"Sinicization" of US economy

Not only has China stubbornly remained Chinese and refused to "Americanize", but it's actually arguable that America has itself regressed and "Sinicized" - its financialist-corporatist ruling class has grown so fat and bloated that it now resembles the communist party in terms of central economic planning (i.e. manipulation) far more than either the Republican or Democratic party establishments would like to admit.

Zero Hedge runs an excellent piece on the sorry state of our "too big to fail" financial system, which is dominated by 5 big banks:

At over 40 percent of all assets, the big 5 (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs) have nearly doubled their share of the banking sector since the opening of the new millennium (from ~23 percent), and have more than quadrupled it since the end of the Cold War (1990).

What's even more disturbing: this is exactly the opposite of what's happened in China, where since the early 2000s the big 5 (originally 4) state banking behemoths (Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Communications Bank) have seen their share of total assets drop from over 60 to little more than 40 percent.

This means that in the single most crucial sector of the economy - indeed, the one that virtually controls all others - China and America have converged in the 21st century to roughly the same level of monopolization from the opposite directions.

You could almost hear echoes of Donald Trump: China's killing us. Indeed, our proudly "capitalist" US economy has become so socialistic and centrally manipulated and controlled - what with the nexus between Big Banking and Big Government (i.e. Wall Street and K Street) - that we're essentially becoming exactly what communist China is moving away from (at great risk and cost).

That being said, I for one don't propose the simplistic panacea of just breaking up the big boys: if they're already effectively operating with a massive albeit implicit federal government backstop, maybe it's time to just turn them into public institutions instead (like China's Big 5).

Bigness itself isn't the problem - no more than smallness itself is the solution. The bottom line is that if you're too big to fail, even though you're probably not too big to exist (a la Bernie), you're definitely too big to keep running a pre-2008 casino.