Regulation, central banks and public policy

The economics of regulated industries, from pricing at marginal cost to competition.

Antitrust should rest on the economics of efficiency, not on protecting competitors.

A century of US regulation through four figures, from Charles Francis Adams to Kahn.

How rival federal agencies dammed the American West's rivers for water projects.

The Fed from 1913 to 1951, told from its own minutes and internal memos.

Four meals traced to their sources, from fast food and organic to hunted and grown.

The economics of climate change, and why a universal carbon price works best.

The 2008 crash, the eurozone crisis and the politics after as one connected story.

Sovereign borrowing from Italian city-states to the pandemic, and what it paid for.

How bankers used depositors' money to control industry, from the Pujo inquiry.

The 1933 Senate hearings exposing bankers' practices that led to securities laws.

Antitrust law should pursue one goal, consumer welfare, and drop the rest.

The breakup of AT&T.

How inflation targeting worked in the first countries to adopt it.

How the 1990 US sulphur dioxide allowance trading programme worked in practice.

How 1980s changes turned the US patent system from aid to obstacle for innovation.

US fiscal promises far exceed future revenue, which official debt figures hide.

Why most government efforts to build venture capital sectors fail.

The 2008 crisis grew from political and economic imbalances, not just banker greed.

How a few scientists with ties to industry ran campaigns to deny settled science.

How PPP concessions are structured, priced and argued over.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

The 2008 crisis from inside the FDIC, which closed failed banks and guarded deposits.

The 2008 crisis, the policy response and the aftermath, for general readers.

How government decisions and monopolies left US internet access slow and costly.

How processed-food makers engineer salt, sugar and fat to make people eat more.

The 2007 to 2012 crises through three central bankers: Bernanke, King and Trichet.

Why banks should fund themselves with far more equity, and why their objections fail.

Broad employee ownership as an American tradition, and the case for reviving it.

Whether a nation's banks are stable or crisis-prone is decided by its politics.

County data showing household debt, not the banks, caused the Great Recession.

What private equity does to companies, workers and investor returns, critically.

What Fed independence legally is, versus what people assume.

How US healthcare became so costly and broken, and what patients can do.

How antitrust shrank to a consumer price test, and the case for breaking up giants.

How fixation on measured performance damages the work it is meant to improve.

The Australian banking misconduct that led to the 2018 Royal Commission.

Fraud in data and manufacturing at offshore generic-drug plants.

A political history of American monopoly and of the tradition that fought it.

The US drug industry from patent medicines to the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.

How Rockefeller philanthropy reshaped American medicine.

The fight over infant formula marketing and the boycott of Nestlé.

The truth behind the tobacco industry's cover-up.

How team owners extract public money for stadiums by threatening to move.

How drug companies turned from discovering drugs to marketing them.

How drug makers became marketing machines, from Risperdal to off-label promotion.

Evidence that patents work poorly as property; the IP-as-asset skeptic case.

How Chile's AFP model was exported worldwide, and who profited.

Glennon's case for pricing and trading water rights.

Why climate policy failed to cut emissions as coal use kept rising.

Regulatory history explaining how a thrift-charter lender grew unsupervised.

How soda makers built global brands, the health costs, and the push to tax soda.

How licensing in place of sale strips buyers of control over what they paid for.

How drug makers, regulators and distributors let the US opioid epidemic grow.

Why America lags in fibre-optic broadband, and the case against the cable incumbents.

Insider account by Microsoft's president on tech policy and regulation.

Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.

The academic case that repurchases hollow out corporate investment.

Insider account of the Fed from Burns through the QE era.

The drug distributors behind the opioid epidemic and the lawsuits against them.

The prosecutorial case against the industry KKR created; read as counterweight.

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

The Volcker Fed from the inside; still the fullest political account.

A report on competition in the telephone industry.

How sports franchises press cities for new stadiums by threatening to move.

The London libel trial that became a reputational case study.

How managers and middlemen took value from the owners of American companies.

Creating Value-Based Competition on Results

International business guide to allowances, offsets and registries.

Polemic against Keynesian policy from an Austrian-leaning investor

RAND occasional paper; the early survey of the US market.

Insider memoir: the Treasury Secretary's version of the same weeks.

A former SEC lawyer on naked shorting and the fights around it.

How business lobbies built emissions trading as the chosen instrument.

How the Federal Reserve was argued into existence, from the 1907 panic to 1913.

Alan Greenspan's life, and with it the making of modern finance from Nixon to Bush.

Deregulated wholesale markets and reliability risk.

Why America lost the ability to build housing, energy and infrastructure.