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The Scale paradox: Paradoxically, the pursuit of economies of scale in itself increasingly undermines the natural economies of scale. There is a natural upper bound to the effective size of a firm, wherein the marginal cost of the machinery required to pursue economies exceeds the marginal benefit to be gained by realising those economies. This point - a point beyond which every financial services firm operates - is a kind of Schwarzschild radius with two consequences:
One, as a kind of event horizon; a point of no return wherein a critical mass of its resources have become so personally invested in pursuing economies that it is impossible for the organisation to stop them, even though its legions of bottom-line reducers are furiously hacking through branches, cables, retaining walls on its top line generators are sitting, so those revenue created business units become anaemic, emaciated, cadaverous and no longer possessed of the energy to resist these cankerous fat birds as they saw away on the few remaining, thin, branches on which they are all sitting.
Two, at an unobserved point, the organisation will suffer a final collapse in on itself, undone by the sheer mathematics of its density. This may not be obvious to outside observers because its own gravity is now so dense no new information can escape it. This is believed to have happened to Deutsche Bank in 2009.