Hello Dr. Johnson,
I am currently watching your talk at MIT Sloan which I find very interesting - thank you for your input on so many varied matters and I think you handled the difficult art student with major poise.
An interesting topic that I have considered quite a bit recently is the idea of 'too big to fail'. Understandably people focus quite a bit on the banks these days and this question but I also worry in other areas specifically the industry I work in (technology). Frankly put, Oracle, Google, HP, Dell, Apple and others are arguably too big to fail right now as well. Telecommunications has similar issues of course. I am sure there are many industries in this situation now as well - how do we hopefully address this as well? We are living in a time of huge monopolies that not only pose a risk to us as something that might fail, but also in many other ways. Is receivership and bankruptcy the solution here? Any trust busting to come?
On the flip side I can somewhat understand how we got here as we are trying to compete on a world stage against huge nationalized corporations but that said I would be interested in your input on this matter or if I am off base in even being concerned with this at this time. Are innovation-stifling monopolies simply something we have to live with in our new world?
