The four biggest banks still control 83 percent of the derivatives market, and only 25 commercial banks -- out of a total of 8,430 FDIC-insured commercial banks in the United States -- control roughly 90 percent of the market.
With the exception of struggling Bank of America, the top five banks all grew even more in the first quarter of this year. Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, co-authored a plan to address the unfair advantage these banks receive because everybody knows the government won't let them fail.
And while the mega-banks tell us that customers can benefit from their "economies of scale," customers have not seen lower rates or charges as the result of their extraordinary consolidation.
These banks are holding the economy and the public hostage to their own possible failure. That's why they -- and the bankers who work for them -- were publicly notified by the Attorney General of the United States that they needn't fear prosecution for their crimes. He later tried to walk that statement back, but he had only articulated a policy that had long been obvious among observers and lawmakers.
Our largest banks are becoming bigger than the law.
3. Bigger Investors
Holding companies, hedge funds, and other institutions own more and more of the private-sector economy. That includes groups like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, which invests in everything from pharmacies to retail chains to homes for troubled teens.
Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding government contractors like his last employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, which is owned by a holding company called the Carlyle Group. Booz Allen brought the Carlyle Group $5.9 billion in revenue last year. In a classic example of Bigger in action, it also announced a new national security deal in February worth $11 billion.
Mega-investors like Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group aren't like entrepreneurs or investors of the past, who put money and effort into businesses they believed in and then built them to last. They want their payouts on the shortest possible timeline, so they push executives at the companies they own to make the bottom line look as good as possible.
Sometimes that means sacrificing the long-term good of the company for a fast-buck payout to these holding companies. That may be one of the reasons why so many American corporations are giving out so much in dividends and share buybacks, rather than investing in infrastructure and employees.
When investors get Bigger, they insist on getting paid Faster.
4. Bigger Charities
It should be no surprise that all of this, along with government policies toward taxation and other matters, is creating runaway levels of individual wealth. And as a few individuals amass extraordinary wealth, even charitable giving becomes a bigger problem.
The philanthropic world is now dominated by a few players. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the mega-player, with more than $34 billion in assets. That's more than the next three foundations combined. As of 2011, the top five foundations held nearly one-third as much in assets as the top 100 foundations put together. As foundations and other philanthropies expand, charitable organizations which are outside their funding protocols are less and less likely to receive funds.
Some players get Bigger within a niche. New York's Robin Hood Foundation, originally funded by hedge fund donors, was given a great deal of authority over small donors' funds to aid the region's victims of Hurricane Sandy. Like similar foundations, Robin Hood has occasionally been used as a propaganda tool for arguing that government "can't do the job."
That's not charity. That's ideology.
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