Please join us for a briefing with Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of Simon and Schuster’sGoliath: The hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracyas we discuss the role of monopoly power in the ongoing global pandemic and its direct impact on the small business sector. The recent announcement of mounting antitrust scrutiny against Amazon, Facebook, and Google underscores the importance of understanding corporate power and the need to empower small businesses in America to fight back against economic concentration.
These past few months have laid bare the structural disadvantages that smaller businesses face. Congress’s misguided reliance on large financial institutions to provide the infrastructure to expediently distribute economic relief to small businesses — while large institutions are supported by the Fed — demonstrates just how ill-equipped we are as a country to support dynamic, competitive markets in which small businesses can start and thrive.
For decades, policymakers on both the left and the right have failed to protect markets across the economy from monopolization, but there is emerging momentum for beginning to do so. Join us for a conversation with Matt Stoller to discuss policymakers’ role in ensuring markets are open and fair and a political context that is increasingly ripe for abandoning decades of deference to monopoly.
Matt Stolleris the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster bookGoliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.†David Cicilline, Chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, has called Stoller’s work “an inspiration.†Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee.
He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis. While a staffer, he wrote a provision of law mandating a third party audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities. He also helped cut part of a $20 billion subsidy to large financial institutions. His 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis,TheHousing Crash and the End of American Citizenship, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article,How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler. Stoller writes the monopoly-focused newsletter Big with tens of thousands of subscribers.
