An economic analysis of Epstein's role as an intermediator [Glenn Loury]

Loury has written an article about this: Jeffrey Epstein as Middleman: An Economic Analysis, February 10, 2026.

From the opening:

Economic theory has always been more comfortable analyzing markets than the people who make markets possible. Textbook exchange is clean, synchronous, and explicit: a buyer meets a seller, a price clears supply and demand, and the transaction is complete. Yet much of real economic life proceeds otherwise. Buyers and sellers often do not meet directly. Information is fragmented. Trust is uneven. Transactions are staggered in time. Under such conditions, intermediaries—middlemen, brokers, fixers—emerge not as incidental features of exchange, but as central institutional actors.

The economics literature offers several ways of understanding why. In the theory of search and matching, intermediaries arise because finding a counterparty is costly and uncertain. Buyers and sellers may exist in the same economy but never meet at the same moment. A middleman, by standing ready and cultivating contacts on both sides of the market, increases the effective rate at which trades occur. In canonical models of intermediation, the middleman does not produce the good being traded; he produces access. His profit comes from reducing search frictions and exploiting his position as a node through which others must pass.

Enter, Jeffrey Epstein:

Once such a system is in place, it can become self-reinforcing. Individually, each participant may find it rational to rely on the intermediary. Collectively, the arrangement can be destructive. The intermediary becomes indispensable precisely because he sits at the intersection of multiple relationships, none of which fully sees the whole. No single actor has enough information—or incentive—to dismantle the system. Economics describes this as a norm-based equilibrium: stable, persistent, and resistant to reform, even when widely suspected to be rotten.

It is against this theoretical backdrop that the Epstein scandal acquires its deeper significance. Treated narrowly, it is a story of horrific sexual abuse and criminal failure. Treated analytically, it is also a case study in extreme relational intermediation. Jeffrey Epstein’s economic role was never easy to specify. He was not a conventional financier, nor simply a socialite. His apparent value lay in his position as a connector across domains that ordinarily remain separate: finance, philanthropy, academia, politics, and private life. He brokered access. He made introductions. He hosted, facilitated, and normalized encounters whose purpose was often left conveniently vague.

Here the reporting by DropSite News adds crucial texture. Rather than presenting Epstein as a lone operator, it reconstructs a dense web of interactions sustained over decades: repeated visits to multiple properties, overlapping social circles that included financiers, scientists, politicians, and university administrators, and philanthropic or advisory arrangements whose concrete deliverables were often ill-defined. DropSite documents how Epstein inserted himself into institutional spaces—elite universities, research initiatives, charitable projects—by offering himself as a conduit to donors, prestige, or influence, even when the precise source of his own wealth or authority remained opaque.

There's much more at the link.