Now, they have 44 percent – more than they had at the time of the 2008 crash.
I wonder how that happened?
Hard to show, but easy to imagine: that flowdown from the Govt was a selective subsidy of just -some- companies and -some- banks. We subsidize the failing by effectively punishing success. Properly functioning banks wanted no part of TARP, but were forced to participate. Why? Because their ability to not depend on handouts would make the failing banks look bad(providing information to consumers...) And, the Gov't knew better.
Financial weasels gutted the nation. The nation allowed them. The nation, Main Street, reeling from the gaming, believed the weasels, and allowed them to gut the nation, believing it needed to be done to avert a greater 'crisis.' The greater 'crisis' was, the weasels and their crony friends taking a bath on past weaseldom. What used to be called 'market education.'
We're in a phase of this development where the following pattern gets used over and over. Perhaps even well meaning federal edicts end up fat fingering a sector of our economies, and eventually screw them up. In the ensuing mess, they uniquely blame the private sector for the mess, and demand more control to subject us all to yet more more of their original fat fingering.
Plenty of parasitic cocksuckers in the private sector to blame for what happened in 2008, but how do SEC exempt FNMA end up bypassing stricter state lending regulations to run its OneSizeFitsAll social experiment, and end up touching nearly every mortgage (and nearly every portfolio) with its singlepointoffailure social experiment?
The systematic replacement of 50 sets of state banking and lending regulations with an over-riding single point of failure federal model is one.
When that social experiment failed miserably, it did so on a massive national level. Had we still had 50 sets of independent state banking and lending regulations running in parallel, they would not have spontaneously aligned on a clearly flawed model, the one based on fighting poverty by eliminating all conventional barriers to credit. This national financial failure was a massive confluence of aligned interests, both public and private, which was what enabled the crisis on a massive scale, even global scale. That is the inherent danger of Totalitarianism, vs. distributed government. It creates opportunities to get it all wrong at once, instead of learning from distributed experiments and failures.
Look at how a suspension bridge cable is designed, the principle emerges in system design all the time. The universe is trying to tell us how to build complex systems -- in a distributed, not concentrated fashion.
We've permitted a kind of soft fascism to emerge. The result is a booming real estate market in DC, and doldrums everywhere else in America. As a private entity, you are either migrating towards a crony relationship with government and purchased state favor, or you are struggling before the inevitable punt on 4th and long.
The National Party regimes in DC for decades have believed they could actually 'run the economy.' Because of that belief, they probably regard fewer large entities as 'easier to run' than more numerous small entities, so, what was once regarded as 'mixed economies wisdom--be on the lookout for monopolies, and devolve them' -- has been assessed as counter productive by the little tribe of constructivists that are presently scrambling to find the necessary 17 people they believe are required in the US Treasury Department to 'fix the Economy.'
Do you all remember when the Berlin Wall went up in '89? Me neither, thought it fell. And yet, centrally planned command 'The Singular Economy' fixing/running is in full sway by all wings of The National Party.
The #1 idea to "Save the Economy" is to stop trying to "Save the Economy." Get the Government back to the role of providing a social safety net for the destitute, not the affluent.