A Monopoly Donald Trump Can Pop

[elleng]

'Among the mysteries about the incoming administration, Donald J. Trump’s approach to antitrust laws stands out for its importance. Mr. Trump gained a lot of voter support because of the stagnation of working-class living standards in the face of record corporate profits.

Sensing this, he channeled populist anger against elite corporations by, for example, calling the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

But the real challenge to competitive markets today does not come from mergers like this one. The great, but mostly unknown, antitrust story of our time is the astonishing rise of the institutional investor — a large company, like a mutual fund company, insurance company, pension fund or asset management firm, that buys stock in substantial quantities for the benefit of clients and customers — and the challenge that it poses to market competition.

In 1950, institutional investors owned about 7 percent of the United States stock market; today they own almost 70 percent. If you count them as a single investor, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are the largest owner of 88 percent of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500. Control of the economy has not been this concentrated since the Gilded Age. This growing power has undercut middle-class living standards. But there is a way to stop it.

The problem is not just the size of the institutional investors, but the way they invest. Institutional investors often own stakes in all the competitors in concentrated industries.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opinion/a-monopoly-donald-trump-can-pop.html?

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Point of Interest.

The Dot Bomb Bust of the Eighties and Bush the first Administration took millions of small investors out of the market.

[sab390]

2. Short term dip

There was a short lived panic in the stock market in the 90's when someone announced that the baby boomers would need to sell their stocks to fund their retirement. It ended when it was learned that baby boomers only owned 2% of the market.

[golfguru]

5. Sorry, that is a mis-leading post

on factual basis. Boomers may own only 2% of stocks directly by individual ownership, however a much bigger share of stock market is owned by boomers via mutual funds, etf's, and pension funds.

It is entirely conceivable if boomers need the cash, they can liquidate their indirect holdings.

[talking-liberally]

3. Anti-Monopoly could be a great unifier for dems.

In this very well written Washington Monthly article, the author makes the argument that a lack of competition and monopolies create bad wages, bad working conditions, bad service, centralization of wealth, coastal corporate headquarters. I think the dems could use an anti-monopoly focus that would attract a lot of people to the party.

[elleng]

4. SHOULD BE, and should HAVE been.

Really disappointing lack of vigorous enforcement in recent years.