Probably from all the consolidation. In the USA there used to be hundreds of companies supplying various industries. Now there's generally 2-5, and they all have the same shareholders.
BlackRock
Vanguard
State Street
Northern Trust
etc
"Vanguard and BlackRock are the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.
BlackRock and Vanguard form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. In all, they have ownership in 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.
Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock. Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a unique structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern, but many of the oldest, richest families in the world can be linked to Vanguard funds."
squeedles•32m ago
Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.
kdhaskjdhadjk•12m ago
So if I invest my meager peasant earnings in Vanguard funds, my holdings are considered equally as important as the Rockefellers?
And it was the solving of this alignment problem that attracted all the Rockefellers, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, etc to Vanguard? So they're not insiders, just big customers with no relationship to the firm itself.
zeroonetwothree•10m ago
Most very wealthy individuals (not sure your examples fit this group) do not use Vanguard. They are more likely to use private wealth management. I feel like you actually have no idea what you are talking about?
kdhaskjdhadjk•3m ago
So your conclusion is that very wealthy individuals do not own and control Vanguard--they have nothing to do with it at all--and that it's collectively owned by the rabble--and all is well as they work hand in hand exclusively for the betterment of their peasant investors as we head into a bright shining new tomorrow? Definitely nothing sinister going on here involving big monied interests.
zeroonetwothree•12m ago
I don’t think you know what monopoly means if you think Vanguard and BlackRock are a monopoly. (At least duopoly would be semantically possible, but factually still wrong)
kdhaskjdhadjk•5m ago
If for example Russia and China together controlled a certain resource, then from the standpoint of the USA, Russia/China have a monopoly on that resource. Doesn't matter if Russia and China are in theory two different countries. They are in fact acting together with the same interest in this circumstance.
Follow ownership up the chain and you will in fact discover the overall point is correct: everything is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
rayiner•11m ago
What influence does Vanguard or Blackrock have in corporate governance? They’re just vehicles for old peoples’ retirement funds. They’re not polling strings in corporate mergers.
Consolidation over the last 30 years is the fault of folks here on HN. Information technology moves the equilibrium point between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. It enables huge companies to operate efficiently. That enables them to leverage their scale to deliver better services and cheaper prices.
Consider Amazon. Everyone loves to hate on Amazon, but they’re doing it while adding stuff to the delivery they already have coming tomorrow. Why can Amazon ship me stuff overnight, whereas it used to take a week back in the 1990s? It’s not the internet per se. You could call in or fax orders back in the day—it still took a week. And delivery is being done using the same planes and trucks we have been using for decades. Amazon happened because technology enabled it to completely restructure the entire warehousing and delivery vertical, rendering a huge swath of the economy obsolete.
That’s happening all over the place. Most of these mom and pop businesses suck. They have shitty service, high prices, limited selection, etc. The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.
crsv•18m ago
Does this calculation take into account garbage stocks and securities fraud? Perhaps some of the reduction was the result of regulation favorable to the consumer?
linuxftw•6m ago
Seems to be little incentive for companies to go public, other than fleecing 401k account holders that have to invest in funds managed by the same companies that underwrite IPOs.
kdhaskjdhadjk•47m ago
BlackRock
Vanguard
State Street
Northern Trust
etc
"Vanguard and BlackRock are the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.
BlackRock and Vanguard form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. In all, they have ownership in 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.
Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock. Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a unique structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern, but many of the oldest, richest families in the world can be linked to Vanguard funds."
squeedles•32m ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•12m ago
And it was the solving of this alignment problem that attracted all the Rockefellers, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, etc to Vanguard? So they're not insiders, just big customers with no relationship to the firm itself.
zeroonetwothree•10m ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•3m ago
zeroonetwothree•12m ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•5m ago
Follow ownership up the chain and you will in fact discover the overall point is correct: everything is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
rayiner•11m ago
Consolidation over the last 30 years is the fault of folks here on HN. Information technology moves the equilibrium point between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. It enables huge companies to operate efficiently. That enables them to leverage their scale to deliver better services and cheaper prices.
Consider Amazon. Everyone loves to hate on Amazon, but they’re doing it while adding stuff to the delivery they already have coming tomorrow. Why can Amazon ship me stuff overnight, whereas it used to take a week back in the 1990s? It’s not the internet per se. You could call in or fax orders back in the day—it still took a week. And delivery is being done using the same planes and trucks we have been using for decades. Amazon happened because technology enabled it to completely restructure the entire warehousing and delivery vertical, rendering a huge swath of the economy obsolete.
That’s happening all over the place. Most of these mom and pop businesses suck. They have shitty service, high prices, limited selection, etc. The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.