The Atlantic
A simple law would stop the U.S. government from rubber-stamping corporate consolidation.
February 25, 2021
Adam Maida / Shutterstock / The Atlantic
The oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron each have assets valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Last year,
The Wall Street Journalrecently revealed, the two companies considered what would have been among the largest corporate mergers in history—a deal that would have reunited parts of the Standard Oil empire that federal trustbusters broke apart in 1911. In the end, ExxonMobil and Chevron didn’t attempt the transaction. But had the companies insisted on it, today’s antitrust authorities probably would have permitted the tie-up. Mergers among the very largest corporations are rarely stopped. Our research found that, out of the 78 proposed mergers from 2015 to 2019 in which the