The surge of real investment now occurring in semiconductor manufacturing and data centers has been funded primarily by corporate profits and old-fashioned bonds, while the emergence of more speculative and exotically engineered arrangements among A.I. companies are already giving rise to concerns of a bubble. The financialized features of the American system are not what make our robust capital markets the envy of the world.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
Private equity is now underperforming an S&P 500 index fund over three-month, one-year, three-year, five-year, and 10-year periods. When a buyout firm does score big with one fund, there’s little to no correlation with the performance of its next fund.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about modern finance is that it fails on its own terms. Mergers and acquisitions tend to destroy value even as they sate the appetites of empire-building chief executives.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 “frontier technologies” identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
When your local hospital and nursing home get loaded with debt, cut back on staffing and start charging more for worse patient outcomes, that’s financialization as tragedy. When airlines earn more by selling miles to credit card companies than by flying passengers, with consumers footing the hidden bill every time they swipe at the register, financialization has become farce.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
When consumers are lured into debt with offers to buy that shirt in four easy payments, that’s financialization at work. When you can’t keep track of all the subscription services needed to follow your favorite N.B.A. team, that’s financialization, too. When you’re no longer allowed to record your own child’s hockey game because an investment group bought the rink, that’s financialization.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
The capitalists driving financialization and promoting its results have become capitalism’s worst enemy. Every consumer and every worker in the United States feels the effects.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality. It has fueled the loss of manufacturing jobs across the heartland.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
:::
Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together.
~ James Burnham
:::
:::