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.) ======= Goes hand in hand with increasing monopsony in [towards] supply chain management of factor suppliers, greatly facilitated by software and computer architectures? Ian
