This is what I wrote a while back in my paper "Finding State Action When Corporations Govern" (last revised April 15, 2009):
This Article argues that corporations have for some time been increasingly taking on roles as pseudo-governmental actors without incurring the accountability to the people generally associated with state action. This is happening via “new governance,” and while the recent financial crisis may suggest that the problems associated with new governance are waning, the reality is that the corporate consolidations likely to follow in the wake of the downturn . . . will result in even more powerful corporate actors with an even greater ability to govern.
This is what David Cho wrote in The Washington Post this past Friday:
The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions . . . . [N]o consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.
Stay tuned.
