MTS@MTSliveAug 7

Ben Landau-Taylor on why zombie companies exist only because the federal government refuses to let them die: "So much of this stuff is locked up in these zombie companies, which exist only because the federal government refuses to let them die." "The period of the most rapid industrial expansion and technological growth in human history from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s was a period of much more frequent and much more severe economic depressions." "You did this huge build-out of gas lamps in a bunch of houses, and then not that much longer, they figure out the light bulb. They put all of this effort into laying telegraph lines across the ocean, and then a few decades after that, they invent the radio." "These sclerotic zombie companies that only exist because of the implicit infinite federal money guarantees, they're sitting on probably hundreds of thousands of the best engineers in the country, tens of trillions of dollars of capital equipment." "Sometimes I think about what would happen if instead of being controlled by the Jack Welches of the world, it was controlled by people who were better industrialists. How much richer we would all be?" @benlandautaylor @AmmoniteInscrip