@fm2279@social.coop To me it also feels like the culmination of the "national champions" model of economic management, which has been a disaster. Basically, putting all your economic eggs in the national champions basket is creating a planned economy, except the planning is done inside corporations instead of inside government bureaus. It has almost exactly the same shortcomings we used to bash communist centrally planned economies for having. One of those is weird shortages stemming from slow or absent adaptation to changing conditions. We're in for more of this till we stop letting every single sector of the economy monopolize or duopolize.

Wall Street is happy with the situation because the economy is working as designed--the national champions are doing fine, for them.