[2024-06-11]
A recent post from Matt Stoller’s newsletter got to the top of Hacker News and made some interesting points.
From the title, it’s not hard to guess its theme - “Economic Termites Are Everywhere” and while the content is intriguing, I found the premise more engaging. ”The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.”
If you read the post, you’d learn a few examples of highly profitable businesses, a couple so practically obvious that maybe they’d be good enough for Berkshire’s investment. And those companies do exercise their pricing power - while most, admittedly, have a small impact on their respective supply chain, the author argues (I interpret) that a) economically, “it’s a 1000 cuts” situation.
b) many thousands of their clients feel a little bit cheated each time it happens and practically they can do nothing about it.
All in all, it’s certainly engaging and works to the tunes closer to the “vibe-cession” phenomena however there’s no argument above that it does indeed have an overall profound impact, rather allowing pondering around the effect of ‘tollbooth’ businesses.
And returning to the ‘macro statistics hides the experience’, can it be true?
I’ve come to think of the following exercise, where the ‘feeling/experience’ might’ve had a profound impact on corporations’ behavior.
Namely - my thought “could it be that the ‘Magnificient 7’ phenomena, i.e. when the basket of top tech stocks has driven a lot of S&P growth for the last few years is affecting the strategy of all other 493 companies left in the index?”
So, a few observations to hypothesis:
Source: Link