Organized Money

Spirit Airlines is dead, and everyone is pointing fingers: Was it the war in Iran that killed Spirit? Joe Biden's Justice Department? Antitrust regulation? Jet fuel? Lina Khan!?? Today on the show we demystify Spirit's demise with William J. McGee, Senior Fellow for Aviation and Travel at the American Economic Liberties Project. William is a long-time consumer advocate in the air travel space and has watched as the deregulation project which began in the 1970s has slowly whittled down c...

Besides data centers, climate change, and regulatory capture, there is yet another reason utility rates are far outpacing inflation: private equity! On this episode, we try to understand why investor-owned utilities, which provide electricity to the majority of Americans, continue to reap profits at the expense of their customers. These entities are supposed to be regulated by state governments, but why is enforcement often so toothless? And why does venture capital want to get involved in so...

After the government announced new regulations for Medicare Advantage, the market-based alternative to traditional Medicare, the stocks of healthcare companies that participate in the program plummeted. But why is this popular program in the crosshairs? And are these new Trump Administration rules actually...good? Today on the show, Olivia Kosloff, senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and creator of the newsletter Acute Condition, joins Matt and David to discuss Medicare A...

We tend to think of the law as a public asset - centuries of statutes, common law, and legal precedents that shape how society governs itself. So why is the law itself so hard and so expensive to access? Matt and David talk with Mike Lissner of the Free Law Project about the quiet duopoly that controls legal information, how Westlaw and LexisNexis turned public court records into pricey commodities, and why even the federal government charges by the page to read your own laws. Along the...

In the twilight of the Biden Administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan filed a price-fixing case against Pepsi, using the powerful but little-enforced Robinson-Patman Act. A few months into Trump’s 2025 term, that lawsuit was dead and buried by the new regime, leaving only a bunch of redacted documents and a lot of questions for the public to pore over. Our guest today is Stacy Mitchell, the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who recently convinced a judge to rele...

The Warner Bros. deal could decimate the film industry in California, and yet almost no state-level politicians have spoken out about it. Today on the show, Matt and David talk to a California gubernatorial candidate who has vocally opposed the deal: Tom Steyer. Tom is a former financier, 2020 presidential candidate, and billionaire, who happens to be the most vocally anti-monopoly candidate in the race. Tom's background in business and personal wealth makes him an unusual candidate, but it a...

With its promise to displace jobs and disrupt daily life, AI and large language models have formed a unique market and social bubble: one that nearly everyone hates. Despite little revenue, billions of dollars are promised by hyperscalers like Google and Meta to help build out AI data centers in increasingly arcane financing schemes that are propping up the otherwise meager economy. Today on the show Matt and David invite two guests: Advait Arun, Senior Associate for Capital Markets a...

It’s one of the most surprising and least understood stories in American agriculture: the monopoly over the seeds that grow our food. Farmers are facing a “seed squeeze,” where two companies, Bayer and Corteva, control 90% of the seed corn market, driving up prices even as crop profits fall. Matt and David speak with Independent seed producer John Latham and industry veteran Todd Martin about how intellectual property, patents, and corporate consolidation have turned seeds into billion-dollar...