Kudos to the Obama administration for blocking a Monopolistic merger. Hopefully a trend.
Democrats should have been fighting the consolation of the economy into the hands of massive monopolistic corporate giants a long time ago.
So this is good news. I hope it's a trend. Companies should compete on their own merits, rather than by swallowing up entire markets.
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a $6.3 billion proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, dashing another huge deal and handing the Obama administration one more antitrust victory.
The decision is a setback for the beleaguered retailers, which have each endured years of slumping sales and increased competition from Amazon and other rivals.
The Federal Trade Commission had sued the two companies late last year, arguing that combining them would effectively create just one dominant retailer focused on pens, paper clips and Post-it notes.......
...In a record-setting boom in mergers last year, nearly $5 trillion in deals were struck. But many of them represented consolidation in industries that, government regulators have said, were already thin on competition.
The United States attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch, said in a speech last month that the Obama administration was worried about continued consolidation.
“Victories across a wide range of industries make clear that if our analysis leads us to conclude that a merger will restrict competition, we will not hesitate to intervene,” she said.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department successfully forced the oil service companies Halliburton and Baker Hughes to call off their $35 billion merger.
