Nathan Newman wrote:
> US capital is considered historically far more centralized; to this
>day, Italian and German manufacturers maintain a far stronger middle-size
>manufacturing sector compared to the more centralized sectors in the United
>States
-It all depends on perspective: ownership in the US is much more -dispersed than in bank-centered systems like Germany. This one's -pretty hard to generalize about.
Even with a bank-centered approach, the concentration of capital linked to folks like J.P. Morgan and the trusts were still more concentrated in the US than in Germany in the relevant time period. Yes, the lack of direct bank ownership of equities in the 20th century made US corporate structures different from much of the world, but one of the results was precisely the mega-corporate structures where firms didn't even need much capital from the markets since they could raise it internally-- a point I believe a certain Doug Henwood has emphasized in questioning the centrality others have given to the role of Wall Street.
-- Nathan Newman