Oligopoly is now the American way in mobile and landline phone service, airlines, credit cards, meat and poultry, beer and soft drinks, breakfast cereal, and more. In the 1990s the six biggest banks held only one-sixth of all Americans’ financial assets, but by 2013, five years after the crash, that share had grown to 58 percent—the year the Democratic U.S. attorney general said that while he’d wanted to prosecute big banks for their role in the crash, he didn’t dare because, in addition to their being too big to fail, the legal trouble might have had “a negative impact on the national
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