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I enjoyed this. I'd also recommend an interesting book that addresses this idea, but in a different context: Merchants of Grain. It discusses the six large worldwide grain companies: Continental, Cargill and 4 others. What's interesting is most of these businesses started out as trading businesses that were asset light and employed lots of leverage, generating prodigious cash flow. Then, in the great depression, there was an oversupply of grain and price went down, and these companies with their excess cash vertically integrated, buying infrastructure upstream and downstream such as refineries and grain elevators. The returns were lower, but more durable once you owned the immovable infrastructure and provided decades of reinvestment opportunity. They also never had to raise capital so these businesses stayed tight and family controlled.

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