A Land of Monopolists: From Portable Toilets to Mixed Martial Arts

Private equity 'roll-ups' hit virtually everything in the economy, from mail sorting software to mixed martial arts to portable toilets to dentists...

Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about a bunch of niche industries in which there are rising amounts of market concentration, largely due to financiers on Wall Street executing a strategy called a ‘roll-up.’ Roll-ups happen in sectors that, like cheerleading, you wouldn’t immediately imagine as dominated by corporations with market power. I write a lot about big tech and private equity, but when I say monopolies are everywhere in our economy, I truly mean…

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