Get real, Oceander.
Big business may be in bed with big government but it's usually to further its own economic interests. Only big government has the authority to wage war, forcibly extract tribute called taxes, require people to behave a certain way or face sanctions ranging from financial penalties to incarceration, and so on. There may be a close working relationship between big business and big government but the latter alone has a monopoly on force.
Get real? Physician, heal thyself. A "close working relationship" is a bland, pleasant way to describe corporatism and crony capitalism, but it's also disingenuous. As an analogy, try this on for size: the mob boss may call for a man to be killed, but it's only the street soldiers who have the guns and do the killing. Who's in charge, the boss, who doesn't have the guns, or the street soldiers, who do have the guns? Who's responsible for the murder, the mob boss, who may have even phrased his order indirectly, as in "it would be a shame if anything were to happen to Johnny, even though he's betrayed me and stolen from me," or the street soldier who pulled the trigger?
The relationship is not a "close working relationship," it's an incestuous relationship in which the politicians wield their control over the reins of government, including the state's monopoly on force, for the benefit of big business in exchange for acquiescence to the politicians' political agendas and financial backing to help keep the politicians in power.
Here's a question: recall Dodd-Frank, the supposedly hard-core new financial regulatory laws that are, we've been told, going to make it impossible for those nefarious bankers to cause another 2008. That puts the kibosh on the shenanigans of the big banks and leaves the virtuous little banks alone, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. Instead, it imposes onerous new compliance costs on all banks, big and small. The big banks, for all that it looks as if they're being punished, can handle those compliance costs readily because they already have a phalanx of lawyers, accountants, and other staff needed to manage what amounts to just one more compliance exercise. Furthermore, the big banks exercise enough market power that they can effectively pass the economic cost of those new compliance measures on to their customers, either in the form of additional or higher fees, or indirectly in the form of lower interest paid on deposits.
By contrast, the regional and local banks, which are also subject to all the new compliance measures, have a harder time of it because the new rules substantially increase their compliance costs, costs which they cannot pass on to their customers as readily because they don't have the necessary market power to do so; they also have a greater need to maintain good long-term relationships with their customers, including their small and medium-sized customers, a need that the large multinational banks don't have other than with their large multinational customers.
So, who's really getting hurt by the plethora of new regulations under Dodd-Frank? The regional and local banks; that is, the banks that were not responsible for the mortgage and securitization eff-ups that contributed so mightily to the 2008 crash. Effectively, Dodd-Frank has imposed additional burdens on regional and local banks that make it harder for them to compete with the large banks. In other words, at the cost of going along with Dodd-Frank and its compliance costs, the large banks have bought themselves an additional layer of protection against any real competition from regional and local banks. So, the politicians win - they get to look tough, play to their base, and reduce the odds of opposition from the big fish in the economic waters - and the big banks win - they get increased protection from competition and they get further access to the political bureaucracy that will allow them to get further tidbits of favors in the form of particularly favorable rulings on various administrative issues, as well as exemptions from some particularly onerous rule, that the little banks will never get - and the regional and local banks, and us, the retail banking customers? We lose. The regional and local banks get hit with significant new compliance costs they can ill-afford and which basically punish them for something they didn't do in the first place - contribute to the 2008 financial mess - and the rest of us get to pay higher fees and receive lower interest on our deposits.
And where do the government's guns come into play? Why, in enforcing the new rules, which enforcement simply cements the advantages the big banks purchased with their role in helping to create Dodd-Frank. In other words, like the mob boss, who gets the benefit of the street soldiers' guns without ever wielding one himself, the big banks get the benefits of the government's threat of force without ever wielding that threat themselves.
Get real? Yeah, get real.
