"Concentration of wealth and business was still another characteristic trend. The merger, the tender offer, the takeover bid, and the proxy fight were in vogue. Bank mergers were all the rage, while at the same time new and untried banks sprouted. Great ramshackle conglomerates of all manner of unconnected businesses were collected together by merger and acquisition. Armies of lawyers, brokers, accountants, businessmen, and technicians who spent their time pasting together these paper empires bolstered the lists of the more or less employed. The most fabulous of the conglomerates was the empire of Hugo Stinnes, which comprised hundreds of companies at its peak in coal, iron, steel, shipping, transport, paper, chemicals, newspapers, oil, films, banks, hotels, and more. Stinnes was Mr. Everything who had also begun to colonize abroad and is supposed to have contemplated organizing all German industry into a single super-conglomerate. After the inflation ended, Stinnes' empire and many lesser ones were found to be functionally and financially unsound, and they disintegrated more or less messily.
Legions of Americans — investors, conglomerators, brokers, advisers, lawyers, accountants, analysts, clerks, programmers, bureaucrats, and so forth — served the business of making money with money and creating absolutely nothing even as a byproduct. By 1970, after just a little curtailment of the money inflation, the stock market had collapsed, conglomerates and new issues and hot stocks were a thing of the past, and all the legions that had been caught up in the frenzy were a sick lot indeed
. If the government makes general credit cheap, first the bankers and then the capital goods industries will prosper, and then the other industries they buy from. Profits rise, wages rise, workers are in demand, a few unemployed will be employed, insufficient prosperity is rectified, and there is a boom."
Goldman joins bumper quarter for Wall St investment banking | Financial Times (ft.com)
- Read above, except add IPO's and private equity to the mix. It's only getting bigger.
- Highly recommend reading GS annual report plus quarterly.
- Read about banks with links to China (HSBC is one I am bearish on atm -haven't finished researching though.)
I don't think I have to add anything else.
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