The Capitol Forum

Editor's Note: This is a re-broadcast of a previous episode.  In 1961, Congress granted the NFL an antitrust exemption allowing the league to collectively negotiate broadcasting rights, revolutionizing sports broadcasting in America. Now, streaming companies like Amazon argue the law doesn't cover them, and that NFL teams can't collectively bargain with them for broadcasting rights. Today on Secon...

Electronics prices are soaring, and the handful of memory chip makers that control the market say the artificial intelligence boom is eating up their supply. A new lawsuit alleges they’re acting like a cartel. It’s a midterm problem for Republicans, who are already facing blowback on prices. In this episode of the TCF Investigates midterm election series, Arjun Singh sits down with reporter Sacha...

Regulators fixed the problem shadow insurance was invented to solve a decade ago. Insurers kept doing it anyway. Today on Private Credit Crisis, Executive Editor Teddy Downey talks with Daniel Schwarcz, a University of Minnesota law professor who first wrote about "shadow insurance" in 2015. They get into how the practice started as a workaround regulators signed off on, why it kept growing after...

John Deere has agreed to pay $99 million to settle a class action over farmers’ right to repair their own equipment. But after lawyers and administrators take their cut, farmers could be left with a small slice of the pie. In this episode of Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Willie Cade, CEO of Graceful Solutions, to break down the settlement, dealer consolidation, and w...

Americans are furious about President Donald Trump’s role in driving up gas prices. With the midterm elections just weeks away, even Republican voters are souring on Trump over the cost of everything. In the first episode of our election series, TCF Investigates host Arjun Singh and senior correspondent Paul McLeod sit down with Capitol Forum reporter Max Berengaut to learn how refinery consolidat...

The ratings agencies already failed investors in 2008. Are they about to do it again? Today on Private Credit Crisis, Executive Editor Teddy Downey talks with Rod Dubitsky, who rated subprime bonds at Moody's before the financial crisis. They discuss whether the high ratings on private equity-owned life insurers can be trusted, and what investors and regulators might be missing.

With a month until the midterms, the polls have Democrats favored to take the House and voters angry about high prices, especially at the pump. In this episode of Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh and reporter Paul McLeod sit down with G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist and pollster who writes the Substack Strength in Numbers. They dig into where...

Private equity owned life insurers are supposed to prepare for the worst, but some of them aren't preparing for anything close to it. Today on Private Credit Crisis, Executive Editor Teddy Downey talks with Corwin Zass, a consulting actuary who has spent more than 25 years advising life insurers on capital and risk.

From Ticketmaster to Paramount-Warner Bros., the Trump administration has had a full docket of antitrust-related cases to deal with. In this episode of Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Karina Lubell, partner in Brunswick Group's global antitrust and competition practice, and Nicholas Cheolas, partner at Wiley, to discuss the evolving antitrust enforcement landscape unde...

Two life insurers can own the exact same bond and tell their regulators two different stories about how risky it is.  In this episode of Private Credit Crisis, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Florida State University professor Kyeonghee Kim to discuss what changes at a life insurer after private equity buys it, and whether the system meant to catch bad numbers is actually built to.

Everyone knows their data gets sold. Almost nobody knows how much of it companies just give away, blurred enough to call it anonymous. In this episode of Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with former Capitol Forum correspondent and privacy lawyer Ben Neumeyer to discuss how DOGE spent a year and a half pooling federal records and made every one of those files findable again.

There's a hole in the life and annuity sector's balance sheet, and private equity dug it. In this episode of Private Credit Crisis, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Nick Nemeth, an investor and the writer of Mispriced Assets, to discuss the life and annuity industry's growing exposure to private credit and the potential risks for insurers and the broader financial system.

With little response from the federal government, state legislatures around the country are looking at banning the use of personalized pricing. Today on Second Request , Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Hal Singer and Gavin Sicard to explain what personalized pricing actually is, and how its deployment today leads to higher consumer prices.

We're excited to introduce Private Credit Crisis, a new weekly podcast from The Capitol Forum examining the policy problems building inside the private credit industry. In this first episode, Executive Editor Teddy Downey and reporter Josh Kosman sit down with attorney Jim Woolery, who is bringing lawsuits on behalf of investors alleging that private equity firms have inflated the assets on their...

When phone makers turned on Qualcomm, the company built an intricate, multi-front strategy to fight back. Now, two former employees say the same playbook is being run in streaming. Today on Second Request, Christie Thoene and Kirti Gupta sit down with executive editor Teddy Downey to revisit their years inside Qualcomm and explain how today's fights over streaming technology mirror the smartphone...

This week, Meta reached a multibillion-dollar settlement in federal court over allegations that it was aware of the harm its products could cause to teenage mental health. That may be the tip of the iceberg for Mark Zuckerberg's problems. Today on Second Request , Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Julia Angwin to discuss how Meta's core business, Facebook, is failing, and how Zuckerberg...

To earn the return on its investment, artificial intelligence will need to nearly triple productivity in the U.S. economy. So what will it do? Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Jessica Wachter, the Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Professor of Quantitative Finance at the Wharton School and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, to discuss her recen...

The Ellison family has been on a quest to reshape American media and Hollywood — their next target: Warner Bros. Discovery, home of HBO Max and CNN.  Today on TCF Investigates, Arjun Singh sits down with editors Jeff Bliss and Jim Oliphant to hear about The Capitol Forum's exclusive reporting on the states' merger trial, and why a state victory could be a paradigm shift for antitrust law.

Plant-based protein has become a mainstay in restaurants and household dinners, but as an emerging industry it's susceptible to the market power of major food companies. Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Andy Fitch and Cynthia Hanawalt of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law to discuss how antitrust law could prevent the alternative protein...

Millions of life insurance policies are tied to the fortunes and speculation of the world's biggest private equity companies. Now, their risk of defaulting on their obligations is increasing, and some worry it could lead to another financial crisis.  Today on Second Request, Teddy Downey sits down with Andrew Granato , Assistant Professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and Pranjal Drall...

Waymo, Apple, Meta and Google have constructed ecosystems that have immense leverage over the global economy and infrastructure. So how should antitrust law tackle that? Today on Second Request , Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with J. Wyatt Fore to discuss the emerging antitrust risks in edge computing and AI.

Same ride, two different prices — that's the new reality facing Uber and Lyft passengers. Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Derek Kravitz of Consumer Reports to talk about Kravitz's new reporting on how Uber and Lyft make use of algorithmic pricing to charge consumers different prices and inflate base costs.

Today on Second Request , Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Carter Dougherty, senior fellow for anti-monopoly and finance at Demand Progress, who argues that Visa and Mastercard enable banks to coordinate pricing without ever explicitly agreeing to it — and makes the case for how the Credit Card Competition Act, ongoing antitrust litigation, and a more aggressive enforcement posture cou...

Twelve states just sued to block Paramount's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the deal would leave viewers with fewer choices and higher prices. Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with The Entertainment Strategy Guy, who writes one of Hollywood's leading newsletters about the streaming and entertainment industry. Read The Entertainment Strat...

What happens if an AI chatbot tells someone to kill someone else?  Tragically, this situation unfolded at a Florida school when a shooter asked ChatGPT for advice on how to conduct a school shooting. But do the creators of ChatGPT bear any responsibility? That's what Erie Meyer, former chief technology officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, thinks, and in this episode of Second Reque...