it's really impressive how these people can have such a death-grip on society. honestly, i'm more curious than mad. how is such a thing even possible? i mean, wow.
How has finance made it possible? By getting the government to subsidize the industry for all existing entrants at the expense of people who may have better, more progressive ideas about how to manage the financial system. Also at the expense of people in general.
This seems to become one of the biggest problems of modern civilization. Until it's fixed, all sorts of issues like this, and bigger, will continue to occur.
The actual reality I observed is that the government inspectors and regulators are lawyers and older industry people who simply don't understand technology. Since the US government has limited technical expertise they rely on FIs to adhere to standards and propose self-regulatory measures.
- [Lobbying Spending Database | OpenSecrets](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2017&inde...)
And note that "Education" isn't spending that much less!
> imo this is one of the things the tech industry hasn't fully optimized yet
How would the tech industry "optimize" lobbying? Or even just lobbying by finance?
The OpenSecrets lobbying data also doesn't include lobbying money that isn't officially lobbying money. A lot of politicians, at least in the US - including state level legislators, have non-profit foundations with sketchy ledgers. With many of these foundations, little of the money dontated actually goes towards their publicly stated causes. Most of it is spent on miscellaneous expenses such as trips and dinners or on political ads.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/02/09/politics-and-the-u...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/08/03/how-end-polit...
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/06/12/12794/state-legis... - oversight doesn't usually happen when it's not public funds being directed into the non-profits
If you include the finance industry's donations to sketcy non-profits that are closely tied to politicians, then I'm guessing it would dwarf what we're seeing compared to just official lobbying money
Tech would 'optimize' not just by spending more, but also in offering benefits that finance can't offer such as better data for say elections as an example
The market likely knows this, hence the stable stock price.
Nope - there are two others who will gladly take up the slack.
We also use the different bureaus together for cross checking, often one bureaus file will be out of date or have errors, while the other is fine. So we'd have a much harder job of calculating risk if one of the big bureaus went out of business, simply because we'd be losing a major data source that drives our business.
I am very sure this case applies to other financial institutions as well.