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If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.

Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.

Today, public companies don't like the idea of conglomerates. People want to buy something in which they know where they are putting their money - into the food business or the oil and gas business. They don't want to put their money into a hodge-podge as a general rule.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

If a few companies were less greedy, the people at the bottom woud have a lot more.

We have multiple businesses, and obviously we want every one to stand on its own, and what you don't want to do is manage one business from the profit of the other one.

Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.