Hal Singer

"When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, crude oil prices rose by about 71 cents per gallon. But retail gas prices jumped roughly $1.50 per gallon. That’s a 79-cent gap—pure profit for refiners and gas stations, pocketed under the fog of war. California’s Division of Petroleum Market Oversight (DPMO) confirmed this finding in an October 2025 report: Every price spike they studied—2019, 2022, 2023—also constituted a profit spike. Retail prices surged well beyond what increases in crude oil costs could explain. And when wholesale prices eventually dropped, gas stations kept their prices high, also to their windfall." My latest via @monthly asks why we should tolerate such profiteering during a crisis, including wars. It also proposes some concrete ideas on how to address this anti-social behavior. Special thanks to @mypaperboat and @ZephyrTeachout for comments, and to @WeisbergNate for excellent edits.

There’s a reason that companies like Live Nation and Netflix (before it abandoned its acquisition of Warner Bros.) love to make expansive, sometimes absurd, claims about market definition: as the Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of per se illegality in antitrust law, plaintiffs are required to demonstrate that defendants possess market power. And, as I explain in my first @LPEblog post, one way to make this requirement more burdensome is to turn the trial into a costly, complex fight over market definition. Special thanks to the editors, @j_e_brandt and Liz Brown, for asking the hard questions, as well as to @mypaperboat and @TedTatos for wonderful comments. lpeproject.org/blog/the-marke…

In this op-ed, @ThirdWayTweet actually argues that "Epstein class" is an "age-old trope" pushed by "Jew-haters on the left."

There’s a reason that companies like Live Nation and Netflix (before it abandoned its acquisition of Warner Bros.) love to make expansive, sometimes absurd, claims about market definition: as the Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of per se illegality in antitrust law, plaintiffs are required to demonstrate that defendants possess market power. And, as I explain in my first @LPEblog post, one way to make this requirement more burdensome is to turn the trial into a costly, complex fight over market definition. Special thanks to the editors, @j_e_brandt and Liz Brown, for asking the hard questions, as well as to @mypaperboat and @TedTatos for wonderful comments. lpeproject.org/blog/the-marke…