David Dayen

Killing Kids in Iran While Kids in the U.S. Go Hungry - The American Prospect For the money the U.S. is spending on war with Iran, it could be covering food stamps for 41 million people or Medicaid for 16 million people.

When you talk to people struggling in this economy, as @sarahlazare.bsky.social and our friends at @workdaymagazine.bsky.social did, their anger at a billion dollars a day being spent to bomb Iran becomes palpable.
prospect.org/2026/03/10/k...

Live Nation Settlement Spurs Chaos in Court - The American Prospect The deal contains a fairly useless set of conditions. More than two dozen states vow to continue fighting.

ICYMI Moe Tkacik and I chronicled the insanity in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday when the Trump Justice Department settled with Live Nation and never told its own line attorneys about it
prospect.org/2026/03/09/l...

Banks Don’t Do Much Banking Anymore—and That’s a Serious Problem As hedge funds, private equity firms, and other asset managers that make up the shadow banking system gradually take over the role of lending, their risks—and the borrowed money they use to make them—...

I first wrote about leveraged loans being a potential problem in *2014*. It doesn't pay to be early, in finance or in journalism.
psmag.com/economics/ba...

From the American @prospect.org email on this, a quote that covers the entire Frump era: “It would be nice if corruption weren’t the steady state of the nation for the foreseeable future.”

"The strategies, which Goldman bankers have pitched on an informal basis, focus on esoteric products known as total return swaps, derivatives that would allow investors to profit if a loan price declined, the people said."
Good thing swaps have never magnified a crisis in history

Get ready to learn a lot more about private credit and software-as-a-service. Get ready like it's 2007.

Goldman pitches hedge funds on strategies to bet against corporate loans Fears that AI advances will upend the software industry have driven demand for new ways to place wagers

Goldman Sachs offering to structure complex short bets against an overvalued security, what @ghostpanther.bsky.social movie have I heard that in before?
www.ft.com/content/52c4...

In a field as competitive as frontier AI, this feedback loop if allowed to persist could result in harm well beyond the immediate consequences of the government's actions. Training and serving frontier-level models like Claude requires extraordinary computational resources. Anthropic has already spent over $10 billion on model training and inference (serving the model to end users) and expects to spend many billions more in the coming years. Although the company has generated substantial revenue since entering the commercial market exceeding $5 billion to date—it has nonetheless had to raise more than $60 billion in outside capital to fund its operations. Anthropic has raised this capital by issuing investors equity stakes in the company.

Based on their lawsuit filed against the DoD, Anthropic appears to be admitting that reports about its revenue and costs are fake, saying its revenue to date “exceeds $5bn” and training/inference “over $10bn.” Previous reports said $4.5bn.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"...the outcome was preordained the day Live Nation signed million-dollar MAGA influencer Mike Davis to lobby for them. ... Under Trump 2.0, competition policy has devolved into a pay-to-play scheme, and the real decisions are being made over cocktails in Pam Bondi’s office...

Live Nation Settlement Spurs Chaos in Court - The American Prospect The deal contains a fairly useless set of conditions. More than two dozen states vow to continue fighting.

"Ticket prices will continue to increase & independent promoters will become extinct... the Mafia couldn’t get a love tap on the wrist like this.” -Tommy Dorfman, who was muscled out of concert promotion by Live Nation & has a long-running lawsuit against the company.
prospect.org/2026/03/09/l...

Live Nation Settlement Spurs Chaos in Court - The American Prospect The deal contains a fairly useless set of conditions. More than two dozen states vow to continue fighting.

OK, here's our story on the wild situation in Manhattan today where the Justice Department settled a monopolization case against Live Nation without telling its own lawyers.
We got one week of testimony that was going really badly for the company. But corruption won out.
prospect.org/2026/03/09/l...

Before every financial crisis, there is a concerted effort to argue that this time is different. Efforts to whitewash recent banking history is an unnecessary sidebar that fuels culture-war grievances while an opportunity for real justice remains on the table.

NEW: Tomorrow marks three years since Silicon Valley Bank's failure. Despite the passage of time, accountability remains elusive. For @prospect.org, our @timi-iwayemi.bsky.social breaks down how Fed Vice Chair Michelle Bowman's calls for a new review ring hollow.

prospect.org/2026/03/09/t...

National Independent Venues Association: "Live Nation’s reported settlement amount - $280 million - is the equivalent of 4 days of their 2025 revenue, which means they could potentially make it back by this Friday."

What's going on is that the antitrust division, which has been decapitated, is trying to do its job while MAGA lobbyists like Mike Davis go over its head to make deals with Bondi's office.

The Live Nation settlement thing is a total mess. Counsel for DOJ didn't know there was a settlement in court this morning!

What Does Trump Think ‘Regime Change’ Looks Like? - The American Prospect Trump’s aim to eradicate the Iranian regime seems for now an unlikely scenario.

The Venezuelan decapitation strategy is no analogue for Iran either politically or militarily. Regime change is a pipe dream, as Ellen Ioanes explains in this well-reported piece.
prospect.org/2026/03/09/i...

A Brief History of America’s Involvement in Iran - The American Prospect For many younger Americans, this is the first U.S. war in the Middle East. Here’s how we got here.

I'm back from a week off, anything happen while I was away?
Oh yeah, that. Well fortunately Naomi Bethune has supplied for me an entire history of U.S. intervention in Iran. Something to share with your underinformed friends:
prospect.org/2026/03/09/i...

Ahead of 2028, Sen. Cory Booker to unveil bill to make $75,000 in income tax-free The bill is a marker for the next time Democrats get a chance to rewrite the tax code. The New Jersey senator told NBC News he's keeping the door open to a 2028 presidential bid.

What are we even doing here? The bulk of this is like four trillion dollar regressive tax cut that doesn’t help the poorest families at all and helps the richest the most.

To make it less regressive, he adds like another two trillion in progressive tax cuts that targets families with kids.

Live Nation Reaches Settlement in Federal Antitrust Case The move spares the concerts-and-ticketing giant from the threat of its business being broken up.

The biggest surprise is they let the trial go on for a whole week
www.wsj.com/us-news/law/live-nation-reaches-settlement-in-federal-antitrust-case-9f0c6fb7

Good news, Trump won't sign any more bills. See you next year

By our count at @prospect.org they have killed at least 28 people since Trump's second term started.

Could this idea save the Democrats? A century ago, Americans broke up the empires of industrial robber barons. Now, anti-monopolists want to do the same again—this time, to tech

Capsule history of the anti-monopoly movement in the Prospect... the other Prospect, from the UK:
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united...

My latest @ The Prospect on the not-so-surprising victory of James Talarico.

‘We’re in it’: Democrats won’t rule out giving Trump more money for Middle East war Democrats will have to balance a desire to criticize Trump’s offensive in Iran with pressure to support funding to defend the nation now at war.

We can draw on the last war authorization in 2002 to say that any Democrat with pretensions of running for president who votes to fund war in Iran will never win the nomination
www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

‘TrumpRx’ Is Another Pretend Solution for High Drug Prices - The American Prospect The proposed government website will just refer people to the drug companies, which use direct-to-consumer pricing to distract from continued high profits.

From last October
prospect.org/2025/10/02/2...

A month in, TrumpRx falls short of president’s grand promises Trump wants to focus on his efforts to lower drug prices, but the TrumpRx website is falling short of his promises.

We told you Trump Rx was going to suck the day it was announced. Now it's been launched, there are barely any drugs on the platform, and most of them are cheaper elsewhere and only help a narrow group of people.
www.statnews.com/2026/03/05/t...

Wealthy Dubai residents race back to UAE to avoid tax bills Some risk spending too few days in the emirate and too many in the UK

Tax exiles stuck in London desperately trying to get *back* to Dubai to avoid becoming tax resident in the UK? Just great stuff. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

How Data Centers Became a Casualty of War Three facilities have suffered damage in drone strikes, and analysts say such installations are increasingly at risk.

Data centers as critical infrastructure: Three Amazon facilities in the Middle East have already been targeted
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Behind Rakhi Israni's empty rhetoric is a record of cutting checks to far-right extremists. Israni claims she’s running as a Democrat when she’s really running as a fraud.

This is the point. If your vaunted trillion-dollar military can't get through a few days of airstrikes because you've consolidated the industrial base so badly, then you don't have a trillion-dollar military, you just have contractors in No. Virginia getting rich