Income and wealth concentration follows the ebbs and flows of the business cycle in America.

Amy Hamilton

2019-04-23 19:45:00 Tue ET

Income and wealth concentration follows the ebbs and flows of the business cycle in America. Economic inequality not only grows among people, but it also grows among companies. A recent McKinsey study shows that only 10% of 5,750 public and private companies (each with over $1 billion in total revenue) account for 80% of their net profits. These top 10% superstar companies can create almost as much firm value as the bottom 10% companies destroy on an annual basis. The top 10% superstar wealth creation has grown 1.6 times in the past 20 years, whereas, the bottom 10% value erosion has risen only 1.5% in the same time frame. One major root cause of this wealth divergence is the corporate focus on key intangible assets and intellectual properties such as patents, trademarks, databases, robots, cloud services, and software solutions. These intangible assets thus serve as affordable competitive moats for the top 10% superstar companies. These top 10% superstar firms spend about 2 to 3 times more on R&D than their peers and hence account for 70% of all R&D expenditures in Corporate America as of early-2019.

However, the top 10% superstar companies are less likely to maintain their product market dominance because half of the superstar companies lose their competitive advantages over the course of one single real business cycle (or about 7-9 years). For this reason, tougher antitrust scrutiny may not be the panacea for addressing the economic implications of anti-competitive clout in tech titans (Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Twitter), big biotech bellwethers (Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Abbot, Amgen, and Bristol-Myers Squibb etc), and telecoms (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile etc). Weaker product market competition may help explain why U.S. productivity growth, capital investment, and wage growth continue to stagnate in recent years.

This dilemma often manifests in the 7%-8% increase in average markups over the marginal costs for more than 900,000 firms from 2000 to early-2019 in accordance with a recent IMF staff report. The higher markups significantly correlate with lower capital investment, subpar wage growth, and less disposable income for the typical U.S. household. In other words, these markups represent the inadvertent social price of market power. Overall, it is important for regulators to help promote greater market competition in several industries such as technology, energy, medicine, air transport, and telecommunication etc.

 


If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.

Blog+More

Stock market misvaluation and corporate investment payout

John Fourier

2022-11-15 10:30:00 Tuesday ET

Stock market misvaluation and corporate investment payout

Stock market misvaluation and corporate investment payout The behavioral catering theory suggests that stock market misvaluation can have a first-order

+See More

Daniel Goleman explains why working with emotional intelligence helps hone our social skills for smarter, better, and more effective leaders, teams, and organizations in modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Fiona Sydney

2025-07-05 11:23:00 Saturday ET

Daniel Goleman explains why working with emotional intelligence helps hone our social skills for smarter, better, and more effective leaders, teams, and organizations in modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Former New York Times science author and Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman explains why working with emotional intelligence helps hone our social skills f

+See More

Global financial markets suffer as President Trump promises *fire and fury* in response North Korean nuclear ambitions.

Daisy Harvey

2017-08-07 09:39:00 Monday ET

Global financial markets suffer as President Trump promises *fire and fury* in response North Korean nuclear ambitions.

Global financial markets suffer as President Trump promises *fire and fury* in response to the recent report that North Korea has successfully miniaturized

+See More

AYA finbuzz podcast offers fresh insights into the latest stock market topics and economic trends for better stock investment decisions.

Daphne Basel

2019-09-30 07:33:00 Monday ET

AYA finbuzz podcast offers fresh insights into the latest stock market topics and economic trends for better stock investment decisions.

AYA Analytica finbuzz podcast channel on YouTube September 2019 In this podcast, we discuss several topical issues as of September 2019: (1) Former

+See More

Millennials can save to make a fortune with compound interest over 40 years.

Laura Hermes

2017-07-25 10:44:00 Tuesday ET

Millennials can save to make a fortune with compound interest over 40 years.

NerdWallet's new simulation suggests that a 25-year-old millennial who earns an inflation-free base salary of $40,456 and saves 15% each year faces a 99

+See More

Top 4 U.S. richest people are self-made billionaires: Gates, Buffet, Bloomberg, and Zuckerberg.

Dan Rochefort

2017-08-01 09:40:00 Tuesday ET

Top 4 U.S. richest people are self-made billionaires: Gates, Buffet, Bloomberg, and Zuckerberg.

In American states, all of the Top 4 richest people are self-made billionaires: Bill Gates in Washington, Warren Buffett in Nebraska, Michael Bloomberg in N

+See More