US capitalism, how it evolves (or how it becomes involved)

Polarisation, concentration, charismatic capitalism, oligopoly, monopoly. These are the terms most statistically cited in the reports by Marcello Messori (European University Institute), Moreno Bertoldi (Senior associate research fellow at Ispi), and Sandro Trento (University of Trento). A little less was said by Richard Robb (School of international and public affairs at Columbia University) who, at least in part, tried to smooth over the harsher points of the criticism levelled by his Italian colleagues against the transformations taking place in US capitalism.

This happened during the conference entitled "How American capitalism is changing" held yesterday at the Palazzo della Regione autonoma Trentino Alto Adige during the first day of the Trento Festival of Economics. In the background of the arguments of the economists who spoke, there were two points in particular: Donald Trump's policies and the excessive polarisation of US industry, especially in the stars and stripes big tech sector.

Thus Messori pointed out that: 'The Trump administration has accelerated a process of degeneration of US capitalism, calling into question certain cornerstones: the first of which is that inherent in the functioning of markets. In Europe we tend to believe that markets can function well because they are one of the institutions of a complex economy that interacts with the state.

In the US, markets are traditionally less regulated than in the EU. In spite of this, the chain of transmission of innovations from the core groups to the rest of the economy used to work well, and now this transfer process seems to be showing signs of dying. The first aspect that must be emphasised, and which has found an emblematic expression in the negative, is precisely the fact that the core group of innovative companies no longer operates on the markets, their structure is a monopolistic one, and the intertwining between technological innovators and institutional political power is very close: these companies in fact live on state transfers and reciprocal favours with the administration. Another datum to be recorded,' Messori continued, 'is what occurred both during Trump's first term in office and during the Biden administration: the multilateralism that characterised relations between states has been replaced by bilateral power relations, in which the US tries to build a game in which the winner takes all'.

Robb countered these theses with a series of slides in which he showed how total factor productivity for each product sector has not been significantly affected, indeed their efficiency has always increased over time. And Sandro Trento insisted: 'One of the important issues is the one also described by Messori: the mechanism of transferring innovations from the frontline company to the chasing companies.