E
conomy
Ban All Big Mergers U.S. Antitrust Legislation to Check Corporate Power? By Robert H. Lande and Sandeep Vaheesan The oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron each have assets valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Last year, The Wall Street Journal recently 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
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