Author and federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou explains why private equity is buying everything from vet offices to tech conglomerates, how this system is broken, and what can be done to fix it. - See also: https://www.plunderthebook.com

Note: Only shows FDIC-reported bank failures; does not include investment banks and non-U.S. banks. Data: FDIC, FRED

An era of remarkable prosperity has ended. Brad DeLong felt confident that the story started in 1870. The polymath economist was writing a book on economic modernity—about how humans transitioned from eking out an existence on our small planet to building a kind of utopia on it—and he saw an inflection point centuries after the emergence of capitalism and decades after the advent of manufacturing at scale.

Gross domestic product (GDP) and derived metrics such as productivity have been central to our understanding of economic progress and well-being. In principle, changes in consumer surplus provide a superior, and more direct, measure of changes in well-being, especially for digital goods. In practice, these alternatives have been difficult to quantify.