Nice article by Ian of course but it really only states the very obvious. Too big to fail is clearly and easily discerned as a situation that should not be allowed to happen and Ian lays out the case well. But there are plenty of smart people in WS and DC that can clearly see this as well.

But "to big to fail" is almost never raised as an issue. Why? Because in our current system, they are too big to be fucked with. They own the government, or at least enough of it to control what they need to control. The root cause then is not economic theory or greed, etc, but our corrupting and corrupted system of campaign finance and lobbying. Fix those or nothing is fixed.

that centrally planned economies don't work yet some of these corporations which are nothing more than centrally planned economies are bigger economies than the old communist governments ran

...should be required to read (or watch) 1984. The parallels with today are uncanny, frightening, and very relevant. America's new world order is operational and indeed the corporatists will not allow anything to change. Appearance being everything; the illusionists will make it all feel real.

www.iauthorbooks.com
http://iauthorbooks.blogspot.com/

is that these oligarchs (which is what they are, make no mistake) insist on the same shopworn free-market tropes and cliches even when it is so very obvious to anyone who looks that the market is no longer free owing to their cartelization of it. If, indeed, it ever was free to begin with.

Just as a gravitational point mass -- a black hole -- is the failure point of Einsteinian physics, so too a monopoly or cartel is the failure point of free enterprise. Would that people would understand it that way.

"I shall continue to be an impossible person as long as those who are now possible remain possible."

-- Mikhail Bakunin

...scrambling to get everything back to "normal". Here's a link to Roubini's take on where we are and where we're going.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31947275

www.iauthorbooks.com
http://iauthorbooks.blogspot.com/

“A free market isn’t a market in which the government plays no role and has no rules. A free market is one in which (among other things) no market participant has enough market clout to enforce prices, in which market participants all have equal information and which has few barriers of entry.”

Didn’t know that. A truly eloquent and educational post.

Take a Gander at this...

the Graph grabbed me and it still hurts....

-5.75,-4.05
"God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." -- Robin Williams