To this day banks and financial institutions remain in a state of financial distress and credit flows are far from normal. ”The financial sector is broken”, remarked Paul Volcker. What has deeply concerned economic players worldwide, and is to be avoided almost at all costs, is the vicious downward spiral between the financial sector and real sector.
Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, boiled it down to this: “The innovative power of competition is at its most apparent where competition is absent.” He cited as an example the market dominance of a software giant in web browsing at the beginning of the 2000s; its browser did not evolve for a full five years: “Five years of stasis in one of the most innovative areas of our time.”3 It is all the more disconcerting to see more and more studies which find evidence for the United States of firms acquiring growing market power and set them in relation to various macroeconomic trends.