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Feral Finster's avatar

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.

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Nipples Ultra's avatar

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.

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Mike Moschos's avatar

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)

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Anant Kadiyala's avatar

My understanding is that ESG initiatives largely aspired to lower the ‘cost of energy’ across the value chain of a company’s ecosystem. This would enable more business efficiency (at least that was the theory and the aspiration). Based on how scope 1,2,3 and other ESG reporting works elements of E and S in ESG were proxy to something else.

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Policy Tensor's avatar

I read all the papers. This was MSCI's new big idea to make money. It was sold as a signal of long-term financial performance (by bringing everything within the model). But that fell by the way side because the evidence for that is practically non-existent, and marked by the glaring anomaly of sin stocks. It was instead taken up bc of the stewardship teams' search for a rational order in the dispatch of its fiduciary duties imposed by the SEC.

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