NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: In many industries, like airlines, telecommunications, health care and beer, mergers and acquisitions have increased the market power of big corporations in the last several decades. That has hurt consumers and is probably exacerbating income inequality, new research shows.
A recent paper by two economists, Jason Furman and Peter Orszag, says that consolidation might have contributed to the trend of some businesses earning “super-normal returns” that are about 10 times as large as the median returns, up from three times in the early 1990s. This trend may have driven the rise in income inequality by increasing the income of executives and shareholders of those businesses relative to everybody else.
In addition, two finance professors at the University of Southern California estimate that nearly a third of American industries were highly concentrated in 2013, up from a quarter of all industries in 1996, according to The Wall Street Journal… (more)
EDITOR: There is nothing that red blooded business people like better than their own monopoly. The government has failed miserably in separating out those mergers that will only lead to price rises from those that are not adverse to the public interest.
Once again, those with the money make the rules. And often government workers later go to work for the same industries for which they have issued a pass.
