The Big Newsletter: “The Trump FTC tried to hide a complaint showing Pepsi forced shoppers to pay higher prices everywhere but Walmart. But now it’s unsealed. And the politics of affordability are explosive Last month, the Atlanta Fed came out with a report showing a clear relationship between consolidation in grocery stores and the rate of food inflation. Unsurprisingly, where monopolies prevail, food inflation is 0.46 percentage points higher than where there is more competition. The study showed that from 2006-2020, the cumulative difference amounted to a 9% hike in food prices, and presumably since 2020, that number has gone much higher. Affordability, in other words, is a market power problem. And yesterday, we got specifics on just how market power in grocery stores works. The reason is because a nonprofit just forced the government to unseal a complaint lodged by Lina Khan’s FTC against Pepsi for colluding with Walmart to raise food prices across the economy. A Trump official tasked with dealing with affordability tried to hide this complaint, and failed. And now there’s a political and legal storm as a result. Let’s dive in…”
See also – Geospatial Heterogeneity in Inflation: A Market Concentration Story. Seula Kim and Michael A. Navarrete. Working Paper 2025-15 November 2025 – We study how inflation varies across regions with different income levels and the role of retailer market structure. Using NielsenIQ Retail Scanner and Business Dynamics Statistics data, we document new stylized facts of spatial heterogeneity in food inflation and retailer market structure. From 2006 to 2020, poorer metropolitan statistical areas experienced annualized food inflation that was 0.46 percentage points higher than that of richer ones—amounting to a cumulative difference of 8.8 percentage points over the period. Poorer areas also had fewer goods, fewer retailers, and higher market concentration. Using a triple-difference estimator during the 2014–15 bird flu outbreak, we identify a causal link between market concentration and inflation.
