Interlocking Boards

The same 200 names, rotating chairs. A cartel, critics say, with better PR.

Interlocking directorates are measured social science: board-network studies (Mizruchi's literature; the 'small world of corporate boards' papers) document that a few hundred directors historically connected most large-cap boards, with bank boards as hubs — the Pujo Committee mapped it in 1913 ('money trust'), and Section 8 of the Clayton Act (1914) banned direct competitor interlocks because Congress agreed it enabled coordination. The node grounds the committee-of-300 intuition in its respectable form: elite coordination via network structure is documented; the unified command it implies is not.