoval noted that, in 2016, the shift in sentiment can be observed in the immediate month after Trump won the election in November, even though he did not take office until January.“That’s even kind of striking because nothing has really happened [by this time],” Sandoval said. “The change in power isn’t until the next year, in January. But already by then you see how the consumer sentiment is changing a lot.”Although Democrats’ consumer attitudes have also been found to vary depending on the national political environment, Sandoval’s research found this shift to be particularly pronounced among Republicans, a finding that has been corroborated by other studies. Ryan Cummings, who previously worked for Biden’s council of economic advisers, and Neale Mahoney, who served as an adviser to the Biden administration’s national economic council, refer to this pattern as “asymmetric amplification”.According to an analysis by Cummings and Mahoney, the magnitude of the partisan bias on consumer sentiment is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans compared with Democrats. In a phone call, Mahoney, now an economics professor at Stanford University, summarized the finding by saying that Republicans “cheer louder and boo harder” when their party controls the White House.Cummings and Mahoney found that this asymmetric amplification accounts for roughly a third of the gap between predicted consumer sentiment, based on current economic conditions, and observed consumer sentiment. In the Harris poll, Republicans were indeed more likely to incorrectly say that the economy is in a recession, but notably, nearly half of Democrats believed the same.So even when accounting for partisan bias, about two-thirds of the consumer sentiment gap remains. That has left economists – and many frustrated members of Biden’s team – searching for answers.Beyond the politicsPotential explanations for consumers’ lingering pessimism have abounded as election day nears. Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has attributed the pessimism to what he calls “referred pain”, meaning Americans are casting their broader doubts and fears about the state of the world on to the economy.“Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole,” Ip wrote in November. “Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother explanation touches on the role of the media, with some experts arguing that coverage of the economy has become skewed toward bad news. One recent study from Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner of the Brookings Institution concluded that “economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years”.A third school of thought addresses the long-term pain and general psychology around inflation. Although the most recent CPI data found that prices rose by 3.4% over the past 12 months, prices have increased by roughly 20% since 2019. So even as the rate of inflation has fallen, Americans are still adjusting to the overall rise in the cost of living over the past few years. Prices also show no sign of significantly decreasing, a phenomenon known as deflation that is generally associated with times of severe economic distress.View image in fullscreenA separate analysis from Cummings and Mahoney found that “the impact of inflation on consumer sentiment fades out with a decay rate of about 50 percent per year,” meaning it takes a few years for the sting of a high inflationary period to substantially dissipate.“The impact of inflation this year is half as big as the impact last year, which is half as big as the impact in the year beforehand, so it has a half-life of basically one year,” Mahoney said. “But it takes two to three years for most of the impact of inflation to no longer show up in an analysis which connects inflation to consumer sentiment.”That lingering effect can dramatically alter views on the economy because, to put it bluntly, consumers really hate high inflation. Research by Stefanie Stantcheva, an economics professor at Harvard University, found that high inflation triggered feelings of anger, fear and injustice. Respondents expressed a widespread belief that their wages were not keeping pace with inflation, resulting in decreased buying power for their households.Respondents do report receiving wage increases as the inflation rate rose, but people tend to associate those raises with their own job performance or career progression, rather than the higher cost of living, so they often feel like inflation is robbing them of their hard-won earnings. Interestingly, people also tend to believe that the salaries of higher-income individuals are better able to keep up with inflation, amplifying feelings of unfairness.“As a result, when you ask people about the emotions that are triggered when they see prices rise, it’s a lot of stress, fear, anger,” Stantcheva said. “[That anger] tends to be directed at businesses [and] quite a lot at the government.”The way forward?Behind Americans’ doubts about the health of the economy are statistics that go beyond jobs and inflation rates. Understanding those metrics could be key to moving beyond some of the partisan perspectives.Despite the overall economic improvement, persistently high interest rates have increased the cost of carrying debt, adding to the burden of credit card bills and auto loans. Credit card debt hit a record high of $1.1tn in the final quarter of 2023, although that figure slightly declined in the first quarter of this year. Mortgage rates have come down marginally since last fall, when they reached a 23-year high, but their elevation has added to Americans’ existing concerns that the goal of homeownership has moved permanently out of reach.Underlying these statistics is the grim reality of how they disproportionately affect lower-income families. Stantcheva’s study found that lower-income Americans report being most adversely affected by high inflation, with some saying they have even delayed buying essentials to cope with rising prices. Her work builds on existing research suggesting that, though high inflation is loathed by all, the burden of the rising cost of living is not equally shared.Stantcheva’s research also offers some insight into Americans’ thoughts on building a fairer economic system. Like other recent surveys, respondents displayed broad support for a number of policy proposals that might address some of those concerns, including raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest households. Biden has called for such changes to the tax code, although he has struggled to get them approved by Congress, and he has incorporated his support for tax reform into his campaign messaging.The messaging could help Biden bridge the divide between his story of economic success and the reality that many Americans are not yet feeling the benefit of the recovery.“We don’t know each person’s situation, and the statistics just don’t capture this very well,” Stantcheva said. “So I think these feelings should not be dismissed at all. They should be taken quite seriously.” More

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      Corporations are forcing Americans to pay more for less – in their own words | Matt Stoller

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      In 2022, the Biden administration and the oil industry were in a brutal fight over oil prices. The president was demanding that domestic oil producers invest and drill more to address spiking costs, but Texas frackers were recalcitrant. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” the Pioneer CEO, Scott Sheffield, said, echoing comments from other leaders at different domestic firms. Profits would go to investors, not to more rigs to address pain at the pump.The oil barons won the fight. Profits in the oil industry jumped from virtually nothing in 2020 to the hundreds of billions in 2021, and then doubled again in 2022. And yet, economists did not see any sort of plot at work. “Don’t blame the oil companies for their high profits,” said the economist Olivier Blanchard. “It is not price gouging, just how markets work.”Three weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission released information showing how naive such statements really were. Sheffield, it turns out, allegedly helped engineer a price-fixing scheme to reduce oil production and increase prices for Americans at the pump. His goal was to end fierce competition in the industry, which had, as he put it, “lowered the price by $20 to $30 per barrel over the past 10 years”. The FTC banned Sheffield from his corporation’s board and has reportedly referred allegations against Sheffield to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation.The magnitude of this alleged plot is stunning. Oil prices are controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), a cartel composed of nations with known oil reserves. Because Opec is made up of governments, price-fixing law doesn’t apply. But these laws do apply to domestic US firms engaged in shale oil production, who competed fiercely with Opec from 2014 to 2016 for market share, bringing down prices in the interim.In 2017, tired of this price war, Texas oilmen and Opec officials began sitting down to dinners, and by 2021, Texas had de facto joined Opec. Companies like Pioneer, Devon Energy and Continental Resources publicly pledged to hold back production. As the FTC found, Sheffield was also privately sending hundreds of text and WhatsApp messages to Opec officials, seeking to align US producers with the global cartel.Class-action lawyers are on top of the scandal, but there’s also increasing political interest. At a hearing last week, the US representatives Rosa DeLauro and Matt Cartwright began criticizing “big oil” for this scheme, and Representative Mark Pocan even called for jail time for the oil executives allegedly involved. The top Democrat on the powerful energy and commerce committee, Frank Pallone, just launched a wide-ranging investigation across the industry.The US consumes 7bn barrels of oil a year, meaning that if the dollar amount went up by $20-30, as Sheffield calculated, that’s roughly $400-700 a person in America, a transfer from consumers to oil men and their private equity backers. That’s a not small amount of what inflation wrought in 2021, which was about $4,700 per capita in increased prices. (I suspect the amount is actually more than $20-30 a barrel, since price spikes tend to be larger than the average over long periods of time. But we’ll leave it at what Sheffield calculated.)What is perhaps most shocking about this scandal is not that it happened, but that it happened in plain sight. Oil CEOs weren’t hiding. In 2021, as prices rose on the end of Covid lockdowns, Sheffield publicly threatened rivals who might increase production, saying “all the shareholders that I’ve talked to said that if anybody goes back to growth, they will punish those companies”.For years, there has been a debate between macro-economists like Blanchard about the source of post-Covid inflation. Many economists chalked up price hikes to workers demanding more money and saw the way to address it as scaring workers into accepting less money by throwing a bunch of them out of work. “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation,” said Larry Summers. That’s what their models told them.By contrast, 85% of Americans, along with a few iconoclastic scholars and writers, said “corporations being greedy and raising prices to make record profits” was the cause of inflation. Why? Well it might have been because they noticed that CEOs were routinely telling investors that they were raising prices to increase margins, not to meet wage demands. Or it might have been because they experienced large and unexplained price increases in meat, rent, hotels, groceries and restaurants. Indeed, when the CEO of Wendy’s recently said Wendy’s was considering using AI to engage in dynamic pricing, the public outrage was palpable.It’s time to declare the debate over. In 2021, the total corporate profit increase was $730bn, or a little over $2,100 a person. That’s a large chunk of the inflationary increase in costs. Moreover, the price-fixing in the oil industry, which contributed roughly $200bn of that, isn’t an anomaly.Take post-Covid rent hikes. One software and consulting pricing firm for landlords, RealPage, specialized in telling its clients to hike rents more than they otherwise might. As of December of 2020, RealPage had nearly 32,000 clients, including “10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States”. There are multiple antitrust suits accusing the private equity-owned firm of organizing a massive price-fixing conspiracy to inflate rents across the board.Beyond rent, the Biden administration or private plaintiffs now have credible antitrust claims against firms engaged in price-fixing in meat, hotels and large online sellers like Amazon. Corporations in a range of industries have made comments similar to those of Sheffield.Alex Cisneros, an executive for Red Roof Inn, told a trade outlet that Red Roof Inn was using a software package called STR from CoStar to systematically hike prices across the hotel industry. “Red Roof’s franchisees for the most part are making more money with less occupancy,” Hotel News Now explained. “Red Roof is now providing more data to franchisees to educate and get them comfortable commanding higher rates.”According to a lawsuit, an unnamed executive at Smithfield, a pork processor, summarized the advice he got from Agri Stats, a consulting firm that coordinates production in the industry, as: “Just raise your price.”Rent, meat, oil and hotels are big sectors, so criminal activity in the form of price-fixing to boost profits should bust through the illusions economists have about how our markets really work. There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.The third is to reform the Federal Reserve so policymakers there stop using macro-economic models that avoid considerations of profits and price-fixing.And the fourth is, frankly, political. One key reason there is action on these schemes is because Biden has prioritized antitrust enforcement. He hasn’t put enough into antitrust, and he doesn’t talk about it very often. But he should, or else Americans are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that what is good for big business is good for their pocketbooks, when the opposite is so often the case.
      Matt Stoller is a writer and former policymaker who focuses on the politics of market power and antitrust More

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      Do you know how the US economy is actually doing? Try our interactive quiz

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      The United States is less than six months away from sending either Joe Biden or Donald Trump back to the White House.For many voters mulling this decision, the economy is front of mind. But how it’s doing, and how it’s feeling, are not one and the same.A majority of Americans believe the US is in recession, according to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian. It isn’t.Do you know how the US economy has been performing? The Guardian created this quiz to find out. 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      in US Politics

      Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden

      by

      Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
      55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
      49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
      49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
      Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession.The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.But the road to recovery has been bumpy, largely because of inflation and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to tamp down high prices.Despite previously suggesting the Fed could start lowering rates this year, Fed officials have recently indicated interest rates will remain elevated in the near future. While inflation has eased considerably since its peak in 2022, officials continue to say inflation remains high because it remains above the Fed’s target of 2% a year.After a tumultuous ride of inflation and high interest rates, voters are uncertain about what’s next. Consumer confidence fell to a six-month low in May.So even though economic data, like GDP, implies strength in the economy, there’s a stubborn gap between the reality represented in that data – what economists use to gauge the economy’s health – and the emotional reality that underlies how Americans feel about the economy. In the poll, 55% think the economy is only getting worse.Some have called the phenomenon a “vibecession”, a term first coined by the economics writer Kyla Scanlon to describe the widespread pessimism about the economy that defies statistics that show the economy is actually doing OK.While inflation has been down, prices are at a higher level compared with just a few years ago. And prices are still going up, just at a slower pace than at inflation’s peak.Americans are clearly still reeling from price increases. In the poll, 70% of Americans said their biggest economic concern was the cost of living. About the same percentage of people, 68%, said that inflation was top of mind.The poll showed little change in Americans’ economic outlook from a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian on the economy in September 2023.A similar percentage of respondents agreed “it’s difficult to be happy about positive economic news when I feel financially squeezed each month” and that the economy was worse than the media made it out to be.Another thing that hasn’t changed: views on the economy largely depend on which political party people belong to. Republicans were much more likely to report feeling down about the economy than Democrats. The vast majority of Republicans believe that the economy is shrinking, inflation is increasing and the economy is getting worse overall. A significant but smaller percentage of Democrats, less than 40%, believed the same.Unsurprisingly, more Republicans than Democrats believe the economy is worsening due to the mismanagement of the Biden administration.Something both Republicans and Democrats agree on: they don’t know who to trust when it comes to learning about the economy. In both September and May, a majority of respondents – more than 60% – indicated skepticism over economic news.The economy continues to present a major challenge to Joe Biden in his re-election bid. Though he has tried to tout “Bidenomics”, or his domestic economy record, including his $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill from 2022, 70% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats seem to think he’s making the economy worse.But it’s not all bad news for Biden. Republican voters were slightly more optimistic about the lasting impacts of “Bidenomics” than they were in the September Harris poll. Four in 10 Republicans, an 11 percentage-point increase from September, indicated they believe Bidenomics will have a positive lasting impact, while 81% of Democrats said the same. And three-quarters of everyone polled said they support at least one of the key pillars of Bidenomics, which include investments in infrastructure, hi-tech electronics manufacturing, clean-energy facilities and more union jobs.Yet even with these small strands of approval, pessimism about the overall economy is pervasive. It will be an uphill battle for Biden to convince voters to be more hopeful.“What Americans are saying in this data is: ‘Economists may say things are getting better, but we’re not feeling it where I live,’” said John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “Unwinding four years of uncertainty takes time. Leaders have to understand this and bring the public along.” More