Dear Friends,
It seems to me that maybe it’s time to take into consideration by the regulators of monopolies, whether or not a company is merging or growing into a behemoth that is, “too big to fail.”
When companies merge and there is a threat of monopoly or limited competition in a given market it is routine for them to have to undergo a process of the government looking into its markets. It’s competitors often have a say in whether or not the two companies can merge.
AT&T was broken up in the 1984 by Judge Green and the firm became the “Baby Bells.” Imagine what a total collapse of AT&T would have done to the telecommunications infrastructure and the result to the economy, (had it happened) before the breakup. I think it is time for the government to take another calculation into consideration … If the growing or resulting firm would be too big to fail.
If a merger would in theory not be a competitive monopoly or impinge on fair competition too much, then it should be determined if the potential new firm would be too big to fail. If it were the merger would be stopped.
We are seeing the results of having companies in critical sectors of our economy too big to fail. The government is taxing through printing, and spending us and our children to oblivion, to keep these corrupt firms afloat. They should never have been allowed to grow to be too big to fail.
It is too late to stop the present meltdown. We can foresee and stem the predilection of companies to become too big to fail. I am reminded of Marx, one of his tenets was that firms would grow larger and larger, (due to many factors) and eventually become defacto despots. We see to our dismay the folly of this reasoning. They merge and grow to be too big to fail, then we the people, have to bankrupt ourselves to prop them up when things go south. Else they topple from their great height and crush us all…
