Warren Buffet on monopolies (for iatrogenic)

You should read the entire article (Unless you think Putin controls the Nation and had one of his spies write the article). Excerpts from this article:
https://www.thenation.com/article/s...dirty-secret-behind-warren-buffetts-billions/

After the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, three officials from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission visited Warren Buffett at his office in Omaha, Nebraska. They wanted to ask America’s most successful investor about his 24 million shares in the credit-rating agency Moody’s. The commission would later identify Moody’s and other rating agencies as “key enablers of the financial meltdown,” for granting super-safe triple-A ratings to securities that were backed by junk mortgages. Trillions of dollars’ worth of rotten financial instruments—the fuel of the crisis—“could not have been marketed and sold without [the rating agencies’] seal of approval,” the commission concluded.

During that May 26, 2010, meeting, Buffett deflected responsibility for Moody’s actions. “I knew nothing about the management of Moody’s,” he told the federal investigators, explaining candidly why he owned so much stock: Moody’s faced practically no market competition.

Listen to David Dayen discuss Warren Buffet’s business strategies on the Start Making Sense podcast.

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” Buffett said. “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business.” The “big three” rating agencies—Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch—controlled 95 percent of the rating-agency market, an insurmountable advantage over would-be competitors. “If you’ve got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper or if you have a network television station,” Buffett concluded, “your idiot nephew could run it.”

This Nation investigation documents how Buffett’s massive wealth has actually been built: on monopoly power and the unfair advantages it provides. Companies in Buffett’s portfolio have extorted windfall profits, evaded US taxes, and abused customers. In the two specific cases discussed below, in the banking and high-tech industries, Buffett’s investments have prompted federal investigations for anticompetitive or other illegal practices.

Buffett did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article, nor did he reply to questions submitted to his office at Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett makes no secret of his fondness for monopoly. He repeatedly highlights the key to his personal fortune: finding businesses surrounded by a monopoly moat, keeping competitors at bay. “[W]e think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed,” Buffett told the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting in 2000. “We tell our managers we want the moat widened every year.”

 

And it was started by the progressives at the beginning of the 20th century. Actually, Hamilton started it as soon as the Constitution was ratified, but the modern form of it was the progressives.

 

Here's why they are not a monopoly:
MIS competes with other CRAs and with investment banks and brokerage firms that offer credit opinions and research. Many users of MIS’s ratings also have in-house credit research capabilities. MIS’s largest competitor in the global credit rating business is S&P Global Ratings (S&P), a division of S&P Global. There are some rating markets, based on industry, geography and/or instrument type, in which Moody’s has made investments and obtained market positions superior to S&P, while in other markets, the reverse is true.

In addition to S&P, MIS’s competitors include Fitch Ratings, Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS), A.M. Best Company, Japan Credit Rating Agency Ltd., Kroll Bond Rating Agency Inc., Morningstar Inc. and Egan-Jones Ratings Company. In Europe, there are approximately 30 companies currently registered with ESMA, which include both purely domestic European CRAs and International CRAs such
as S&P, Fitch and DBRS. There are additional competitors in other regions and countries, for example, in China, where Moody’s participates through a joint venture. These competitors include China Lianhe Credit Rating Co Ltd., Shanghai Brilliance Credit Rating & Investors Service Co Ltd., Dagong Global Credit Rating Co Ltd. and Pengyuan Credit Rating Co Ltd.

MA competes broadly in the financial information industry against diversified competitors such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Fitch Solutions, Dun & Bradstreet, IBM, Wolters Kluwer, Fidelity Information Services, SAS, Fiserv, MSCI and IHS Markit among others. MA’s main competitors within RD&A include S&P Global Market Intelligence, CreditSights, Thomson Reuters, Intex, IHS Markit, BlackRock Solutions, FactSet and other providers of fixed income analytics, valuations, economic data and research. In ERS, MA faces competition from both large software providers such as IBM Algorithmics, Fidelity Information Services, SAS, Oracle, Misys, Oliver Wyman, Verisk and various other vendors and in-house solutions. Within Professional Services, MA competes with Omega Performance, DC Gardner, and a host of financial training and education firms, and with Evalueserve, CRISIL Global Research & Analytics, and other providers of research and professional services, respectively.