David Dayen
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ddayen.bsky.social
David Dayen
@ddayen.bsky.social
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Executive editor, The American Prospect. Author, Chain of Title and Monopolized. Tips at ddayen-at-prospect-dot-org or Signal at ddayen.90
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ddayen.bsky.social
Here's what these kids are earning, based on interviews with 61 workers. Most of them were born in the US to migrant parents.
prospect.org/2025/11/28/c...
Child farmworker earnings by type of crop.
November 28, 2025 at 3:35 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Green bean casserole's done
November 27, 2025 at 1:28 AM
ddayen.bsky.social
Pie's done
Pecan pie cooling
November 26, 2025 at 9:57 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Fortunately, the state AGs didn't join this settlement. The gap between the old, lenient mindset regarding corporate power and the new, aggressive mindset is growing.
prospect.org/2025/11/26/w...
The good news is that this imperative is not monolithic. When Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter took over the federal antitrust agencies, they approached the potential harms of market power differently. And though they no longer sit in those agencies, that spirit has not been snuffed out. It exists in law schools, among young lawyers, and at the state level. State attorneys general who had joined the DOJ’s RealPage case did not join the DOJ’s settlement, and can continue to litigate if they choose. I’d expect them, particularly the AGs in Arizona and the District of Columbia who filed cases separately from DOJ, to keep pursuing justice. In a separate hearing last week, state attorneys general won the right to attempt to block an Antitrust Division settlement in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise–Juniper Networks merger challenge, something I’ve written about extensively. The Tunney Act allows a judge to hold proceedings on whether antitrust settlements are in the public interest, to prevent the very kind of pay-to-play, lobbyist-fueled corruption we saw in that case. (A Tunney Act proceeding is available in the RealPage settlement, too.) It’s not clear how much Judge Casey Pitts will probe the process leading to the merger settlement—he said he wanted to focus more on the substance—but there’s an opportunity to put Trump-era corruption, and the mindset of not making trouble for corporations, on display.
November 26, 2025 at 2:49 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
The race for deposits is at the heart of rapid bank consolidation. Larger banks also typically pay less in interest, making deposits more lucrative at larger sizes.
This is driving big banks to fight the CFPB's "move your money" rule that Silicon Valley has taken up.
For these reasons and more, banks are racing to buy one another at the fastest rate in 35 years, confident that Donald Trump’s merger-friendly regulators will approve the transactions in less time than it takes to, well, plan a bank robbery. The merger wave is crashing over banks of all sizes, from community banks Plumas and Cornerstone, together worth $61.3 million, to Cincinnati-based Fifth Third and Dallas-based Comerica, which will create the ninth-largest bank in the country, in a $10.9 billion transaction. JPMorgan Chase, already as large as its next three mega-bank competitors combined by assets, has set a goal of increasing its U.S. retail deposit share from 11 to 15 percent of all deposits. Bank of America boosted its deposit base by one-third in the last five years. There’s one glaring tell about the intent of all this consolidating. The consultant-industrial complex—Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, and of course, McKinsey, which bluntly calls deposits “a profitability lever”—cannot stop talking about the money banks stand to make from deposits. In other words, Wall Street is demanding that Wall Street consolidate more—and quickly.
November 25, 2025 at 2:54 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
The thing to watch in Trump's plan is the incentive to self-degrade insurance by offering the difference between a higher & lower subsidy in a Health Savings Account. That will have limited use, worsen everyone's insurance, and likely push people into middleman schemes. prospect.org/2025/11/25/t...
The way Trump gets around that is by using the cash promise as an incentive for people to downgrade their insurance. Under his plan, if someone on the insurance exchanges shifts from a “gold” to a “silver” or “bronze” plan, they will get the difference in subsidy placed into a tax-exempt Health Savings Account, from which they can purchase health care. This may sound attractive—you get your money to do with it as you please!—but it’s just a recipe for worse coverage and more uncertainty. The lower tiers of ACA plans come with increased out-of-pocket expenses and higher deductibles, which the HSA account is unlikely to offset. The administration apparently wants Congress to appropriate additional “cost sharing reductions” to lower out-of-pocket costs, but that feels like the one thing House Republicans would insist on keeping out of the plan. So people will be enticed into making their insurance crappier in exchange for “cash” tied up in a savings account with limited utility. (UPDATE: Friend of the Prospect Andrew Sprung checks in to note that even the cost sharing reductions idea is a poison pill, designed to eliminate something called “silver loading” that states have used to make ACA plans cheaper and boost enrollment.) It will also affect everyone who stays in their gold and silver plans. The individuals who want to keep their good coverage are likely sicker patients who know that they need to use insurance over the course of a year. If everyone leaving the better plans is relatively healthier, it makes the “risk pool” of those who remain sicker on average. That will almost certainly raise the costs of that insurance over time. The HSA money, meanwhile, could end up flowing to a new set of schemes that either promise to close gaps in the bad ACA plans or offer emergency room coverage or some other patch. These could easily herald a return to the bad old days before Obamacare, when insurance was of dubious value when called upon. Trump has been changing federal rules to promote short-term “junk insurance” plans with limited benefits that trick customers into thinking that they are more comprehensive. Because the plans would exist outside of the ACA framework, for example, they may not cover so-called “pre-existing conditions,” and may exempt basic things like mental health and maternity care.
November 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
I was impressed with Aftyn Behn in talking to her. Republicans are tagging her with tired culture war stuff; I'm not sure it'll work even in a deep-red district.
It's also interesting how she's the first federal candidate to connect the Epstein files to oligarchy:
prospect.org/2025/11/24/t...
In addition, I was surprised to find Behn prominently using the Jeffrey Epstein case in her campaign. One ad cites how her opponent resisted the release of the files until the roof caved in last week. “The Epstein files are locked away, Matt Van Epps will keep ’em that way,” the narrator states. Invoking the Epstein files had a policy dimension to it: She was using it as a proxy for elite impunity, for an oligarchy that is unconstrained by the laws. “People don’t like feeling that there’s a different set of rules for some people,” she said. “I’ve used this race to disentangle the nexus of corporate rule, that these are well-connected people making life harder for you.”
November 24, 2025 at 4:49 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
I'm from here Twitter said so
I do have an Android phone so you can ding me on that
see, account based in United States
November 23, 2025 at 8:03 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
I mean, it's rough out there.
prospect.org/2025/11/21/a...
A retiree in Colorado, Jeff Rowan, described how this year’s open enrollment is driven by a sense of fear. His 2026 premium for a health plan on the state insurance exchange went from $350 a month to around $900. So he switched to a plan offered by his pension, which is $700, still a 100 percent increase. Last year, Rowan concluded that was “an outrageous amount.” Not anymore. At one point, Rowan seriously contemplated dropping health insurance completely, he said. “But the fear of something unexpected happening and my moderate savings being wiped out is forcing me to pay the piper. It’s a completely fear-based decision.” Some patients are looking for help from their elected officials, such as Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI), who said his constituents are describing “staggering” premium increases. One constituent, a retired marketing executive named Susan, told him that she’s currently paying about $600 a month with ACA tax credits. Next year, that will jump to $2,120, a 250 percent increase. Another constituent, Sarah, who owns a small business with her husband, said her premiums will jump from $536 a month to more than $1,000, an 89 percent increase. “These are just a few of the stories I have heard,” Magaziner said via email. “Americans cannot afford these price increases. These spikes will break household budgets in Rhode Island and across the country.” Staff for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), meanwhile, told me they’ve fielded 3,200 messages from constituents about health care costs in this month alone.
November 21, 2025 at 2:28 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
This frees up Big Tech to move from lobbying states to lift all AI regulations to punishing any lawmaker who dares to try and stop them:
prospect.org/2025/11/20/b...
THIS SAVES CORPORATE LOBBYISTS from having to do the hard work of going state by state to fight AI regulations. One such fight is happening in real time in New York, which passed the RAISE Act, a bill to mandate safety testing for the AI model makers that have spent more than $100 million. Gov. Kathy Hochul hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it, and tech lobbyists have pressured her to veto. The American Innovators Network, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, spent over $350,000 on lobbying and digital advertising against the RAISE Act. The draft EO would do these lobbyists’ work for them, forcing Hochul to risk a lawsuit if she wants to sign the bill. In the context of the insane spending on the AI build-out, that’s not much of a savings; preempting lobbying across the country might get you one Nvidia Blackwell server rack. But the certainty a moratorium will provide is priceless, a nice side benefit to capturing the White House. The only people at risk would be all of us not inside a C-suite at OpenAI or Anthropic. Plus, it allows the AI lobby to focus on vanquishing their enemies. The co-author of the RAISE Act is Alex Bores, a New York assemblymember and former computer scientist. He’s running in the crowded Manhattan primary to replace Jerry Nadler in the House. And a new AI super PAC is singling him out for retribution. Backed by—there they are again—Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and president of OpenAI Greg Brockman, Leading the Future has amassed a $100 million fortune to unleash in the 2026 midterms. It has committed millions of dollars to stopping Bores, claiming his legislation “would handcuff not only New York’s, but the entire country’s, ability to lead on AI jobs and innovation.” Bores responded by welcoming their hatred. “When they say, ‘Hey, we’re going to spend millions against Alex because he might regulateBig Techand put basic guardrails on AI,’ I just basically forward that to my constituents,” Bores said on Monday.
November 20, 2025 at 6:25 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Great piece from James Baratta.
prospect.org/2025/11/19/n...
In its recent analysis, the Insurance Fairness Project called on Florida to “move beyond cosmetic fixes,” citing the need for “transparent and reliable financial ratings, and enforceable accountability mechanisms” that protect consumers when the next disaster strikes. “What we need is a complete revamping of the structure of the insurance industry in Florida,” Weiss told the Prospect. “We effectively have to build the market from scratch.”
November 19, 2025 at 2:59 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
And yes this is attached to the rest of the financial system. Maybe deliberately so! prospect.org/2025/11/19/a...
WHILE THIS PILE MAY BE CENTERED IN PRIVATE CREDIT, private equity funds, real estate investment trusts, and other vehicles have pieces of it. A Moody’s report last month said that banks have at least $300 billion in loans to private credit. Blue Owl has BlackRock, Invesco, and PIMCO selling the bonds financing the Hyperion data center. Because this is the only thing moving in this economy, everyone on Wall Street wants some of the action, even those who are wary of it. Deutsche Bank, for example, is talking about reducing its exposure to data center risks, including by shorting AI stocks. But within that, the bank has acknowledged that some of its traders had “gone heavy” on financing for data centers. That puts the effort by Trump’s financial regulators to deregulate traditional banking, including the Federal Reserve slashing bank supervision, in a different light. It may be hard for a private credit firm to get bailed out by the government; for the banks, it’s easier. If banks soak up and carry over the debt from the Blue Owls of the world, they have better opportunities to have it effectively extinguished.
November 19, 2025 at 2:46 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
"Using loans backed by their GPUs to purchase other GPUs."
We're in so much trouble.
prospect.org/2025/11/19/a...
A great paper from the Center for Public Enterprise lays out additional alarms. Data centers are not lasting infrastructure, or at least the guts inside them aren’t. If the GPUs are working overtime to compute AI models, they may not last more than two years, and high-end AI firms will always want to upgrade to the latest version anyway. (By the way, our friends at Blue Owl are lending money to Elon Musk’s xAI to buy Nvidia GPUs.) But AI firms are extending their depreciation schedules for the GPUs; they’re saying they will last much longer than they likely will. That means overstated revenues, as companies have to purchase far more GPUs than they are admitting publicly, and thence possible financial disaster. Indeed, some of the smaller companies are using loans backed by their GPUs to purchase other GPUs. It also means that these hulking buildings, and the dedicated power plants some of them are constructing in the vicinity, are likely to become stranded assets when the site outlives its usefulness.
November 19, 2025 at 2:38 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Big Tech is limiting debt exposure by building new "special purpose vehicles" and implicitly guaranteeing payments. But there are already troubling signs underneath.
This is the case with an SPV for Meta’s $30 billion Hyperion data center in Louisiana. Blue Owl, a private credit fund, owns the majority stake in the SPV; it put in a small amount of equity, and the SPV carries the debt. Meta has another 20 percent, which gives investors the confidence that they’ll get repaid without Meta having to put debt on its balance sheet. This has a side effect of highly rating these debt instruments, with “specialized” rating agencies doing much of the work, in ways that are more than suspicious. Blue Owl is a private credit fund, which again is an end run around financial regulations. These companies suck up money from investors, well over a trillion dollars according to The Wall Street Journal. Blue Owl has $295 billion on its own. It’s pitched as a bulletproof trade; Big Tech firms are locked into leases, and their payments will pay back the debt. But if that’s the case, why is Blue Owl, in the aftermath of a merger of two of its private credit funds, blocking redemptions in a way that will automatically give those investors 20 percent losses? As a traditional bank, that move would be akin to a bank run; this is just pissing off rich people who got into an arrangement with limited rights. But the warning signs are unmistakable. And it’s not limited to Blue Owl; covenants on corporate debt are gradually being rewritten to protect private credit in the event of a fallout.
November 19, 2025 at 2:37 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Oh this bit is funnier.
www.politico.eu/article/nato...
Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin, who is plugged into the new Labour government’s top tier, wrote in the Observer that Morgan McSweeney, the mastermind behind Labour’s election win, is handing out a paper titled “The Death of Deliverism” to party officials as they already look toward the 2029 election.
November 18, 2025 at 10:41 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
CMS received hundreds of thousands of complaints from people enrolled in ACA plans *without their knowledge.* It's an indictment of red-state consumer protection failures, but also the jury-rigging of a universal health care system through private companies. prospect.org/2025/11/18/o...
Democrats have all but ignored stories like the Fiorella Insurance tale, because right-wing think tanks have amplified them to justify ending the subsidies in mendacious screeds like this City Journal essay, which absurdly contends that scamming people into high-deductible Obamacare plans has “dwarfed prior opportunities for fraud.” Uh, no: Medicare and its evil neoliberal doppelganger Medicare Advantage decisively dwarf even the artificially inflated, grift-fortified post-2021 Obamacare subsidies by a factor of eight. And practically since the passage of the updated False Claims Act in 1986, Republicans not named “Chuck Grassley” have labored to legally institutionalize that fraud in our health care system, starting with Bill Barr’s 1988 memo arguing that rewarding whistleblowers who reveal fraud against taxpayers defies the Constitution, accelerating with Rick Scott’s political career, and manifesting most recently in the lengthy list of Florida Medicare fraudsters, from Miami Beach elder abuse kingpin-turned-domestic abuser Philip Esformes to Miami “patient recruiter” Lawrence Duran, who have been granted some form of clemency by President Trump himself. But the fact is, for the majority of Democrats who support Medicare for All, and who suspected back in 2009 that just as “blanketing a bunch of big companies in government cash” isn’t a particularly logical way to build affordable housing, nor was it a sensible (or moral) way to create affordable health care. As serious Dems ponder the task of rebuilding the institutions Trump fed into the woodchipper, the harrowing subsidy cliff, and the orgy of grift that preceded it, should serve to remind them that the legacy of Obamacare is little more than an object lesson in how not to do it.
November 18, 2025 at 2:48 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
WaPo confirms our scoop about Summers and CAP's Project 2029 from Friday, but doesn't say "The American Prospect first reported this," as usual.
What they don't say is the housing paper CAP released today was supposed to have Summers' name on it.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
The housing paper is the first in a series of proposals that CAP hopes will become a playbook if Democrats win the White House. Bernstein and Lawrence H. Summers, who served in senior roles in the Clinton and Obama administrations, were set to lead the economic component of the project. Democratic operatives are calling it “Project 2029,” a play on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term. (Other liberal operatives are using the same title for similar projects.) The formal launch of that working group is on hold, though. Summers’s involvement is drawing scrutiny, as well, after records from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate revealed he was in regular contact with the disgraced financier. In a statement Friday, a CAP spokesperson said, “Summers is a non-resident, uncompensated fellow at CAP. We are reviewing this week’s disclosures to determine appropriate next steps.”
November 17, 2025 at 3:37 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
@prospect.org, September: crypto ATMs are just predatory terminals to swindle people
@nytimes.com, November: crypto ATMs are just predatory terminals to swindle people
Read @prospect.org, get the news first.
Crypto Bank Machine Operators Swindle Seniors, The American Prospect, Sept. 11, 2025 How Fraudsters Use Cryptocurrency A.T.M.s to Target Victims, NYT, November 16, 2025
November 17, 2025 at 7:23 AM
ddayen.bsky.social
The other bit I love here: Kevin Hassett insisting that tariffs didn't increase coffee and fruit prices, there was also weather and disease.
Yes, true, but those are both a function of a warming planet, which Hassett's boss thinks is a hoax!
What they're saying: "The prices for those goods weren't necessarily going up just because of tariffs," National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on ABC's "This Week." Hassett, like other administration officials in recent days, pointed to a range of external factors — including weather and disease — driving most of the price increases for things like beef, coffee and cocoa. After removing duties, "the prices will go down, of course," Hassett said.
November 17, 2025 at 12:03 AM
ddayen.bsky.social
After getting battered on beef prices and battered by ranchers after he tried to increase imports, Trump demanded an antitrust investigation into the meatpacker middlemen. This happened right after his DOJ *closed an investigation* into meatpackers, lmao
Bloomberg headline: DOJ Closed Meat Probe Just Before Trump's Investigation Demand
November 15, 2025 at 2:12 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
We have an all SNAP day today: stories about the food assistance program, how it was damaged in the shutdown, and where it goes from here. Here's the lineup at prospect.org:
Three SNAP stories at prospect.org
November 14, 2025 at 2:33 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
oh
www.nber.org/papers/w33576
Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities. The standard view of housing markets holds that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply—shaped by factors like geography and regulation—explain differences in how house price and quantity growth respond to rising demand across U.S. cities. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same results when we examine rents, expand the sample to 1980 to 2020, use different elasticity measures, use per capita income or population growth instead of total income growth, and when exploiting a variety of plausibly exogenous variation in local housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that these results imply that estimated housing supply constraints are unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among U.S. cities. Our conclusions challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that relaxing regulatory housing supply constraints may not materially affect housing affordability.
November 13, 2025 at 5:44 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
This will not be the last one of these
Revolving Door Project Calls On OpenAI, Harvard, and Other Organizations To Cut Ties With Larry Summers. The call comes in light of recently released email correspondence between Summers and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, showing the close relationship the two shared long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.
November 13, 2025 at 2:35 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
The best Epstein email is where he's forwarding around No Labels third-party presidential nonsense
Epstein forwards some third party craziness #1 Epstein forwards third-party No Labels BS #2
November 12, 2025 at 10:51 PM
ddayen.bsky.social
Epstein doc, randomly chosen: "Stephen Hawking, photographed in March 2006 aboard an Atlantis submarine that was custom-fitted by Epstein to accommodate his wheelchair."
Stephen Hawking, photographed in March 2006 aboard an Atlantis submarine that was custom-fitted by Epstein to accommodate his wheelchair. Hawking was attending •.4 the conference "Confronting Gravity. "a workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmoloo" sponsored by the J. EpSteiti VI Foundation and the Center for Education and Research in Costnolop and Astrophysics (CERCA) at Case Western Reserve University,
November 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM