NYRB: "Biden has been the best president of my lifetime on economic policy. Combatting corporate concentration is at the top of his agenda. [...] Biden is the first major trustbuster in over fifty years. He hired and elevated dozens of economic populists, most notably Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who has emphasized throughout her tenure that, as she once put it, 'monopolies not only have economic power, but use that power to buy political power.' Khan’s FTC has rewritten merger guidelines to make it harder for companies to consolidate; forced the major biotech company Illumina to divest from its prize acquisition, a cancer test maker called Grail, in the name of keeping the market for such tests competitive; and persuaded courts to ban Martin Shkreli—who was convicted of organizing a monopoly scheme to hike prices for a lifesaving AIDS treatment—from further involvement in the drug industry. Last year the commission partnered with the National Labor Relations Board to investigate companies that rely on gig work, like Lyft and Uber, for 'deceptive' practices such as denying their workers health care and unemployment benefits and misleading them about their earning potential.
"Biden also gave a White House advisory role to the legal scholar Tim Wu [...] who spearheaded an executive order that encouraged (and in some cases required) federal agencies to report to the White House on how they tackled corporate power from within their fiefdoms. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, meanwhile, came under the direction of Rohit Chopra, who The New York Times called 'Wall Street’s most hated regulator' for his effective assault on junk fees. Despite the howls of the debt-collection industry, he moved to ban listing medical debt on credit reports.
"Biden, alongside his trade representative, Katherine Tai, publicly rejected the dogma that has dominated US economic thinking since NAFTA: the neoliberal consensus around corporate privatization and the liberalization of finance and trade. Instead he embraced domestic manufacturing, particularly in the semiconductor and green energy industries, which received major subsidies through, respectively, the CHIPS Act and the Industrial Recovery Act. He announced this reversal in a 2021 speech condemning the cult of efficiency. 'We’re now forty years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power,' he said: "And what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses. Too many Americans who feel left behind. Too many people who are poorer than their parents. I believe the experiment failed."
"By arguing that concentration was a problem for workers and democracy, Biden rejected the Chicago School’s 'experiment' at relegating antitrust law to a technocratic backwater. In the process he also broke from his Democratic predecessors, Clinton and Obama, who had joined the Bushes and Reagan in embracing the idea that concentration was not a problem in itself, only when it interfered with measurable efficiencies. Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, followed his lead two years later in an address to the Brookings Institution that rejected neoliberalism."