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Dec 23, 2022·edited Dec 23, 2022

Consolidation is the natural extension of late stage hyper-capitalism, where only shareholder value is maximised, i.e profits, by minimizing actual work done and maximising economic rent seeking. One can only gain the power to increase prices, and seek higher economic rents, if one becomes a monopoly or has monopoly power.

It should be clear to everyone by now. Wall Street, loves nothing more than a monopoly. There are no competitive constraints to reduce prices, increase worker wages and cause market disruption. Just consistent, and controllable gains to shareholders as long as the industry grows.

It's not even capitalism, as we know capital markets encourage competition, cause prices to go down and force firms to remain competitive. It's a perverse alternative and is a clear admittance by companies that they have no merit to provide the market, no meaningful product, service, innovation or efficiency.

Want to create a new product as your main product has stopped growing? Buy a leading company in a tangential market, vertical integration. Want to increase marketshare of your main product? Buy your competitor, horizontal merger.

Anti-trust is really at the heart of nearly all socioeconomic problems in America, and is the only cure to the cancer that is this perverse capitalism and yet anti-trust has been completely gutted for the last 20, maybe even 40 years, intentionally so by Wall Street and hyper capitalists.

The window of opportunity is closing, let this perverse capitalism fester for a few more decades and you will have irreversible monopolies/oligopolies in nearly every distinct market. It cannot be reiterated how the world has dodged a bullet by having Biden elected and spear front anti-trust by electing Lina Khan and John Kanter.

We're at a time where the youth are more anti-capitalism than perhaps ever before. If the FTC/DOJ can harness this and gain wide populous support, it could be the catalyst for generations to come.

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Beyond thinking that consolidation is natural and inevitable, it seems like the vibe is like there's a fundamental property right to engage in M&A.

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what do you call a captialist economy whose shot callers are creating a command economy no different from that of the CCP or former USSR?

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“The thesis for all of them,” is that there is going to be consolidation, ‘one day we’re going to stop competing with eight different studios for a project, we’ll be competing with three and we’ll be able to spend more rationally.’ They all believe that to be the case.”

Am I wrong or isn't this the essence of a command economy?

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Matt Stoller's writing is revelatory and puts in stark relief the failure of Corporate Media's news coverage.

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"In Supermarket News, industry pundits believe that the Kroger-Albertsons deal heralds a “'new grocery landscape.'"

Joseph Stalin said something similar to his apparatchiks deployed to seize Ukrainian Kulak's grain or kill them if they resisted—leading to the holodomor and 5 million dead.

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Wall Street thinks that consolidation is natural because that's how finance gets paid, and that's how executives and bankers get rich.

Of course that's complete nonsense, that's not how the real economy operates at all. Real people used to get rich by creating good products and doing good business.

If the FTC ever puts enough fear in these companies, they'll realize there is money to be made in breakups as the individual companies perform better than the monopoly dinosaurs.

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As someone who was trained as a scientist, not an economist, can someone please give me the bullet of what happens when the game of big fish eat smaller fish ends and there is only one fish left. I can't imagine that it's anything good....

From my amateurs perspective...if you are counting on consolidation for growth, what happens when there is no more consolidation to be had? It sounds like a dystopian scenario out of hell...

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Wow...this is causing ideological whip lash— "The Pentagon has been complaining about consolidation for years now. But Aerojet executives seem to want to get out of the business of making stuff, and hand that problem over to someone else."

Reminds of the reporting on Congress members dependend on militiary-industrial complex cash flow to their districts forcing M1A2 Abrams tanks on the Pentagon which stedfastly said it didn't want them or need them. What has played out on the battlefield in Ukraine proves the Pentagon analysis of its needs to be accurate.

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