Stay up to date on all things crypto and blockchain

It's critical that we fight this fight, even if we end up losing. It's the right side of history to be on, and corps are already profiting off of the crisis small businesses are going through. We can't let that truth get washed away by the firehose.

This will never ever pass (because both the GOP and half the Dems will listen to the Chamber of Commerce) so the best hope is jamming through a rent freeze somehow and then trying to persuade Biden to break up big everything next year. Because there is going to be major consolidation. Mitch’s donors are salivating at the thought.

As a messaging bill to signal to Biden that she’s the populist flag bearer of the party and the best bridge to the AOC generation despite being 70 however...excellent work

M&A activity basically hasn't been thing since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a cure for a problem that doesn't exist.

Good thing T-Mobile and sprint merged just before the shit hit the fan.

I think curbing back LBOs when capital is rolling around seeking high returns and plenty of companies are vulnerable is probably a good idea because of the reliable shitty outcomes that LBOs wind up producing.

But M&As in general are kind of a part of how companies in trouble deleverage and survive. Just be a little more holistic than "does it benefit consumar/???????? THEN OK" when evaluating them, because everyone knows how to game that.

BREAK EM UP!

where is the M&A advisors ping

Elizabeth Warren famously made breaking up several big tech companies part of her platform, something that, not surprisingly, turned off a lot of people on this subreddit. I often see people finding her view on things incomprehensible here, but there's a lot more substance -- and pro-capitalist instinct -- behind her anti-trust policy than we often give her credit for.

I'm plagiarizing myself from a few months ago here, so I apologize if this comment seems familiar:

By all appearances, Warren seems to take a more classical "does this harm the marketplace" approach to anti-trust, rather than the more limited "are we sure this harms consumers" approach, such that a business practice that is anti-competitive but can't be shown to be directly hurting consumers may still draw her ire. This isn't to say that she isn't concerned for consumer welfare as the end goal, just that she seems to regard market health as a really strong heuristic for estimating whether consumers are harmed in the long run, and as a result is very skeptical of vertical and horizontal integration in general, and doesn't give a lot of credit to the argument that "the efficiency benefits of removing redundancies will be passed on to consumers".

One of her two underlying arguments behind "break them up" was to reverse mergers that she believes should never have been approved. Her belief was, and presumably still is, that the DOJ and FTC have repeatedly green lit mergers that they knew to be anti-competitive, sometimes with conditions (spin off this part of the business and you can merge), and that this has often been shown to result in disproportionate price increases that ultimately harm consumers over the long run. She might even be ultimately right about that; though it must be said, her proposal during the campaign of reversing mergers that have already happened seems like an extreme step compared to just being more strict going forward.

Her second argument supporting breaking up big tech companies was about defining and strictly regulating "platform utilities", with examples like Amazon promoting its own brands in its marketplace or Google promoting their own brands in search results. This is a case where even people who don't like Warren should be able to acknowledge that she "has a point" at the very least. A single company both owning the dominant marketplace for something and making sure their own stuff is promoted more heavily than third party participants is a kind of market failure; on a small scale it's probably not terribly harmful, but on a large enough scale it starts to stifle competition and hurt smaller businesses trying to break into the marketplace. That's mostly a regulatory proposal, though it falls under "break them up" because it could force companies like Amazon, which participates heavily in its own marketplace, to spin off or shut down parts of their business.

None of this is to say you have to agree with her; her campaign trail proposal to reverse past mergers and fundamentally disrupt the business model of several major companies is not a gentle or modest solution to the problem, even if you do agree with her argument. You might agree with her argument but not her conclusion. But this is not merely anti-corporate jeering; she has a coherent argument that a number of widely accepted industry practices and past mergers have been significantly anti-competitive and are likely to be harmful to consumers in the long run.

I get wanting to stop mega corps from buying up all the competition during a crisis, but $100M revenue is too low a cap. Add that to the fact that some companies are going to faced with the decision to close down or sell and regulation like this is gonna put more people out of work.

Warren’s back to being a mask-off succ after the “Beth from Oklahoma” shtick failed her in the primary. Dodged a bullet there.

Because what this country needs most right now is more ideological attacks against corporations. Let's restrict corporate capital at a time when everything is already shut down and liquidity is at a premium. Just brilliant. Fortunately this has no chance to pass.

As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion.

In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any advocating or wishing death/physical harm, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.

If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.

For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click here to review our details as to whitelist and outlet criteria.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

A necessary step. The push to revive antitrust enforcement has been gaining traction on both the left and the right. Lots of recent and upcoming books to add to your reading list:

• The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu (2018)
• The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper (2018)
• Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller (2019)
• Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen (2020)
• Break 'em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money by Zephyr Teachout (2020)
• Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy Vs the Will of the People by Barry C. Lynn (2020)
• The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream by Thom Hartmann (2020)
• Monopolies Suck: 7 Ways Big Corporations Rule Your Life and How to Take Back Control by Sally Hubbard (2020)
• Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi (2020)