| I am honestly curious as to what you found confusing. I think it's fairly well structured and written. > How on Earth is it related to populism? A populist would generally be opposed to the concentration of wealth and power in a small subset of the population. Populism is on the rise today, as is the trend of family investment offices which are a result of concentrated wealth and power. Thus family offices are destined to face uncomfortable questions by populists. > they didn't create inequality.
Yes, you're agreeing with the author. The surrounding sentances from the sentence you quoted: "[...] the objections to them [family offices] will rise exponentially. The most obvious of these is the least convincing — that family offices have created inequality. They are a consequence, not its cause." The article does not say that family offices have created inequality, it actually says that they have not. Regarding the "point of the article": This is an Economist "Leader", which is a one-page summary of the three-page full article published in the print version of the newspaper. It says the following: 1) Explains what "family offices" are: rich individual's DIY private investment firms. 2) Explains why the populist argument "family offices create inequality" is wrong. 3) Presents three arguments for "family offices are bad" with which the author does not agree, and their rebuttals: a) "family offices destabilize the financial system" - but data shows that actually they are doing the opposite. b) "family offices magnify the power of the wealthy" - but this is against the interests of their owners who want to diversify. c) "family offices might beat regular investors because they have privileged access to information" - they don't outperform the markets right now, but privileged access to information and insider trading could be a problem with family offices. The author arrives at the conclusion that family offices are a force for good, but more regulation and transparency might be required to address (3c). |
You (or the author of the full piece) seem to be describing Socialism. Populism is sometimes but not necessarily opposed to a wealthy elite, and the type of populism on the rise in the US and Europe seems generally to be a vague conception of a cultural elite, instead. Seems odd to bring into this discussion.