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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

This kind of merger seems exactly what the regulatory system was designed to prevent, right? Have any recent mergers actually been blocked? Is the regulator completely toothless now?

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Staples and Office Depot just had their proposed merger stymied by the FTC

http://www.wsj.com/articles/antitrust-suit-over-staples-offi...

Staples / Office Depot, Time Warner / Comcast (not officially blocked but called off due to regulatory approval), T-Mobile / AT&T. Those are just some recent big ones I can remember off the top of my head.

The combined company won't have a monopoly by any stretch: in the chemical space, it'll compete against the Germans (BASF, Bayer), and in the Ag space it'll compete against Monsanto.

It might have pricing power, and hence a monopoly, in some more narrowly defined market than those broad spaces, though.

But doesn't the FTC look at US companies? If a merger results in a monopoly locally, isn't that enough to warrant denying it?

The FTC and DOJ don't block mergers because it may result in a monopoly. They don't specifically judge things based on monopoly or market share, but rather based on whether it will likely or has resulted in consumer / market harm (and I would agree that a quasi-monopoly merger is far more often than not going to fall into that category in the eyes of the FTC or DOJ, but that's not the criteria they start from).

Intel for example has / had a practical monopoly in processors for many years in PCs. The government was ok with it, based on various terms they agreed upon with Intel. The same is true of Microsoft, and countless other businesses (big and small) across the US.

There of course used to be far stricter rules on local monopolies in media (radio, tv, newspapers, cable stations etc), but those have been heavily relaxed in the last 20 years.

Only if the market is inherently local or the combination with result in increased prices.

Market sizes vary. For airlines they look at cities or even specific airports. it doesn't matter that there are a million different airlines, if your merger creates a quasi monopoly for flights into and out of some cities. That's why in airline deals, you often see one of the two sell off routes to third party competitors.

But for chemicals and agriculture supplies--it's really an international marketplace. It doesn't really matter if they are the only US company as long as Chinese, Korean and German companies are active in selling in America.

Though the DOJ will undoubtedly look at the deal hard. Make sure things like distribution chains, retail deals etc. don't create a monopolistic effect.

Production is also international. German chemicals giant BASF's first plant outside of Europe was built in Texas in 1958, and as of late they've found Texas very attractive because of our low natural gas prices, feedstock costs are very important when you're making chemicals by the 100s of thousands of metric tons.

(Potential supply disruptions might also be an issue, seeing as how last time I checked Germany gets most of it's natural gas from Russia through pipelines going through Ukraine, and with the latter two being at war right now....)

> it'll compete against the Germans (BASF, Bayer)

I wonder how come BASF and Bayer are still in business, post-WW2. From the wiki page of Carl Wurster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wurster), the guy who re-established BASF in the early 1950s, out "of the ashes" of the infamous IG Farben:

> Wurster retained links to those he had worked with as part of the Nazi war machine and on 6 February 1959 as chairman of BASF he hosted a reunion banquet for the veterans of the pre-1945 IG Farben Vorstand. The event was attended by Otto Ambros, Heinrich Bütefisch, Fritz Gajewski, Max Ilgner, Friedrich Jähne, Carl Krauch, Hans Kühne, Wilhelm Rudolf Mann, Christian Schneider and Fritz ter Meer as well as Carl Bosch's widow.[4]

All of those guys were Nazis, some of them convicted war criminals.

GE selling it's appliance business to Electrolux AB. Technically the FTC didn't block it, but GE did back out before the FTC made their ruling. Most likely because the FTC was going to block it.

Among industrial companies like in the OP, GE, under Jack Welch, proposed to buy/merge with Honeywell in the late 1990s. It was shot down by regulators. http://www.economist.com/node/687696

AT&T and T-Mobile was blocked.

It makes me wonder how much harder it would be to end up with the three companies planned, but without a bigger company between now and then. It would involve creative shuffling.

Why the hopeless reaction? Plenty of large companies have announced mergers recently and then backed off or been blocked by regulators.

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