The financial sector is heavily monopolised in its own right. More importantly, the financial sector drives monopolisation in other parts of the economy. For example, investment banks actively pitch mergers & acquisitions to clients; or financial lenders lend cheaply and copiously to monopolists, while starving the smaller competitors of credit. In addition, big tech firms are rapidly getting active in finance, potentially ‘tipping’ parts of finance into the embrace of big tech firms.
Britain is embarking on a reckless spree of post-Brexit financial deregulation, with eerie echoes of what preceded the global financial crisis of 2007/08. As a top UK regulator put it recently, we tried this before and “it didn’t end well, for anyone.”
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Welcome to The Counterbalance, the newsletter of the Balanced Economy Project. This is the first part of a series about how finance concentrates economic power. Our last newsletter but one focused on finance and “competitiveness”:
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