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Comment by comte7092 | Hacker News Reader

Are you disagreeing with parent comment? I’m having a hard time parsing.

Are you claiming that economies of scale don’t exist, or that they are trivial to the composition of markets?

Diseconomies of scale also exist and are very real, and I theorize that many organizations try to overcome it by applying political pressures on smaller peers.

I'm claiming we need less government intervention

That's how we get wonderful things like the East Palestine Disaster. Let's deregulate biotech! Coming up next after Shark Week -- Lab Leak Week! Let's deregulate environmental pollutants! You don't need clean drinking water! /s

It's really easy to say something dumb, but it's hard to actually think about the subject.

I don't really know what happened in East Palestine, but I haven't found anyone saying it was because of deregulation

then you havent looked

Maybe you should point me to a source

I guess that’s my question.

Are you arguing that, if markets are left alone, economies of scale are more or less irrelevant, and we wouldn’t see consolidation in banking?

Seems like a dubious claim to me. More driven by ideology rather than evidence.

Economies of scale aren't the only thing that matters

Banking is already one of the most regulated industries, regulation takes out smaller companies and leaves out only the ones that are big enough.

It seems to me way more dubious to claim that more regulations would solve this problem in an already incredibly regulated industry

Regulations by and large have solved the problem.

Bank failures were incredibly common in 19th and early 20th century America. Today they are next to non existent.

Again, take a step back from the ideology and look at the evidence. The count of bank failures before 1930s era regulations vs post speaks to the effectiveness of government intervention.

That's a bit of a circular argument, since there are radically fewer banks now than there were in the past. Just in the last 20 years the number of banks in the US was cut down in half; and back in the 1930s, there were almost four times as many banks as we have now. Fewer banks mean fewer bank failures.

A fairer comparison perhaps would be to see how many dollars of deposits (in some adjusted manner, like per capita, percentage of GDP, or percentage of circulating money) were imperiled as a result of bank failures back then versus now? A hundred banks failing in the 19th century each serving a few thousand customers each would be a much smaller impact than, for example, the hypothetical failure of Bank of America.

Bank failure is a different problem than bank consolidation, of course it would happen less when you don't allow small banks to exist and just give money to the ones that do so that they don't fail, making them richer and protecting them from their mistakes

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