Maggie's Farm

Bulldog makes a great point. Look back 150, 100, 50 years ago to those identified as being wealthiest. Those fortunes either became the basis for a foundation (doing worthy projects, we hope) or became less notable due to changes in the economy/new inventions. The Fed is simply managed by a bunch of people making educated (?) guesses, a task that has seldom succeeded longterm.

Look at John Reed (former chair of CitiGroup and the NY Stock Exchange and now president of M.I.T. where all those algorithms were established for trading hedge funds and, supposedly, keeping our economy stable), who has yet to lasso the finer points of running a massive organization over a long period of time. I'm not suggesting he's not an intelligent man, just that the premise is wrong: attempting to run profitable huge organizations usually doesn't work for very long unless "exceptions" are made via cronyism -- special favors by government regulation to select parties. It like turning a semi-trailer around on a two-lane highway. It's far easier and less disruptive to allow many smaller companies, agencies, etc. to tackle the vargaries of the marketplace where fine tuning is possible faster and less likely to lead to the mismanagement of an entire economy.

Big is not better after a certain point and finding that point (which I thought our anti-trust legislation was to designed to do) has been ignored by the powers-that-be since they took on AT&T and Microsoft.

Socialism/elitism = same distorted results.