Company Town USA
For anyone who doesn't know, here's the generic Wikipedia definition of a company town: A company town is a place where all or most of the stores and housing in the town are owned by the same company that is also the main employer. What that definition leaves out though, is that in practice the company running everything sets wages and prices so that the employees tend to stay in debt to the company. So every worker has no choice but to keep working, but the cost of surviving in order to work keeps the debt slowly growing. It's a trap that keeps the workers in a position to be exploited without really any recourse. With that idea in mind: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Given the different names you'd think that's three competitors in the private equity/investment business. Except they are all major shareholders in each other. So they aren't competitors, in fact they are literally invested in each other's success. To the point it's not an exaggera...