The "new economy" is full of self-dealing. That's the result of loose (or non-existing) regulations on monopolies. It all starts with Wall Street controlling stocks on thousands of large companies that are ultimately owned by small groups of the same shareholders. Now it's evolving to large sectors owned by fewer and fewer people.

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toomuchtodo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is certainly a contributing factor, which Matt Stoller has documented robustly in his newsletter "Big" [1] [2], as well as the More Perfect Union org [3] [4].

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com

[3] https://perfectunion.us/

[4] https://substack.perfectunion.us/

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stocksinsmocks 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.

I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.

	▲	coliveira 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As I said, BlackRock and their friends were just the beginning. NVdia is trying to own a huge chunk of the AI space using their profits. Other tech companies are using a similar playbook. And of course they're all owned by Wall Street. The competition is highly controlled so the winners are all part of the same club.