>Free market chaos from mom and pop markets?
In the macroeconomic sense, yes. That's one of the reasons the 19th century economy was so unstable. When there are a lot of small actors, there are more links between firms, meaning more opportunity for something to go wrong - a missed payment, for example, that can cascade through the system. And less financial strength among the small individual actors increases the likelihood that something can go wrong. Large firms internalize a lot of these relations, meaning less possibility of something going wrong.
Doug