Breaking up US tech companies will cede power to their Chinese competitors. Alibaba will have the advantage.
And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.
Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh.
Now that fractional shares can be bought with no commission, essentially everyone who wants to can invest in those FAANG companies and get returns on capital. They're better than lottery tickets (a popular "investment" for the poor).
> Every country in the world would do a great deal to get a FAANG company native to their turf. But here in America we want to wreck them. Sigh.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
Lumping FAANG like that (an acronym originally created by Jim Cramer to denote high-growth tech stocks) seems dubious. What does hosting a Netflix do for a country?
Taiwan has TSMC (which has a comparable market cap), and it hasn't exactly transformed that nation, other than perhaps becoming a technological source of strategic importance.
It seems like your post argues for their importance due to the benefits that investors can receive from them. But you always could buy blue chip stocks and $SPY.
Amazon, for example, has brought enormous prosperity to Seattle. Seattle has had successive waves of prosperity driven by large companies - first there was coal, then Weyerhauser, then Boeing, then Microsoft, and now Amazon.
It's a double-edged sword highly dependent on local governments. All the wealth that tech has brought to the Bay Area hasn't improved the dire state of housing or public infrastructure. Economic activity isn't a cure-all.
A flood of tax money due to Amazon has flooded into the city. If the city doesn't spend it well, they aren't going to do better if prosperity flees the city.
Perhaps, but bringing in a ton of workers can exacerbate a shortage. The point is that the ancestral post was claiming that Amazon's presence in Seattle is an unalloyed good, while I'm saying it's more complicated than that.
And breaking up the phone company didn't improve anything. We just got AT&T again from their well-performing Texas shard. Companies need to be regulated to provide the services the author is looking for.