Economic Termites Are Everywhere - BIG by Matt Stoller

Today I want to start with a comment by a colleague, Texas antitrust lawyer Basel Musharbash, observing a restaurant trying to do a renovation in Dallas. “Something funky is happening in the building materials supply chain,” he wrote . “A 3,000 sq. ft. commercial space in a strip mall shouldn’t cost $720,000 to renovate into an Italian food joint.” He’s right. It shouldn’t. And yet it does.

This attitude of ‘something is very wrong with our society’ is everywhere now. Corporate procurement officers just assume costs are going up, it’s in budget projections for the Defense Department, and we expect cost overruns on everything. ‘Inflation’ is now a catch-all for a basic view that stuff is just going to suck more and more.

So what’s going on? Today’s piece is about a concept I am going to call ‘economic termites,’ which are instances of monopolization big enough to make investors a huge amount of money, but not noticeable enough for most of us. An individual termite isn’t big enough to matter, but the existence of a termite is extremely bad news, because it means there are others. Add enough of them up, and you get our modern economic experience.

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