

Study Says World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few - swombat
http://www.insidescience.org/research/study_says_world_s_stocks_controlled_by_select_few

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gaius
This rather misses the point that what looks like a single mutual fund from
the outside, from the inside it's the pension funds and other savings of tens
of millions of ordinary people. Take Vanguard or Fidelity for example, they
"control" a vast amount of money, but all they do with it is track indices on
behalf of their retail customers.

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Confusion
The fact that a single entity acts on behalf of tens of millions of ordinary
people does not detract from the fact that it is a single entity that can
exert that kind of influence. If that single entity abuses that power, then
smaller entities loose money and the (extra) earnings largely end up in the
pockets of the entity itself.

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tnovelli
Interesting how so much money/power/responsibility is diluted and
reconcentrated over and over in mutual funds, pensions, insurance companies,
governments, etc. -- much like those subprime mortgage tranches. And we call
this capitalism?!

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yummyfajitas
How is voluntarily paying people to manage your money for you anti-capitalist?

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tnovelli
Everyone is passing the buck... what's the connection between your investment
and a productive enterprise somewhere? A long chain of financial games.
Decisions are based on statistics and third-hand information, not on the
merits of the end investment. Result: a crapload of bad investments and an
unstable economy.

[Edit:] "Capitalism" gets blamed for this mess caused by the dilution of
responsibility, which sounds pretty socialistic to me. You might call it
"emergent socialism".

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yummyfajitas
The connection between my investment and productive enterprise is very simple.
Vanguard (the people who manage my money) transfer my investment to an
enterprise they believe is productive but undervalued.

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rjprins
As an academic field, economics is completely underperforming. It's no suprise
interesting research comes from other areas, such as physics in this case.

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lionhearted
In fairness to economics, it's one of the most politicized fields. Back when
hard sciences were a threat to some religious dogma, there was lots of trouble
even doing astronomy. Economics is up against something a little similar to
that right now.

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kingkongrevenge
Economics is inherently political. Please drop the pretense that there can
ever be economic study not deeply interwoven with politics.

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albertcardona
There can be. There is such thing as integrity and objectivity, particularly
with the hindsight of centuries.

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johnohara
If the list is so small then list them all instead of pointing to the 'big
fish.'

This gives rise to the very real concern that the automated 'systems' that
inform and execute on behalf of the 'few' may in fact wield too much control
over the decision making process.

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byrneseyeview
Interestingly enough, this is true of basically every industry: our food
production is controlled by a select few (who own farms), our car production
is controlled by a select few (the car companies), our computers are
controlled by a select few, etc.

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onreact-com
No surprise here. Good to have scientific proof nonetheless. The so called
free market is a travesty in the current form of oligopoly capitalism.

