3 Comments

As a member of the feline-american community, it seems to me that one of the differences between the impact of the dot-com implosion vs The Great Recession was the difference between an equity bubble and a debt bubble.

Cue up Hyman Minsky vs Modigliani-Miller.

Expand full comment

Well written and interesting. But while you did note this degree of corporate concentration is higher than it was in the early twentieth century, I think it should be noted that it is actually far higher than it would appear because back then we were politically and economically decentralized so there were *effectively* antitrust mechanisms at the state and even local levels. And in regards to banking, we had interstate (sometimes inter region) capital flow inhibitors back then (we had them for every day of the nations existence until they were done away with between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s), we had state level usury laws, we had multiple classes of banks with some of them having geographic or sectoral capital allocation biases (we dont have those anymore despite appearances, like, they literally changed the laws for credit unions all the way back in, again, the latter 1970s to mid 1980s and made them fundamentally mostly not credit unions anymore, among other examples)

Expand full comment

Thank you very much for this. It makes a lot of sense. Also, I did not know about the "proxy voting rule". I had assumed that ETF managers were just passive.

Expand full comment