Wall Street’s pathological and ruinous demand that companies show perpetual growth, as opposed to healthy sustainable profits, is only possible in a world where firms are allowed to lock up markets, eliminate competition and collect increasing extractive rents at increasing scale.
I'd go the other way on the cause-and-effect (I think the root problem is allowing too many firm mergers and not breaking apart mega-firms, and these problems are downstream from that, rather than wall street quarterlies driving firms to lock-up markets and eliminate competition), but yes.
But either way, firms can only impose extractive rents because customers can't easily switch out the abusive provider to other, broadly-compatible providers
my weird pet policy is that airlines shouldn't be able to own more than a third of the gates at any airport servicing a sufficiently large metro area. it's exactly this but it's a rare case where the public owns key infrastructure and can set rules that force competition w/o splitting a company.
The GOP has eroded and rigged the rules of the markets (including through non enforcement) that the outcome of expected market behaviors is what we have today.
It’s a failure of governance, not market actors.
Its kind of funny, business used to be when someone(s) had a desire to provide a product and a service. The old idea that I adore cooking for others and making them happy, or I designed a widget to solve this issue. All that shit is gone, consumed by greed.
buy local.
*cues up the Sarah McLachlan*
If you regular people just hunted and executed 2 billionaires every 2 years on PPV we could solve so many of societies problems.
Remind them they are mortal & no mountain of money can save them from our rage.
My personal theory is that this, unlimited political fundraising, and gerrymandering are the big three democracy killers. Judicial lifetime appointments runs a close fourth.
Throw in the complete collapse of local journalism (which just so happens to be largely the result of demand for perpetual growth over sustainable profits).
The FTC initiated a price fixing investigation into grocery and there were immediate price drops.
They are also now investigating the people that organized the apartment rental cartel.
I mean I'd argue it's only not "late stage" because there are so many more parts to strip out of industry and society before they run out of ways to make number go up
But I'm basically a communist and am aware of other arguments and respect that they may be valid
Debatably, this kind of industry plunder is more indicative of an era with relatively few direct external pressures that might force institutions to prioritize efficiency. Between climate change and a global uptick in armed conflict, it's an era that might also be coming to an end.
The term late capitalism unintentionally implies an inevitability. I think it might be better to rebrand it as what it was, unregulated capitalism. Remind people that we are approaching the triangle shirtwaist, kids hands getting cut off era of American history.
Even the "regulated" capitalism we had sucked ass but using Gilded Age imagery might have a mote profound effect on peoples' perspectives. Talk about union massacres and political machines with people you know so they understand where we are socioeconomically.
We could say that it's not so much base capitalism as it is meta-capitalism. The practices (law, banking, consulting) that serve largely to reduce the players' anxiety about the risks of the capitalist engine.
Since I keep getting notifications on this, I was thinking, manufacturing capitalism was physical, visible, and therefore more fixable in regulatory processes. The dark money/law firm+investment bankers+private equity+VC+stock buybacks nexus is WAY harder and thus still wreaks havoc.
I've argued since I was in college 20+ years ago that this would eventually collapse the United States as an economic power. Britain's issues will come here.
Its like they never met the logistic function "S" curve in their MBA programs.
Exponential growth leading to addressable market saturation and flattening of growth to the "farming" stage of reliable, ongoing profit was one of the very first things I ever learned in product development work.
I learned finance in the early 90s. There was a concept of the cash cow that was well managed and produced dividends. Over the years the stock market has forced everything into the growth model and killed the cash cows. Part of this is executives compensated in equity chasing stock price rises.
