JD>
speaking of which, I've noticed that the media make a lot of comparisons
between the last 20 years or so and the US "gilded age" of the late 19th
and very early 20th centuries. I think there's a lot of validity to these
comparisons (though no analogy is perfect). In the last gilded age, the US
saw a transition from the prevalence of local monopolies or oligopolies to
the prevalence of nation-wide monopolies or oligopolies in manufacturing,
along with a radical increase in the degree of wealth and income
inequality. Now, not only do we see the latter, but there's a transition
from nation-wide monopolies or oligopolies in many countries to world-wide
monopolies or oligopolies in manufacturing. (Inside the US, we see a shift
from monopoly/oligopoly banking on the local level to similar on the
national level, inexorably creating a small number of super-banks that will
all be "too big to fail," so the Fed will prop them up. Likely, the
international concentration and centralization of banking will happen
later. The differences in banking laws between countries slows the process.)
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Goes hand in hand with increasing monopsony in [towards] supply chain
management of factor suppliers, greatly facilitated by software and computer
architectures?

Ian

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