8 ms·

They will certainly kill city-run broadband and anything else that the big companies view as encroaching on their monopolies. In 2008 we should have let the ba

They will certainly kill city-run broadband and anything else that the big companies view as encroaching on their monopolies. In 2008 we should have let the banks fail and all the wealth in the world evaporate like it's supposed to in a Capitalistic society. Instead, we basically made the banks bigger and the rich richer and more powerful.

emodendroket 10y ago
Capitalism, as a system, tends toward wealth accumulation, and that wouldn't have been less true if they allowed a bunch of banks to fail.
- cpursley 10y ago
  I think you're referring to cronyism (aka crony capitalism), which is often conflated with free-market capitalism here on hn.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    It's a distinction without a difference.
  - ska 10y ago
    Iirc correctly there is theoretical work supporting the former (i.e. capitalism leading to wealth accumulation) but not the stability of that wealth over longer terms. That is, there is inequality in distribution, but also churn. Of course this has the same fundamental issues as all economic modeling when employed in practice.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    "Crony capitalism" is the only kind that has ever existed and the one for which its critics coined the name "capitalism". "Free market capitalism" is a not particularly coherent utopian aspirational vision which defenders of real-world crony capitalism invented as a distraction.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      I think that's a little harsh. The game of Monopoly exists to show that structural factors can inevitably lead to an outcome an outcome where one player has all the money even if players behave completely fairly towards each other. BTW if you've never heard of it, I think you'd be extremely interested in Nomic, a game whose play revolves around the reconstruction of its own rules.
  - dagss 10y ago
    Sources? Piketty's "Capital in the 21th century" can serve as a source on how wealth has been getting concentrated in the real world (interrupted by WW2 which spread it out again). He also argues well for why this is an intrinsic feature of our economies. You may oppose him and say "that was just because the market isn't free enough", but it is an extraordinary claim and I would say the burden of actual proof is on you then.
    - clock_tower 10y ago
      I'd refer you to Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War. He argues that it's not capitalism that leads to wealth concentration, it's peace, stability, and prosperity -- since we can see this problem worldwide, and very far back in history. Since peace breeds wealth concentration, it eventually ends in a crisis (normally a period of major wars); the crisis mostly kills people and ruins lives, but it also disrupts concentrations of wealth as a side-effect. Eventually the wars end in a peace of exhaustion, with wealth a little more equitably distributed (or at least enough wreckage that everyone can make money by rebuilding), and a period of peace and wealth concentration begins again. Solutions to this problem that have been tried and failed include: * Endless war. This doesn't do much the problem of concentration of wealth (warlords as well as capitalists have high wealth concentration), and it creates sociological problems; for details in a familiar context, read Albion's Seed, specifically the section on the Borderers/hillbillies/Scotch-Irish. * State ownership of some productive capital (Britain after WWII) or basically all productive capital (the USSR). This works well for a while (see How Asia Works), but if kept around for too long it breaks down, producing complacency, mismanagement, and an inevitable fiscal crisis. Thatcher and Gorbachev did pretty much the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons. * Wage controls, price controls, tariff walls, heavy internal regulation. The New Deal, Ireland under De Valera, all European governments before the 1700s (see Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), and the Tokugawa Shogunate did this. For as long as the will to enforce everything exists, this approach sort of works, and it slows down wealth concentration and the development of crises; but it doesn't stop them entirely, and the crises are likely to be really explosive when they hit. (See also the 1700s, 1968, and the fall of the Tokugawas.) It also leads to technological stagnation, which has other obvious problems. * Letting the market work its magic. See Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, for why this is intolerable in practice. Don't ask me for a magic bullet, none of the ones above work and I don't know what others there could be. Perhaps the solution is to just be aware of the problem and try to manage it...
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I'm afraid I think that's a basic structural flaw of capitalism (notwithstanding its many structural goods). When I hear this argument I feel it's a bit like proponents of socialism saying 'ok communism actually does suck but that's because it's a departure from the beautiful socialist ideal.' The basic problem is this: no matter how good your system, it's not going to be used solely by angels, but by a distribution of people. A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. And a lot of people in the middle will just go in the same direction as everyone else - when there are more good people around they'll conduct themselves ethically, when there are more bad people around they'll help themselves. But the middle group is generally passive and doesn't make any particular effort to either support or subvert the system within which they find themselves. So in the context of capitalism you'll have some very high-minded entrepreneurial people and some corrupt cronyist types, in the context of socialism you'll have some very selfless individuals and some authoritarian thugs, in a religious context you'll have some saintly types and some hypocrites who prey on the naive and use fear of divine retribution to silence their victims, and so on. When we design or experiment with social technologies, we have to be on our guard against two extremely risky assumptions: one, that our proposed system would work great if only everyone adopted it, and two, that our proposed system will be used by people like ourselves who share our basic assumptions about right and wrong. In sum, you're right to point to cronyism but you're wrong to ignore cronyism given the fact of its widespread popularity. there are bad as well as good people int he world, and so we should consider what the possible negative outcomes of our technology would be if such people gained control of it.
    - rtfsgdfarea 10y ago
      >A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others This seems far from the general consensus in social psychology, which is that the context we exist in determines the majority of our actions. The Milgram and Asche lines of research are the most prototypical, but Zimbardo has spent his whole career on basically this question. True sociopaths are incredibly rare (less than 1% of the population). People find it very difficult to betray or hurt other people, and this comes from genetics, not context, and we know this because it is a human universal. In similar experiments measuring trusting behaviors and betrayal vs. reward responses to those behaviors, 90% of people engage in a trust behavior (giving money to another research participant, over a computer game, never seeing this other person), and 95% of people who are trusted reward, rather than betray, their partner. This sort of human-naturism is just defeatist propaganda meant to maintain the existing system of total hierarchical dominance of elites (the capitalist class, men, whites, cisgenderds) over the oppressed. You can choose to stop being a shitty person, and your doing that will create a context where other people are pressured to do the same, and will likely concede to that pressure. (It's not surprising that this didn't exactly take on in an environment like the Soviet Union, where trust was intentionally minimized by the state, which itself didn't trust its citizenry because it was the active target of an espionage and proxy war for its entire existence. It's also not surprising that people in an environment that values capital accumulation over all else are quick to betray each other. However, there are a lot of examples of libertarian socialist territories, brief though they may have been, that contradict the notion that communism (which is the same thing as socialism, there is no difference at all) inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Since these societies were attacked both by capitalists and authoritarian communists, it's not surprising that they didn't last very long either.)
  - Trundle 10y ago
    Owning income producing assets increases income, allowing for the purchase of more income producing assets. I don't see how crony capitalism vs free market needs to come in to it.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Right, exactly. And besides that, it's not exactly surprising that you'd end up with disparities in a system whose distinguishing characteristic is the ability of a small class of owners to capture the lion's share of excess value.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    What is 'Crony capitalism', and what evidence is there for it? This "It's not capitalism, it's crony capitalism" is Capitalism by a different name. You need someone to defend your private property, which usually entails a state or state-like institution (and of course the class system inherent in capitalism). Rather than linking you to a particular source of information, there are plenty of good sources here on this 'cronyism': https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/search?q=crony&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/search?q=crony&restrict_s... Also, capitalism without government intervention is still as flawed because it is capitalism. And either way, wealth accumulation is a feature of capitalism, 'crony' or not. So is wage labour, the two-class society of the proletariat and bourgeois, maximising exchange value over use value and the biggest teller of them all, private ownership of the means of production. Recommended reading is Marx's 'Wage Labour and Capital', and I'm making my way through 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressell if you want to get to the nitty gritty of what Capitalism was like and how it still persists in its exploitative global form.
- mistermann 10y ago
  > Capitalism, as a system, tends toward wealth accumulation, and that wouldn't have been less true if they allowed a bunch of banks to fail. Perhaps, but if the government hadn't refilled their coffers after they blew up all their money, at least a different set of criminals would have it now.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    And a lot of other people would get hosed in the process.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      As they should if the funds are not guaranteed.
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        What good would come of it?
        mistermann 10y ago
        Bankers would have less incentive to make highly risky bets as it would no longer be a risk-free endeavor. As it is now, they win regardless of whether they are correct.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        The same ends could be achieved by stringent regulation without having to also punish ordinary people who are not to blame for what happened.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        So you'd be perfectly fine with tons of elderly people ending up homeless.
threeseed 10y ago
You're not making any sense. The reason we are discussing this policy is because Trump was elected as the antithesis of the rich and powerful elite. Which is obviously ridiculous but that's another issue. The masses who voted for him are responsible for this policy. And simply letting the financial system crash would've hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. Just as I personally saw in the UK when Northern Rock went under. It was pensioners and the poor left confused and panicked who were lining up at branches not the big, fat bankers.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >And simply letting the financial system crash would've hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. Just as I personally saw in the UK when Northern Rock went under. It was pensioners and the poor left confused and panicked who were lining up at branches not the big, fat bankers. Those people actually got their money back whereas the "big, fat" shareholders sued for compensation in court and lost. I'd rather queue. Letting the financial system crash and deleveraging in a disorderly manner wouldn't have been the ideal way of dealing with the crisis but it would have yielded a better outcome than the bailouts which simply provided lavish subsidies for the financial sector.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Printing money to bail them out has bad consequences too.
- ChicagoDave 10y ago
  I'd say it's easy enough to look at Iceland to see how they handled the financial fallout. They imprisoned the bankers and bailed out their citizens. They have a booming economy now and no wealth inequality.
ComradeTaco 10y ago
The global economy as of 2008 was and continues to be absurdly leveraged, often combined with a wonderful smorgasbord of complex financial instruments that obfuscate risk. If the banks holding these complex instruments were allowed to fail, if Lehman Brothers collapsed along with AIG, then it's very likely that the financial system would have been dragged down with it. The resulting recession would be likely on the same magnitude as the great depression. The bank bailout inserted a huge amount of liquidity into the market, which absorbed much of the shock of reduced consumer spending. Combined with the auto bailout and Obama propping up state budgets, the economy was able to hold together. Truthfully, I believe that the banks should have never been able to be too big to fail. Let it be said, however, that main street and wall street are intimately linked, and failure of one deeply imperils the other.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Regarding bailouts saving the economy... that's the narrative. I'm not sure how anyone can be confident that it is accurate. Either way, it's fatalistic to say that wall street and main street are linked. We could have easily picked main street banks over wall street banks. To some degree, that's what the opposite of too-big-to-fail looks like.
  - ComradeTaco 10y ago
    I think it's over simplifying the situation to make a division between main street banks and wall street banks. Main street is largely owned by and receives liquidity from wall street. Many seemingly stable "main street" banks actually had tons of subprime junk that was rated as triple A up until the correction. These main street banks also had assets whose worth was threatened by the collapse of wall street. Some of these main street banks owned pieces of wall street itself. I mean I don't give a nickle about wall street, but I understand that the collapse of wall street would have been totally devastating to the global economy. Compartmentalization is key for the financial industry.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by "picked Main Street banks over Wall Street banks" ?
gnaritas 10y ago
We did let the first bank fail, it nearly broke the global economy and it was one of the smaller ones. That's why the other banks were bailed out.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  How does it break the global economy? Without the failed bank, there will be no more demand for the labor performed by employees? No more demand for products from customers? People will say "That bank closed up, better stop making things and being productive, time to climb in a hole"? It's confusing when people conflate the prosperity of the ruling financial elite with the "global economy".
mistermann 10y ago
> They will certainly kill city-run broadband and anything else that the big companies view as encroaching on their monopolies. I'm curious, how do you know this?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
snarf21 10y ago
Right, but the reason that happened is that the FTC, FCC and others approved all these mergers. Comcast would never have organically captured all these customers. The same thing happened with the banks. They were getting insane concerns and used that money to buy more banks to speculate on that money too, rinse and repeat. The customer at Sante Fe Trust (e.g.) wouldn't have likely chosen to move to Bank of America or Wells Fargo but he didn't get a say. The challenge with capitalism is these rollups of the small players are great for efficiency but once they get past a certain size it will become a defacto monopoly without regulation.
st3v3r 10y ago
So you want your children AND your parents living with you for the next 30 years?

emodendroket 10y ago

Capitalism, as a system, tends toward wealth accumulation, and that wouldn't have been less true if they allowed a bunch of banks to fail.

cpursley 10y ago
I think you're referring to cronyism (aka crony capitalism), which is often conflated with free-market capitalism here on hn.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  It's a distinction without a difference.
- ska 10y ago
  Iirc correctly there is theoretical work supporting the former (i.e. capitalism leading to wealth accumulation) but not the stability of that wealth over longer terms. That is, there is inequality in distribution, but also churn. Of course this has the same fundamental issues as all economic modeling when employed in practice.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  "Crony capitalism" is the only kind that has ever existed and the one for which its critics coined the name "capitalism". "Free market capitalism" is a not particularly coherent utopian aspirational vision which defenders of real-world crony capitalism invented as a distraction.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I think that's a little harsh. The game of Monopoly exists to show that structural factors can inevitably lead to an outcome an outcome where one player has all the money even if players behave completely fairly towards each other. BTW if you've never heard of it, I think you'd be extremely interested in Nomic, a game whose play revolves around the reconstruction of its own rules.
- dagss 10y ago
  Sources? Piketty's "Capital in the 21th century" can serve as a source on how wealth has been getting concentrated in the real world (interrupted by WW2 which spread it out again). He also argues well for why this is an intrinsic feature of our economies. You may oppose him and say "that was just because the market isn't free enough", but it is an extraordinary claim and I would say the burden of actual proof is on you then.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    I'd refer you to Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War. He argues that it's not capitalism that leads to wealth concentration, it's peace, stability, and prosperity -- since we can see this problem worldwide, and very far back in history. Since peace breeds wealth concentration, it eventually ends in a crisis (normally a period of major wars); the crisis mostly kills people and ruins lives, but it also disrupts concentrations of wealth as a side-effect. Eventually the wars end in a peace of exhaustion, with wealth a little more equitably distributed (or at least enough wreckage that everyone can make money by rebuilding), and a period of peace and wealth concentration begins again. Solutions to this problem that have been tried and failed include: * Endless war. This doesn't do much the problem of concentration of wealth (warlords as well as capitalists have high wealth concentration), and it creates sociological problems; for details in a familiar context, read Albion's Seed, specifically the section on the Borderers/hillbillies/Scotch-Irish. * State ownership of some productive capital (Britain after WWII) or basically all productive capital (the USSR). This works well for a while (see How Asia Works), but if kept around for too long it breaks down, producing complacency, mismanagement, and an inevitable fiscal crisis. Thatcher and Gorbachev did pretty much the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons. * Wage controls, price controls, tariff walls, heavy internal regulation. The New Deal, Ireland under De Valera, all European governments before the 1700s (see Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), and the Tokugawa Shogunate did this. For as long as the will to enforce everything exists, this approach sort of works, and it slows down wealth concentration and the development of crises; but it doesn't stop them entirely, and the crises are likely to be really explosive when they hit. (See also the 1700s, 1968, and the fall of the Tokugawas.) It also leads to technological stagnation, which has other obvious problems. * Letting the market work its magic. See Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, for why this is intolerable in practice. Don't ask me for a magic bullet, none of the ones above work and I don't know what others there could be. Perhaps the solution is to just be aware of the problem and try to manage it...
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I'm afraid I think that's a basic structural flaw of capitalism (notwithstanding its many structural goods). When I hear this argument I feel it's a bit like proponents of socialism saying 'ok communism actually does suck but that's because it's a departure from the beautiful socialist ideal.' The basic problem is this: no matter how good your system, it's not going to be used solely by angels, but by a distribution of people. A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. And a lot of people in the middle will just go in the same direction as everyone else - when there are more good people around they'll conduct themselves ethically, when there are more bad people around they'll help themselves. But the middle group is generally passive and doesn't make any particular effort to either support or subvert the system within which they find themselves. So in the context of capitalism you'll have some very high-minded entrepreneurial people and some corrupt cronyist types, in the context of socialism you'll have some very selfless individuals and some authoritarian thugs, in a religious context you'll have some saintly types and some hypocrites who prey on the naive and use fear of divine retribution to silence their victims, and so on. When we design or experiment with social technologies, we have to be on our guard against two extremely risky assumptions: one, that our proposed system would work great if only everyone adopted it, and two, that our proposed system will be used by people like ourselves who share our basic assumptions about right and wrong. In sum, you're right to point to cronyism but you're wrong to ignore cronyism given the fact of its widespread popularity. there are bad as well as good people int he world, and so we should consider what the possible negative outcomes of our technology would be if such people gained control of it.
  - rtfsgdfarea 10y ago
    >A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others This seems far from the general consensus in social psychology, which is that the context we exist in determines the majority of our actions. The Milgram and Asche lines of research are the most prototypical, but Zimbardo has spent his whole career on basically this question. True sociopaths are incredibly rare (less than 1% of the population). People find it very difficult to betray or hurt other people, and this comes from genetics, not context, and we know this because it is a human universal. In similar experiments measuring trusting behaviors and betrayal vs. reward responses to those behaviors, 90% of people engage in a trust behavior (giving money to another research participant, over a computer game, never seeing this other person), and 95% of people who are trusted reward, rather than betray, their partner. This sort of human-naturism is just defeatist propaganda meant to maintain the existing system of total hierarchical dominance of elites (the capitalist class, men, whites, cisgenderds) over the oppressed. You can choose to stop being a shitty person, and your doing that will create a context where other people are pressured to do the same, and will likely concede to that pressure. (It's not surprising that this didn't exactly take on in an environment like the Soviet Union, where trust was intentionally minimized by the state, which itself didn't trust its citizenry because it was the active target of an espionage and proxy war for its entire existence. It's also not surprising that people in an environment that values capital accumulation over all else are quick to betray each other. However, there are a lot of examples of libertarian socialist territories, brief though they may have been, that contradict the notion that communism (which is the same thing as socialism, there is no difference at all) inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Since these societies were attacked both by capitalists and authoritarian communists, it's not surprising that they didn't last very long either.)
- Trundle 10y ago
  Owning income producing assets increases income, allowing for the purchase of more income producing assets. I don't see how crony capitalism vs free market needs to come in to it.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Right, exactly. And besides that, it's not exactly surprising that you'd end up with disparities in a system whose distinguishing characteristic is the ability of a small class of owners to capture the lion's share of excess value.
- ue_ 10y ago
  What is 'Crony capitalism', and what evidence is there for it? This "It's not capitalism, it's crony capitalism" is Capitalism by a different name. You need someone to defend your private property, which usually entails a state or state-like institution (and of course the class system inherent in capitalism). Rather than linking you to a particular source of information, there are plenty of good sources here on this 'cronyism': https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/search?q=crony&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/search?q=crony&restrict_s... Also, capitalism without government intervention is still as flawed because it is capitalism. And either way, wealth accumulation is a feature of capitalism, 'crony' or not. So is wage labour, the two-class society of the proletariat and bourgeois, maximising exchange value over use value and the biggest teller of them all, private ownership of the means of production. Recommended reading is Marx's 'Wage Labour and Capital', and I'm making my way through 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressell if you want to get to the nitty gritty of what Capitalism was like and how it still persists in its exploitative global form.
mistermann 10y ago
> Capitalism, as a system, tends toward wealth accumulation, and that wouldn't have been less true if they allowed a bunch of banks to fail. Perhaps, but if the government hadn't refilled their coffers after they blew up all their money, at least a different set of criminals would have it now.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  And a lot of other people would get hosed in the process.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    As they should if the funds are not guaranteed.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      What good would come of it?
      - mistermann 10y ago
        Bankers would have less incentive to make highly risky bets as it would no longer be a risk-free endeavor. As it is now, they win regardless of whether they are correct.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        The same ends could be achieved by stringent regulation without having to also punish ordinary people who are not to blame for what happened.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      So you'd be perfectly fine with tons of elderly people ending up homeless.

threeseed 10y ago

You're not making any sense. The reason we are discussing this policy is because Trump was elected as the antithesis of the rich and powerful elite. Which is obviously ridiculous but that's another issue. The masses who voted for him are responsible for this policy. And simply letting the financial system crash would've hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. Just as I personally saw in the UK when Northern Rock went under. It was pensioners and the poor left confused and panicked who were lining up at branches not the big, fat bankers.

crdoconnor 10y ago
>And simply letting the financial system crash would've hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. Just as I personally saw in the UK when Northern Rock went under. It was pensioners and the poor left confused and panicked who were lining up at branches not the big, fat bankers. Those people actually got their money back whereas the "big, fat" shareholders sued for compensation in court and lost. I'd rather queue. Letting the financial system crash and deleveraging in a disorderly manner wouldn't have been the ideal way of dealing with the crisis but it would have yielded a better outcome than the bailouts which simply provided lavish subsidies for the financial sector.
bbcbasic 10y ago
Printing money to bail them out has bad consequences too.
ChicagoDave 10y ago
I'd say it's easy enough to look at Iceland to see how they handled the financial fallout. They imprisoned the bankers and bailed out their citizens. They have a booming economy now and no wealth inequality.

ComradeTaco 10y ago

The global economy as of 2008 was and continues to be absurdly leveraged, often combined with a wonderful smorgasbord of complex financial instruments that obfuscate risk. If the banks holding these complex instruments were allowed to fail, if Lehman Brothers collapsed along with AIG, then it's very likely that the financial system would have been dragged down with it. The resulting recession would be likely on the same magnitude as the great depression. The bank bailout inserted a huge amount of liquidity into the market, which absorbed much of the shock of reduced consumer spending. Combined with the auto bailout and Obama propping up state budgets, the economy was able to hold together. Truthfully, I believe that the banks should have never been able to be too big to fail. Let it be said, however, that main street and wall street are intimately linked, and failure of one deeply imperils the other.

humanrebar 10y ago
Regarding bailouts saving the economy... that's the narrative. I'm not sure how anyone can be confident that it is accurate. Either way, it's fatalistic to say that wall street and main street are linked. We could have easily picked main street banks over wall street banks. To some degree, that's what the opposite of too-big-to-fail looks like.
- ComradeTaco 10y ago
  I think it's over simplifying the situation to make a division between main street banks and wall street banks. Main street is largely owned by and receives liquidity from wall street. Many seemingly stable "main street" banks actually had tons of subprime junk that was rated as triple A up until the correction. These main street banks also had assets whose worth was threatened by the collapse of wall street. Some of these main street banks owned pieces of wall street itself. I mean I don't give a nickle about wall street, but I understand that the collapse of wall street would have been totally devastating to the global economy. Compartmentalization is key for the financial industry.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by "picked Main Street banks over Wall Street banks" ?

gnaritas 10y ago

We did let the first bank fail, it nearly broke the global economy and it was one of the smaller ones. That's why the other banks were bailed out.

cookiecaper 10y ago
How does it break the global economy? Without the failed bank, there will be no more demand for the labor performed by employees? No more demand for products from customers? People will say "That bank closed up, better stop making things and being productive, time to climb in a hole"? It's confusing when people conflate the prosperity of the ruling financial elite with the "global economy".

mistermann 10y ago

> They will certainly kill city-run broadband and anything else that the big companies view as encroaching on their monopolies. I'm curious, how do you know this?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

snarf21 10y ago

Right, but the reason that happened is that the FTC, FCC and others approved all these mergers. Comcast would never have organically captured all these customers. The same thing happened with the banks. They were getting insane concerns and used that money to buy more banks to speculate on that money too, rinse and repeat. The customer at Sante Fe Trust (e.g.) wouldn't have likely chosen to move to Bank of America or Wells Fargo but he didn't get a say. The challenge with capitalism is these rollups of the small players are great for efficiency but once they get past a certain size it will become a defacto monopoly without regulation.

st3v3r 10y ago

So you want your children AND your parents living with you for the next 30 years?