<p>*...Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”</p>
<p>...“If you look at the distribution of faculty at leading business schools,” says Khurana, “they’re mostly in finance. … Business schools are responsive to changes in the external environment.” Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist. *</p>
<p>about the faculty at various schools: remember that these high pay executives could turn around and give a lot of that money back to the school. there’s and old saying: “Whats a well-rounded Yale applicant? One who can roll from New Haven to Wall Street”</p>
<p>On a side notes: the first thing that popped into my mind was Dilbert and the pointy haired boss. An engineer who actually knows what he’s doing vs. the boss who’s only concerned with the bottom line.</p>
<p>i don’t think its fair to say that the article is laying blame of the failure of America’s industrial base at the doorstep of business schools.</p>
<p>the article (which i agree with on balance) asserts that the curricula at elite b-schools started to become finance-centric – reflecting certain economic realities of the marketplace (e.g. $$$ from Wall St) –> i.e. pumping out finance oriented graduates. </p>
<p>if anything, the failure / mismanagement of the industrial base was a combination of: lack of vision, lack of imagination, lack of strategy, lack of competent / qualified management.</p>
<p>Yeah, but whose fault was that, especially the last bit? I would argue, as would the authors, that business schools are to blame, at least partly. If management was not operationally competent, it may be because they’re not properly taught to be competent. </p>
<p>With regard to Harvard Business School, Harvard MBA’s cannot simply stockpile finance courses to the exclusion of all else. Every MBA student is required to take the first-year Technology & Operations Management course, which is supposed to impart competent operations knowledge. Granted, nobody is expected to be fitted for a Six Sigma Master Black Belt after that course, but you are still expected to finish the course with some familiarity and appreciation of operations management. If you don’t, well, that speaks to a weakness of that course.</p>
<p>It’s a complicated issue at best. I’d agree that b-schools probably are somewhat complicit, but I disagree that they are the “cause” of the decline.</p>
<p>There is a bit of chicken and egg at play here, for instance, why were finance / consulting jobs becoming more desirable vs. Corporate America? The road to finance success was (is) still wrought with uncertainty / instability / longevity, but in addition to the increased payout this contrasted with the declining desirability of a GM / Ford job –> when those used to be considered extremely desirable at one point. Why? What happened?</p>
<p>The answer isn’t cut and dried. There are many reasons the US auto industry failed: and management is just a part of the reason. I’d argue, however, that this decline was occurring before these changes were happening at the b-school level. </p>
<p>US auto co’s were becoming bloated bureaucracies weighed down by uncompetitive practices (including the unions which ultimately acted as an anchor around the neck of the industry) in addition to the runaway debt, pension liabilities and, of course, management’s inability to make swift, bold decisions in the face of a changing landscape (e.g. vs. the nimble Japanese, the US companies had the turning radius of an aircraft carrier).</p>
<p>When the first oil shock hit in the 70s, US auto makers were woefully unprepared and the Japanese, despite their reputation for poorer made cars, took full advantage of their cheaper, fuel efficient vehicles. In the 80s, a little known fact is that Reagan of all people under pressure from the US auto industry, initiated a trade sanction against Japanese auto makers, slapping tariffs on units sold over a certain volume. The Big 3 Japanese makers responded in kind by going up market to get the most bang for their Yen and so Toyota created Lexus, Nissan created Infiniti and Honda created Acura and the beginning of the end of the US automakers began. Meanwhile, they became leaner, hungrier, more efficient (they had to be as exporters), incorporated innovative production techniques, etc. Slowly, their products started to improve, quality and reputation gained traction. The rest is history. The Koreans (Hyundai) are currently taking a chapter right out of this playbook. What other auto maker is offering financially strapped consumers in an uncertain economy a money-back guarantee on their product? The Chinese will no doubt come a knocking in about 15-20 years from now when I doubt there will be more than one US automaker left (if they haven’t all been acquired by the Japanese, Koreans or Germans).</p>
<p>At any rate, I digress, the point is, there are a lot of factors at play when it comes to the demise of the US automaker. Business schools, if they are at fault, aren’t at the top of this long list IMO.</p>
<p>i think the problem is that the MBA degree is gaining more and more power in the top rungs of corporations. Bankers and consultants view high level corporate posts as comfy exit options, and can often get them due to the MBA network. over 10% of fortune 500 ceos are mckinsey alums. </p>
<p>This stranglehold on the upper rungs causes the grunts to feel under-appreciated and lacking a viable career path. The grunts who actually come up with products, sell products, etc. thus become less motivated and “check out”. when you cut out all the fat of a company, the heart is making things and selling things, so this is a major problem.</p>
<p>the innovation workers (engineers/scientists) get frustrated and switch careers (maybe even join the mba party) or do the absolute minimum work required to get a paycheck. the best ones start new companies, where the layers of corporate culture are removed and they can innovate freely. none of these things actually help their original company.</p>
<p>the corporate innovation pipeline will continue to disintegrate until engineering is once again a viable and attractive career path IMHO. our “best and brightest” dream of becoming a wall st trader rather than a lead production engineer.</p>
<p>looks like an excellent high-level post that an ambitious googler could aspire to. there seems to be a strong indication that success in that job could lead to ever higher management positions. yet the Req does not request software engineering or sales experience, but rather banking or consulting. why would a grunt work hard if he/she will never get a chance to really have a career? </p>
<p>So incentives are screwed up. As an engineer who just received his MBA I would tend to agree. I’m a damn good engineer, but it has tough to support my family, I fixed that by moving away from home. It’s been tough to get into leadership positions, because the leaders I’ve been given to follow have mostly sucked. It was the horrible leaders that convinced me to get my MBA, thinking it would give me the opportunity to lead. However, with the economy the way it is those jobs are few and far between.</p>
<p>We follow the money, as sad as that is. Sometimes it looks like the only option is to do your own thing. That way you can have a shot at doing what you love and creating a career and showing others what a real leader is suppose to look like.</p>
<p>Would I blame an MBA? Do the MBAs create the incentives?</p>
<p>Actually, I’m not sure about that. A finance career doesn’t seem to be any more unstable than a career in operations/manufacturing management. Boatloads of ops managers within just the US auto industry alone have lost their jobs in the last few years. Each time a US auto company or supplier closes a manufacturing plant, or, even worse, terminates an entire marque, represents a grave loss of operations management jobs. </p>
<p>Moreover, no rebound for operations management as a career is on the horizon, if one will ever happen at all. Contrast that with the finance industry, rejuvenated by extraordinary (and extraordinarily costly) taxpayer support, and is doling out record bonuses once again. In contrast, few if any manufacturing firms are paying out any bonuses whatsoever - heck, their employees feel lucky to simply have jobs at all. A graduating MBA student is therefore entirely rationally incentivized to prefer a finance career over an operations career. </p>
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<p>I would actually argue otherwise: the trend of MBA graduates towards higher-end ‘management service’ professions not only occurred well before the decline of US manufacturing, but actually contributed to that decline. By 1970 - several years before the oil crisis that spurred the popularity of the small Japanese cars - half of all graduating Harvard MBA’s were taking jobs in consulting or financial services as their first job (Khurana 2007: Table 7.2). Furthermore:</p>
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“…as consultants and investment bankers, these business school graduates would play a significant role in downsizing traditional manufacturing and product firms. Other elite schools, such as Wharton and the business schools at Stanford and the University of Chicago, began seeing similar shifts in student job preferences around this time. Moreover, even those students entering large corporations often typically went into staff positions in areas such as strategic planning, business development, or corporate finance, not into line positions.” (ibid: p.329) * </p>
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<p>I agree, but the question again is - why? Specifically, why were the best Japanese management talent incentivized to become innovative operations managers, but the best US management talent seemed more interested in consulting and finance? True, US domestic auto industry may well have become bloated and slow-moving bureaucracies, but that should have provided extensive entrepreneurial opportunities for innovative US managers - the same opportunities that the Japanese exploited.</p>
<p>While I don’t blame individual MBA’s, I do blame business schools, for they shape incentives, either directly or indirectly, and they do shape opinions through research. Harvard Business School was founded to teach the principles of operations management as espoused by F.W. Taylor, yet the fact is, only a tiny handful of HBS faculty remain who publish research on ops management. Heck, even the required first-year Operations Management MBA course is often times not taught by a professor who actually researches operations management. In contrast, far more faculty members specialize in finance and strategy. The message to both the students and to the management cognoscenti who look to business schools for future trends could therefore not be more clear: Harvard does not consider operations management to be as important as finance or strategy (e.g. consulting). With the important exception of the MIT Sloan School, the same could be said for most other top B-schools.</p>
<p>sakky, I understand what you are trying to say, but in the end, I kind of look at the demise of the US auto industry and say, “who cares?” The US economy (as any economy) is constantly changing and evolving. If anything, it’s been too slow to change, too late to see the writing on the wall. Some of this resistance to change is due to industry ineptitude, but some of it is also institutional (e.g. flawed US economic policies which have helped prop up businesses and industries with inefficient practices, pro-business laws, etc.) </p>
<p>And it should come as no surprise as there are so many powerful stakeholders who have so much to gain (and lose), i.e. lobbyists, unions, politicians (via voters). etc. If you take a step back and look at the economic landscape as it has evolved over the decades and centuries, there have been industries which have come and gone (used to be coal and railroads, now it’s software and gene splicing). Take the US auto industry as we have been discussing this. There was a point in time where US firms held a comparative AND competitive advantage – what with our ability to easily access natural resources, an abundant and capable workforce and a captive consumer base (i.e. no real need to export – and the costs that come with that segment) and competitive practices via industry giants Ford and Sloan… but now, not only have US firms lost the competitive advantage, they have, more importantly, in an ever increasing interconnected global economy/sourcing, they’ve lost the comparative advantage as well. Non-US firms just do this business better, more efficiently, more cost effectively and produce better end products. It’s game over. </p>
<p>Same can be said of the consumer electronics industry. But all is not gloom and doom. I say, good riddance. Instead of trying to compete in a fight where you have all but lost – instead of throwing away that capital and future careers, I say let’s focus on the “next big things”. </p>
<p>Instead of bailing out the Big 3, I say, use those resources to invest into businesses where we may still hold an advantage: software firms, biotech, nanotechnologies, “clean energy” other cutting edge technologies which aren’t only profitable and certainly exportable, but perhaps more importantly, can actually help save the planet as well (whether it’s a feasible alternative to fossil fuels or a cure for AIDS).</p>
<p>I know this is very “pie in the sky” stuff, but I kind of take a broader view and say, who cares about the auto industry? Sure it’s a huge blow to the US economy now, but its been a drag for a long time – let’s just put it out of its misery and invest into areas where the future is brighter and the returns are greater. The demise of the auto industry? Call me crazy, but I say good riddance.</p>
<p>How do the MBAs fit in this discussion? I know I went off a bit on a tangent, but I firmly believe that no matter what the US auto firms did, no matter if they were still recruiting Harvard MBAs by the bucketloads, the time had come for the Japanese, Germans to surpass the Americans. They were hungrier, leaner, smarter with policymakers back home all on the same page – for them it was do or die. Ironic since we helped those two countries after we defeated them in WWII.</p>
<p>*Industry ineptitude
*Lack of society-enhancing (as opposed to rent-seeking) innovation
*Flawed economic policies that have propped up inefficient businesses with inefficient practices
*Pro-business laws
*Powerful stakeholders with substantial political lobbying strength
*Foreign competition that holds comparative & competitive advantage</p>
<p>Quite the inventory of incompetence, the docket of decrepitude. To that, I have to concede: the United States economy should migrate towards newer and more flexible industries and allow the antiquated finance industry to wither on the vine. Oh wait, what? We were talking about the auto industry?</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that, whatever ills ail the auto industry, frankly, the same could be said for the finance industry, and perhaps even more so. Both industries are replete with work staff who are not only paid far above what they are probably worth, but paid with little regard for the long-term health or shareholders’ value of the firm. {Far more lucrative to have been an investment banking employee in recent history than to have been an shareholder of those investment banks.} The finance industry has demonstrated just as much ineptitude as the auto industry - the major banks having posted losses as comparably large as the auto firms. Nor has the finance industry proven to be particularly innovative despite vociferous protestations to the contrary. For example, where exactly did the ‘rule’ of the 7% investment banking IPO fee spreads arise from, and why do investment banks shy away from competing on these spreads (Chen & Ritter 1990)? Why has the 2&20 fee structure proliferated within the alternative investment industry and why doesn’t that structure ever become a serious function of competition amongst the various funds? Many of the other ‘innovations’ in the finance industry such as CDO’s have apparently been exposed as being little more than opaque machinations to swindle investors (which ironically sometimes included the banks themselves) into purchasing investments that they did not understand and to offload overall risk to the taxpayers, but which nevertheless generated large fees for the individual bankers. As Paul Volcker recently famously proclaimed, how many socially valuable (as opposed to rent-seeking) innovations has the finance industry generated since the ATM? As far as political power is concerned, what other industry could summon a 12-figure taxpayer bailout with minimal political debate or oversight, without even counting the myriad other extraordinary government and central banking liquidity facilities enacted to not only revitalize the finance industry but to restore record bonus payouts (while the rest of the nation languishes in double-digit unemployment)? As far as the issue of foreign competition, it is quite clear that a number of other countries have suffered far less damage from the financial crash because their bankers never made such irresponsible decisions. </p>
<p>Yet the fact remains that, despite the mortifying depantsing of the finance industry, far more of the top MBA students would still rather enter that industry than the auto industry or the manufacturing industry. Nor is such behavior surprising, if anything it is entirely rational. As mentioned above, the finance industry is once again paying out record bonuses, so why wouldn’t enterprising MBA students continue to want to join? Put another way, if GM, Ford, and Chrysler were paying Ibanking-comparable packages, the top MBA students would be bursting from the woodwork to work for the Big 3. </p>
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<p>Whatever the problems of the US auto industry, at least it didn’t drag down the entire rest of the national economy with it, which is more than the banking industry can say. What’s worse is that banking crises have historically and periodically tarnished government balance sheets not only through bailouts but through resulting reductions in economic growth and tax revenue. </p>
<p>I would like to bid ‘good riddance’ to the banking industry as well…but I can’t! See below. </p>
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<p>I agree that those industries are the future - but the question is, are we really investing in these industries? Specifically, are we redirecting our human capital towards those industries. As I’ve mentioned on other threads, the best engineering and science students - precisely the people who could develop those technologies - often times don’t really want to work as engineers or scientists, instead preferring jobs in finance. In recent years, nearly half of all MIT graduates who went into the workforce took jobs in finance or consulting. </p>
<p>The same could be said with regard to MBA’s and the business school culture. After all of the supposedly new-found emphasis on entrepreneurship and technology innovation that the top-ranked business schools tout, the fact remains that only a small fraction of their newly minted MBA’s enter the technology industry, either as entrepreneurs or as managers for existing tech firms. Even at Stanford GSB - the epicenter of technology management and entrepreneurship - 28% of the new MBA’s enter the finance industry as opposed to only 12% who become entrepreneurs (and 28% total who enter the technology industry in some capacity). </p>
<p>The business school academic promotion process only serves to emphasize the distinction. The path to academic job placement and promotion to tenure is far more more clearcut for a finance researcher than an entrepreneurship or technology innovation researcher. None of the academic journals that cater to innovation/entrepreneurship carry the same academic weight as the J. of Finance or J. or Financial Economics. Finance departments are politically well established within business schools in a way that entrepreneurship/innovation departments are not - in many cases the latter don’t even have their own departments at all, instead being relegated to a subfield of strategy or operations. </p>
<p>The same emphases can be seen outside of the business school context. If your tech startup encounters difficulties, the government is not going to rescue you. But the government will rescue large banks and even some firms such as AIG that were not banks. Government subsidies for basic research and small business creation is puny compared to the extraordinary facilities provided to the finance industry. The tech industry has practically no clout in Washington relative to the tremendous power of the banking lobby. </p>
<p>All of this only adds to the strong whiff within business schools and the greater economy at large that technology and entrepreneurship (and certainly manufacturing) is simply not as important as finance, and so the best MBA students are incentivized to become financiers. Just as you’ve recommended rather than bailing out the Big 3 to instead divert those funds towards developing new technologies, I would similarly advocate not bailing out the banks and diverting those (far larger) funds towards new technologies. But that’s sadly off the table. The large banks are now truly too big to fail - there is now no doubt that if one were to become troubled, the taxpayers would be dragged along for a rescue once again. </p>
<p>But to join an industry that is paying record bonuses and that the government will rescue whenever necessary: what’s not to like? As an MBA student, why should I turn that down for a career in the tech industry?</p>
<p>Are there serious problems in the finance / banking sector? Absolutely. No question about it. The latest crisis makes this plain to see. The latest banking crisis isn’t a unique one. We’ve had a number of them, notably the banking crisis which led to the Great Depression, S&L crisis, etc… and it won’t be the last.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, a modern economy requires a strong finance / banking sector as it is the lifeblood / heart of the economy at large for firms (large and small), cities, counties, municipalitie, states, the federal gov’t and, of course, the individual. You need strong banks. But you don’t need an auto company necessarily – just for the sake of having it. Now while I am in no way defending the financial institutions which received bailouts (though its interesting that most of those firms are already in a position to payback their loans something that the auto firms would never have been able to do – not to mention the looming auto pension financial bomb just waiting to derail the economy: [The</a> New York Times > Business > Image > The Largest Pension Plans](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/04/24/business/24pensions.graf01.ready.html]The”>The New York Times > Business > Image > The Largest Pension Plans) – but I digress).</p>
<p>Your points (criticisms) of the financial industry are well taken. As we speak there is legislation being crafted to reinstate the Glass Steagall Act – though I’m not sure if this is just an obvious knee-jerk reaction and doesn’t really help solve anything: [Reviving</a> Glass-Steagall Means Escalating War on Wall Street - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg)</p>
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<p>We are in full agreement that there is a serious imbalance which needs to be addressed – particularly if America is going to succeed in promoting and competing in the industries of the future.</p>
<p>Here is a very interesting and timely article which appears on Bloomberg today (not on website) about Geely Automobile’s (China) bid to purchase Volvo from Ford:</p>
<p>Geely Bid for Volvo Makes Goldman-Backed Boss Disregard Toyota by William Mellor</p>
<p>I won’t post the entire article as it’s very lengthy, but here are some interesting excerpts:</p>
<p>The fact that this crisis is not unique but is rather a variant of a general theme of the history of the finance industry only serves to highlight the inherent instability of that industry. Why does the finance industry always seem to instigate crises every few decades? Even more importantly, why do those crises always seem to necessitate taxpayer bailouts each and every time? During the Great Depression, the the financial system required extensive and expensive taxpayers bailouts. During the S&L crisis, the financial system once again required extensive bailouts via the RTC. And now once more unto the breach. </p>
<p>Contrast that with the tech busts, which while also admittedly have been numerous, have never conjured taxpayer intervention. Nobody came to rescue the beleaguered and bloated dotcoms and telco firms during the tech bust of the early 2000’s. Nobody came to rescue the biotech firms during the biotech bubble of the 1980’s. Nobody came to rescue the US game developers during the video game crash of 1983, even as leadership of video game console technology permanently shifted from the US to Japan. In each case, immense shareholder value was lost, thousands of tech workers were thrown out of work, and scores of firms went bankrupt… and the government did nothing. The government never provided funding at a below-market cost of capital. The government never opened new liquidity facilities for sundered tech firms. The government never offered to guarantee the debts of any tech firm. Those tech firms were proffered no support whatsoever. But every time the banks encounter turbulence, different rules evidently apply. </p>
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<p>While I might agree that a modern economy requires an underlying payment & clearing system, as well as a commercial banking system that serves as a capital allocation apparatus to convert deposits to loans, it is far less clear why such a system needs to be bundled with a proprietary trading division that has generated the bulk of banking bonuses (and fictitious profits belatedly discovered to be losses to be shouldered by the taxpayers) over the last decade. </p>
<p>In particular, it’s not clear why such a function needs to necessarily reside within the United States. In parallel to the notion that a country doesn’t need an auto industry just for the sake of having one, it is also true that a country doesn’t need a proprietary trading banking function just for the sake of having one. US industrial firms could contract with foreign banks for appetite for derivatives and other synthetic securities just as foreign industrial firms had surely contracted with US banks. More importantly, when foreign ‘casino’ banks rupture, then that becomes the problem of that foreign country’s taxpayers, not the taxpayers of the US. If other countries allow bankers to behave in a reckless manner, then let those other countries pay the price.</p>
<p>But the simple reality is that tech busts don’t, in and of themselves, threaten the stability / viability of the economy at large. Contrast that to the banking industry where an acute and widespread run on the banks led to the Great Depression – so there is ample precedent that helps make the case that instability in the banking industry is a clear and present danger to a nation’s ability to function, and no other industry has its tentacles in virtually every other industry, hence the potential domino effect that inherently lies within.</p>
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<p>This is precisely why one of the first things that banks did when acquiring securities units was to shut down acquired prop trading desks (JP Morgan, Citi, BoA / Merrill have all either scaled down or shut down their prop desks).</p>
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<p>I’m not sure that it necessarily needs to reside in the US – but looking at the consumer banking market as an example, I’m not sure how comfortable the average US citizen would be depositing all of their money with non-US banks.</p>
<p>On the corporate lending side, I see no problem with it in theory (in fact many US corporates are already debtors to numerous non-US banks).</p>
<p>But you and I both know that this would never happen because the banking industry is way too entrenched in the system (frankly it IS the system in many ways) and there are far too many people making way too much coin.</p>
<p>This is a disturbing take on the banking industry (called the “History of Money”) I’m not sure if you’ve seen it but, I think you’d find it interesting (even if its a bit fast and loose):</p>
<p>And that’s precisely the point: why should the banking industry be allowed to burrow itself so deeply within the fabric of the greater economy such that a threat to the banking system is a threat to the entire economy. As Mervyn King has espoused, ‘too big to fail’ is synonymous with ‘too big to exist’. </p>
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<p>Yet the fear is that they could restart proprietary trading and/or embark upon a new round of financial ‘innovations’ at a later date, with no new laws having yet been enacted to stop them. Then when another crash is upon us, we’ll be bailing them out all over again. </p>
<p>Look, I can understand that we needed to bail out the banks this time in order to stave off another Depression. Fine. But it should be made clear to the banks that this is a one-time deal. We’ll bail them out once, but then we need to ensure that we’ll never have to bail them out again. The banks that serve as custodians for the national clearing systems and commercial banking services should not be allowed to take large ‘innovative’ risks. Innovative risk-taking ventures should be housed within spin-off units with ring-fenced capital structures and ‘investor-beware’ prospectuses that lay clear that if turbulence is encountered, the taxpayers are not going to save them. </p>
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<p>Well, frankly, I’m not entirely sure how comfortable the average US citizen would be depositing all of their money with USbanks. The 2 largest US banks - BoA & Citi - also happen to be 2 of the sickest banks in the world. Were it not for the deposit insurance of the FDIC, I’d be far more comfortable depositing my money with TD (a Canadian bank with extensive operations in the US) than in either BoA or Citi. </p>
<p>But FDIC insurance does change the game, which means it shouldn’t matter who actually owns your bank. As long as the bank falls under the FDIC aegis, the deposits are insured, and that’s all that any US customer ought to care about. </p>
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<p>I have to sadly agree, and so as long as the banking industry has its claws dug deeply into the system, they’ll be able to continue offering lucrative jobs while offloading risk onto the taxpayers, and hence encouraging the best human capital to become financiers rather than technology innovators.</p>
<p>It has to end sometime, with the US either ending up as a second world economy or a massive devaluation in the USD (which might be the same as the former).</p>
<p>Fortunately (or unfortunately for others), the US is similar to Citi / BoA / AIG. It’s just “too big to fail”. </p>
<p>There is no way that the US goes down without bringing down every other major economy in the world. China? Who do you think is the largest holder of US debt (in the form of US Treasuries)? The Chinese alone hold an astounding $800 billion of US debt. Who is next? Japan. Next? UK, OPEC, Brazil, Hong Kong, Russia… Switzerland, Germany, Korea… etc., etc.</p>
<p>You think it’s gonna be some cataclysmic event or something. The US turning into a second world nation will be a slow process. No matter to me. The smartest generally don’t have to worry about the issues of the “median”. Most status seeking is merely a positional game.</p>