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look at this friendly looking old man here seems harmless right but if you look a little closer he's holding up a dairy queen number one fan card and that kind of makes you wonder because no one in their right mind would ever brag about being a dairy queen let alone as number one fan dairy queen is where you go as a last resort i'm talking about when you don't even have enough freezer frost to make a snow cone because lord knows even that is better than dairy queen just based off that we could tell there is something off about grandpa buffett here and i know no one wants to talk about this because most people are too busy fluffing the buff but we gotta ask ourselves is the oracle of omaha actually an evil monopolist or is he just a shrewd friendly businessman like everyone says he is that's what we're gonna go over in today's video from a blog from matt stoller at big talking about warren buffett america's foxiest predator and this is one where i definitely want to hear your opinion so comment down below and of course before we get into it make sure you check out our free training we talk about the effective strategy that i use and most of our fallable members use as well don't gotta be a monopolist or anything to make profits with this one so check it out so in this article matt is actually interviewing dave dayan who recently just published a book monopolized life in the age of corporate power and in that book he goes through a lot of good stories about people living under the control of various powerful corporate entities from wall street to amazon to prison and even the military and before we even get into it we gotta remind ourselves why monopolies are bad and the reason is is because it hurts consumers and it can do that in various different ways one of the biggest ways is putting up large barriers of entry and when they do that that prevents competitors from coming into the same industry that they're in and disrupting it so this is why we like competition and not monopolies because more competition means a better result for consumers they're going to compete on price product and at the end of the day the consumer is going to get the best possible version but if you have these monopolies that are pretty much corrupt and get embedded with the government they put up all these barriers that don't allow any of those smaller companies to start so it stifles innovation and consumers get screwed because you're stuck with whatever that monopoly wants you to have at whatever price they want so it's bad for capitalism as a whole now in this book that dave wrote warren buffett is actually a presence throughout every single story that he's going over because he quietly profits in the background from almost every monopoly that dave talks about and no one talks about this when they talk about buffett but he's actually a great monopolist so in dave's book he went around talking to different people and getting their stories about how they were screwed so the first question asked is do you think the problem of monopoly is just too complex for voters to understand your normal person and dave explained that people know that something is terribly wrong even though they might not be able to articulate it because they know they're getting screwed but they don't know what in particular is actually screwing them so for example he talked to a woman who's renting a home and then she got an alert one day saying her home was being put on the market without her knowledge no one told her because it's just owned by a private equity giant and she's a big trump supporter but now she really hates the private equity firm blackstone which is full of trump donors and this private equity thing is something we've talked about before and you're gonna see it more in this video too where these guys are buying up these different things right different assets or that's how they look at them not considering that these are people's homes that they live in and then they're shuffling them around between different private equity firms because there is so much money in the economy so all the richer people in society give their money to these private equity firms and they pass it back and forth and the valuation of these assets or homes go up every time so it's like this shell game which i guess wouldn't matter if it wasn't an asset someone else is using so in this case this lady gets an alert oh my house is going up for sale and before she knows it she'll be paying more rent because oh it's a different owner now and he's increasing the rent and they've been doing this a lot and on low income family homes too and trailer parks which buffett is in as well which we'll see in a moment here but this shuffling of assets back and forth is just stupid not productive at all it just hurts people as another example he talked to this one lady whose husband has diabetes and she tracks his blood sugar on her phone because he has this wearable device that will alert her so whenever he has low blood sugar she'll go in and give him a piece of chocolate well it turns out where she's living there was a gap in her wi-fi conductivity because she lives out in a rural area and with the laws that went into place with all these telecoms that are also monopolies again some consumers are getting screwed because her area is literally forbidden from getting broadband and the telecom industry had that law passed with all their lobbying to help themselves and then no other company can get in there either because it's against the law those are those stupid barriers of entry so there was a 15 minute gap in her tracking and when she went into the room where her husband was she found him slumped over in his chair because his blood sugar crashed and she never got alerted so people don't know that it's monopoly power that's screwing them over but they know that something isn't working and who is buffett well he's pretty much the avatar of a monopoly because he's the one who pushed the whole idea of economic moats if you build a moat around your business then it's going to be successful and those are the companies that he looks for now there's multiple ways to build a moat the productive way is to have the best product on the market and have a really loyal fan base that no one wants anything else because you're constantly giving them the best value at the best price i'd say costco is close to that i was going to say amazon but things have been changing in the last few years now the bad type of moat building is when you do what i was talking about before go lobby in the government get all these rules and regulations put in place so that no one else can enter your space then you use that mode to exercise your pricing power because you're the only name in town to screw over the consumer like hey you're paying this much now you're going to pay this much and you don't have any other choice you know every time you get mad at your cable company that's exactly what's happening they have you buy the cojones and you just have no other option and buffett doesn't discriminate between which type of moat a company is building in fact a lot of his investments go towards the bad type of moat so he does a lot of anti-competitive things like one of the first things he did with berkshire was purchased newspapers and in that process he was definitely trying to corner the market he used anti-competitive practices to put the competition his rival newspapers out of business this was all in buffalo another not so great moat that buffett will jump into is addictive drugs like teva pharmaceuticals he had a big position there and they manufactured generic opioid-based products and you know there's a whole crisis around this in the united states people getting addicted to prescription drugs and what's a better way to put a moat around your business than to sell an addictive product like that is it ethical i don't know same thing with dialysis companies he's a huge investor in davita which is one of two dialysis providers and these companies give terrible service and they capitalize on the fact that medicare covers kidney disease davita just rips off the government and then the person getting dialysis gets screwed over too because the service is horrible again there's clearly some moat here some monopoly power if there's only two of them buffett is also an owner of one of the largest trailer park manufacturers and through that he's presided over the complete rip-off of very vulnerable people who can't afford anything more than a mobile home and i was actually gonna do a video about this before specifically buffett and trailer parks because it's been shown again and again berkshire going in buying those trailer parks and then jacking up the prices and a lot of people living there had to move out and they didn't even know what happened they didn't have a say in it all of a sudden new ownership hey prices are this much now leave and these are friendly old grandpa buffett's companies mr nice guy verisign is another example this company basically owns dot com and dot net website so every time you create a new website and normally you pay around 10 15 a year to hold it well these guys are getting a cut from that and verisign has a right to manage these domains through a government contract and if i didn't say it before yes buffett is invested in this company and recently the government gave verisign the right to increase prices for those.com registries which is stupid and corrupt because if this were a good capitalistic system what they're doing then the government would have given the contract to another company who could do it for as little as a dollar a domain instead of 10 but these contracts are automatically renewed as long as certain performance metrics are met and these guys absolutely act as monopolists because a few years ago they tried to get web started the government it was supposed to be seen as a competitive product to com well verisign went and rigged the auction for dot web coming on they created a fake company called new co that bid an enormous amount of money 135 million for dot web and they won the auction then two days later they put out a press release saying hey actually verisign is new co and to this day not a single dot web address has been created they bought that address to take it off the market so they could control their monopoly still is that good for people no yet another example of a buffett investment john deere these guys block customers from repairing their own equipment they have to go back to a john deere to get it repaired they say that no when you buy a tractor you're not buying the tractor you're just buying a license to run the machine so again they have a tight hold on that market buffett has a long-standing partnership with 3g the brazilian private equity firm so he's helped them create mergers between burger king and tim hortons and even crafton heinz another one he helped get through was inbev buying anheuser-busch and when it comes to the beer market there is a huge monopoly forming even when you think about all the craft beers most of them fall under this one company so they have a huge huge portion of the beer market and not just in the us but around the world once again buffett pushed that through when he asked buffett why he was investing in credit rating agencies like moody's he said i don't know anything about that business the reason i bought it is because there are only three credit rating agencies and they serve the whole country so they have pricing power once again this is buffett's mo this is what he looks for and when it comes to these companies going through with these anti-competitive practices buffett just says hey i have very little to do with them he claims that plausible deniability because he's not directly managing them he's just invested in them so it's tempting to sort of let buffett off and say hey this is just the way things are and he's a smart guy to capitalize on it but he's also been a huge force in pioneering this tactic and creating these monopolies he's been at it for many many decades and by cheerleading these monopolies and what he calls moats he helps cement them in place and he creates a strategy among aspiring business tycoons that hey this is the way you succeed in america buffett has a ton of power influence to make that happen and they even talk about berkshire hathaway being a great road map for regulators and anti-trust enforcers buffett would be the best informant for them buffett69 that's what we could turn him into snitching on monopolies because you could just subpoena him and say all right tell me about this company that you bought and why you bought it and he'd say well they have incredible pricing power and there you go the government can attack that company break it up create some competition so what do you think do you think it's okay for buffett to do these things to keep pushing these monopolies because he's not just a passive party just investing you know he has significant power and influence over everything that goes on in the world economy really which is kind of funny when i think about his whole giving pledge thing all these billionaires giving up all their money oh they're so amazing but what could they do if like in buffett's case he actually stepped up and pointed out monopolies and said hey we need to break this up instead of putting these things together and profiting off of them how many more people would he help instead of saying he's going to donate all his money why doesn't he use his power and influence right now why can't he help the people getting screwed over in the motor homes instead of making it happen so he can make a buck isn't that the point of the giving pledge or do you only want that to happen after you die and your money is donated how do you weigh that on a scale all the damage you're doing versus what that money will do after you're dead and the type of corruption that goes on is just crazy like in july the fed picked up 8 million of amazon bonds 11 million of berkshire hathaway companies bonds 17 million in walmart and 24.6 million of microsoft all these companies that don't need help the government is helping while the smaller companies they're getting screwed left and right and this is all more more bonds they've already spent before it's a lot of corruption if you ask me and if you're really out for the people and we're really a nice guy then maybe it's time to you know change some of these things work on the other side of it i don't think buffett really needs to make too much more money and i'm not on the side of the socialist where we should go after billionaires like bezos and redistribute his money i don't think that makes sense but i also think there should be rules in place so these companies can't do stupid things like this pe hot potato where they're just passing assets back and forth while rents get raised for everybody else or break up the monopolies too that would be a huge help for the consumer put these rules in for the games so that all these billionaires like buffett can still make all their money but then they won't be screwing over consumers so i'd be interested to see what you think comment down below should buffett be somewhat responsible for this or is it just all part of the game he's just an investor right maybe let me know down below and if you haven't already make sure you take our free training it'll teach you our strategy that we use that requires no monopoly power just based off trends but take the training and you'll see what we're talking about and how you can use it to profit if you like this video make sure you subscribe because we're gonna make a lot more do that and i'll see you in the next one stay fallible out there bye you
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