FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 23, 2023 

CONTACT: Ashley Woolheater, woolheater@openmarketsinstitute.org 

In a Washington Monthly Cover Story, Open Markets Board Member & FT Columnist Rana Foroohar Writes on President Biden's “Great Reordering” at Home & Abroad 

In The Atlantic, Open Markets Chief Economist Brian Callaci Examines How Biden Abandoned Old, Chicago School Thinking in Favor of Investment-Driven Growth 

The Monthly’s Will Norris Explains How Biden Officials are Truly “Winning at the Antimonopoly Game”

WASHINGTON – Two new publications feature Open Markets writers and thinkers defining the ways in which President Biden’s economic policies represent a tremendous “sea change” for America's political economy, which shows early signs of generating shared prosperity and stronger, healthier democracies. 

“While paradigm shifts take years, indeed decades, to play out, there’s no question that one is underway," writes Financial Times columnist and Open Markets Board member Rana Foroohar in a cover story for the Washington Monthly’s new, aptly titled edition: “Bidenomics really is a BFD.” 

In her sweeping cover story for The Monthly, “The Great Reordering,” Foroohar documents both the collective surprise that a traditional, moderate politician like Joe Biden has initiated the greatest economic reordering since The New Deal, yet reflects that Biden has always related more to the blue-collar worker than the Ivy League elitist and how that outlook has shaped his policy priorities and early questioning of “the world is flat,” thinking. 

Instead, President Biden and members of his administration like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai have made clear the imperative of worker-centered trade policies and greater government intervention to ensure stability and “de-risking” of our supply chains. (She cites Barry Lynn’s many writings on how corporate monopolies have wielded their enormous influence to consolidate and put at risk our supply chains – and how to correct them.) 

A second, not-to-be-missed story in The Monthly from Will Norris, “Winning at the Antimonopoly Game,” correctly identifies the Biden Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s many policy wins, both in court and in rulemaking and enforcement across government from the 2021 executive order on competition, with more to come. Widely off base, he writes, are members of the media trying to label administration’s antitrust approach a failure after a mere two lost merger challenges, while many more proposed mergers have been abandoned as a result of the new competition enforcement regime.

Additionally, last week, just as the Commerce Department announced an impressive 4.9% annual growth rate for the last quarter, The Atlantic ran a piece from our chief economist, Brian Callaci, which documented tremendous economic policy shifts under President Biden and how they are showing early signs of yielding greater and more equitable economic growth compared to 40 years of Reagan-era policies to “tweeze’ out the little inefficiencies, which have failed many times over to produce the growth they promised and instead allowed corporations to consolidate in both size and influence. 

In “Biden Says Goodbye to Tweezer Economics,” for The Atlantic, Callaci writes, “for nearly half a century, the government gave corporate America the hands-off policies it preferred, hoping the wealth would trickle down. Now the government is letting strong overall growth set the foundations for more efficient businesses.” 

While the Biden administration’s political economic shifts in thinking and actual policy are tremendous – thanks, in part, to years of thoughtful scholarship from Open Markets and others – the general public has yet to take note. This is reflected in Biden’s latest poll numbers and as Paul Glastris writes in his editor’s note for The Monthly. But like Glastris, we too are hopeful that the more thought-leaders write and talk about smart economic policy in populist, democracy-promoting terms (and the more we can cite the economic numbers to prove it) the more people will come to understand the promise of this new approach. 

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