Posts Tagged ‘antitrust’
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s Massachusetts special election debacle, the White House today is set to announce a major change of strategy on financial reform, with the president to propose new legislation that will limit the size and complexity of banks. Such legislation is unlikely to pass the Senate. In fact, the approach to financial reform [...]
The Department of Justice seems to thinking, at least in principle, about potential antitrust action in and around banking. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney spoke about this yesterday, but her exact wording is open to interpretation, “”I have to ask if too big to fail is a failure of antitrust enforcement.” (The press release was uninformative [...]
The Obama administration is strengthening its antitrust enforcement policy. That said, this in itself probably wouldn’t have done anything about the “too big to fail” problem. It might have increased scrutiny over large bank mergers – like Nations-Bank of America, Bank of America-Fleet, or JPMorgan Chase-Bank One, but frankly those probably would have gone through [...]
This guest post was contributed by Lawrence Baxter, a member of the faculty at Duke Law School and formerly a divisional executive in a large banking organization. He takes a look inside the large mergers that created the behemoth financial institutions we know today, and the assumptions that encouraged and allowed those mergers. A friend recently [...]
The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. Theodore Roosevelt, “Address at Providence,” 1902 (emphasis added) [...]
In early February I suggested there was a showdown underway between the US Treasury and the country’s largest banks. Treasury (with the Fed and other regulators) is responsible for the safety and soundness of the financial system, the banks are mostly looking out for their own executives, and the tension between these goals is – by now [...]
We now interrupt our global crisis programming to bring you news from the rest of the economy . . . Earlier today, the Department of Justice approved the merger of Delta and Northwest, which I believe closed later this evening. In its statement, the Antitrust Division blessed the merger, saying: the proposed merger between Delta [...]
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Monopolies Everywhere
March 4, 2010 in Commentary
Tags: antitrust
By James Kwak Thomas Frank has a review in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall, but Mark Thoma has an excerpt) of Barry Lynn’s new book Cornered, which apparently documents the prevalence and power of monopolies and oligopolies in lots and lots of industries, not just finance. (I guess one response would be that [...]