Merger Mania

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Having never read a textbook like Copeland and Weston's Finacial Theory and
Corporate Policy, I would ask Henry and others about the significance of
these mergers being mostly stock, not cash, deals; also are mergers
concentrated today in certain kinds of industries, not others? Which
industries are most concentrated in the US; does such a pattern hold in
other countries?  Will the main effect of mergers be to give monopoly power
to national capital at home and thereby the ability to secure additional
surplus value in circulation while positioning these monopolies to better
compete on the global market in which each can undersell the other as each
can sells at marginal costs for the sole purpose of destroying
international rivals having made superprofits in production and circulation
at home? What percentage of profits do these monopolies make at home? And ,
following Brenner, what are the implications of these mergers for the
nature of competition on the world market?

yours, rakesh