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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (864263)	6/10/2015 5:57:43 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574491

Monopolies are illegal, unless a special exemption is granted by congress. The Sherman Act, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act all prohibit the creation of monopolies. There is no such thing as "unchecked competition" in the U.S. You've cited some examples of market share leadership, but none of those corporations are currently known to be in violation of U.S. antitrust statutes. And a whole division of the U.S. Justice Department (the Antitrust Division) is there to keep an eye on them, with business practices heavily enforced and litigated.

To: combjelly who wrote (864263)	6/26/2015 2:45:21 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By Bill Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574491

Every business sector tends towards monopoly That isn't true. Dominant companies (often not monopolies) arise, but they also decay. A good example is Standard oil, which steadily lost market share long before the government broke it up, and only retained any degree of market dominance at all by nearly constantly reducing its prices. When it did try to take advantage of its monopoly (at least past the very early days) it just took a hit to market share. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop without any input from the government Microsoft had a monopoly on Windows operating systems (a narrowly defined market) because the government granted them that monopoly. Copyright might be a good idea overall but its still a government granted monopoly. Microsoft did not have a monopoly on the desktop, and their degree of dominance on the desktop, and to a greater decree in consumer computing in general, has declined largely for factors that had little to do with the government. Google has a de facto monopoly on search to the point that Bing uses Google to supplement its searches. It has dominance on search, but no monopoly. There are other search engines, personally I rarely use Google's web search (unless you count Startpage which shows Google results) Microsoft may sometimes copy Google's results (that's disputed) Startpage definitely does, but they don't pass information on to Google or show Google's adds. Its not an example of Google being able to take advantage of any market dominance. Even if Bing copies some of Google's results it shows a lot of its own. Startpage does pay Google, so if you don't want to even do business indirectly with Google you might not want to use them but there are plenty of other alternatives. You also have Yahoo (uses Bing results and gives 12% of the search revenue to MS), AOL Search, Ixquix, Duck Duck Go, ask.com, Dogpile, Gigablast, Blingo, Yandex (Russian but also does English search), and others; also various meta-search, specialized search, and non-English search engines. Anyone at any time (except people in places they are blocked who don't know how to get around the blocks) can use any of these search engines. Its not like physical stores where a dominant market presence might keep competitors off the shelves. IE uses Bing as the default search, The US and world economies is becoming more and more dominated by monopolies. Except in areas were government grants or protects monopolies this is mostly not the case. Your link doesn't even make any argument for that idea. It shows percentages controlled by the largest 4 companies (4 companies controlling 15 to 75 percent does not equal a monopoly). Also it doesn't consider that in many of those 4 industries the top 4 companies have changed. (Some changed during the period of 1992 to 2007 that it covers, all of the top fours for each of the industries it lists have changed in my lifetime.)

To: combjelly who wrote (864263)	10/14/2015 7:43:40 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574491

Fortune 500 firms in 1955 v. 2015; Only 12% remain, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels economic prosperity Mark J. Perry CARPE DIem American Enterprise Institute October 12, 2015 7:33 pm \ What do the companies in these three groups have in common? Group A: American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins Radio, Detroit Steel, Zenith Electronics, and National Sugar Refining. Group B: Boeing, Campbell Soup, General Motors, Kellogg, Procter and Gamble, Deere, IBM and Whirlpool. Group C: Facebook, eBay, Home Depot, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Office Depot and Target. All of the companies in Group A were in the Fortune 500 in 1955, but not in 2015. All of the companies in Group B were in the Fortune 500 in both 1955 and 2015. All of the companies in Group C were in the Fortune 500 in 2015, but not 1955. The list of Fortune 500 companies in 1955 is available here and for 2015 here. Comparing the 1955 Fortune 500 companies to the 2015 Fortune 500, there are only 61 companies that appear in both lists (see companies in the graphic above). In other words, only 12.2% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 were still on the list 60 years later in 2015, and nearly 88% of the companies from 1955 have either gone bankrupt, merged with (or were acquired by) another firm, or they still exist but have fallen from the top Fortune 500 companies (ranked by total revenues). Most of the companies on the list in 1955 are unrecognizable, forgotten companies today (e.g. Armstrong Rubber, Cone Mills, Hines Lumber, Pacific Vegetable Oil, and Riegel Textile). Economic Lessons: The fact that nearly 9 of every ten Fortune 500 companies in 1955 are gone, merged, or contracted demonstrates that there’s been a lot of market disruption, churning, and Schumpeterian creative destruction over the last 60 years. It’s reasonable to expect that when the Fortune 500 list is released 60 years from now in 2075, most of today’s Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist as currently configured, having been replaced by new companies in new, emerging industries, and for that we should be extremely thankful. The constant turnover in the Fortune 500 is a positive sign of the dynamism and innovation that characterizes a vibrant consumer-oriented market economy, and that dynamic turnover is speeding up in today’s hyper-competitive global economy. According to a 2012 report from Innosight (“ Creative Destruction Whips Through Corporate America“) based on almost a century’s worth of market data, corporations in the S&P 500 Index in 1958 stayed in the index for an average of 61 years. By 1980, the average tenure in the S&P 500 had fallen to about 25 years, and in 2012 it was just 18 years. At the current churn rate, 75% of today’s S&P 500 companies will be replaced by 2027! Another economic lesson to be learned from the creative destruction that results in the constant churning of Fortune 500 (and S&P 500) companies over time is that the process of market disruption is being driven by the endless pursuit of sales and profits that can only come from serving customers with low prices, high quality products and services, and great customer service. If we think of a company’s annual sales revenues as the number of “dollar votes” it gets every year from providing goods and services to consumers, we can then appreciate the fact that the Fortune 500 companies represent the 500 companies that have generated the greatest dollar votes of confidence from us as consumers – like Walmart (No. 1 at $486 billion in “dollar votes”), ExxonMobil (No. 2 at $383 billion), Apple (No. 5 at $183 billion) and GM (No. 6 at $156 billion). As consumers, we should appreciate the fact that we are the ultimate beneficiaries of the Schumpeterian creative destruction that drives the dynamism of the market economy and results in a constant churning of the firms who are ultimately fighting to attract as many of our dollar votes as possible — and the 500 top winners of that competitive battle in any given year are the firms in the Fortune 500, ranked by their dollar votes. aei.org H/T Glenn Peterson