Columnists Ahoy!!

I chose to highlight James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who posts his columns every few days reagrds "business, the markets, and the economy." I think I chose this column over others because I am increasingly clueless about all things economic!! Surowiecki looked credible and presented a chance for me to undertand the mechanics of our economics a little bit better.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/10/notes-on-this-weeks-column-big-banks.html

In this column entitiled "The Big Banks Get Bigger," Surowiecki is questioning the status of big banks and how they seem to maintain their excessive amount of power in the economic world by increasing every year. He first starts by offering a view that the government bailing out big banks and the consistent mergers of large companies only make the situation worse by creating larger banks with even more power than before controlling the economy. He then goes into 2 reasons how banks maintain their power. One of which is how expensive the "switching costs" are for people who wish to choose a different bank, so therefore only a small percentage of people actually do change their bank in the first place. The other case Surowiecki makes is that larger banks tend to have a more prestigious reputation, and therfore draw more customers and deals easier than smaller companies.