One of my former bosses from the late 1990s recently penned a guest commentary for our hometown daily, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was published yesterday and essentially asked, if certain financial companies have become ‘too big to fail,’ why did U.S. regulators allow them to get that big in the first place, and why do they continue to protect said firms’ disproportionate size? An excerpt:
It is disturbing, to put it mildly, that almost everything that’s been done so far in the name of saving the American economy has worked to keep these already huge corporations big or to make them even larger through industry consolidation.
It’s about time we realized that bigness itself is much of the problem, not only in the financial sector, but also throughout our economy. Rather than working to preserve these mega-entities, we should be trying to create a marketplace that actually can be controlled by human beings and that meets human rather than only corporate needs.
That strikes me as an issue entirely worth debating.