Everything makes more sense when you believe it to be intentionally orchestrated by someone or something. That's why this way of thinking is so popular.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Conspiracy Theorist Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
You quoted Smith Chapter X Part II, whose argument in context is that the pressure of competition quickly kills attempts at collusion, while surviving conspiracies are enabled by regulation.
The paper contrasts commodities from all other concentrated markets; whereas the former is expected to have an impulse transient response whose price discovery quickly settles by way of competitive forces consistent with Smith, the latter has a salient capacity as price maker to play games.
Megacorps and multi-nationals weren't exactly meta in the 18th century. Exponential tech complexity, sector consolidation, global economies of scale, regulatory capture, the speed of information and capacity of market participants to meaningfully act are just a few modern barriers to entry in concentrated markets suppressing the notional competition that Smith leans heavily into.
To be clear, I was not quoting Smith in support of his contextual argument, but in recognition of what appears to be a universal human tendency that remains. I deliberately did not quote the following "But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary." In light of present data, a case could be made for law.
I upvoted your comment because it's true, and important to keep in mind.
However, in this case, it would be very naive to think there wasn't some intentional orchestration going on.
I like to bring up the recent massive intentionally orchestrated conspiracy by "dozens" of major tech companies to defraud their own employees with "no poaching" collusion. It's estimated that they may have effectively stolen over $8,000,000,000 from their own employees.
> The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay,
The private economy is literally owned by shareholders who want to get paid for holding shares. That's not a theory, not a conspiracy, it's a description of reality.
The mechanism that keeps them in check is competition. We should expect constant attempts to circumvent this mechanism requiring frequent intervention to keep it in place. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's a consequence of incentives working, which is the reason why we have this system in the first place. Not for these incentives, for other better ones, but these come along for the ride. You should expect to see them.
These are basic reasonable expectations you should have in a capitalist economy.
so that the firms that run that kind of fund are the largest shareholders of many firms. If I was a shareholder in, say, Delta airlines, but not American, I might want Delta to compete really hard against American today (at the expense of immediate profits) so that it gains market share and is worth more tomorrow.
If I am a shareholder in all the airlines, however, it makes no difference to me in how the market is partitioned, I just want the industry as a whole to be profitable. So one would imagine that large index fund shareholders would be having conversations to that end with the firms that they own.
The majority of US adults own stock in some form. And as people age, the percentage owning grows significantly. Pensions, retirement funds, savings outside perhaps cash, all provide stock ownership as an asset component.
So by shareholders you mean the majority of everyday people.
Edit:them/it