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Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

1988

Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions; Corporate Consolidation; Trade; Competition; Economic Performance

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The Bigness Mystique And The Merger Policy Debate: An International Perspective, Walter Adams, James W. Brock Jan 1988

The Bigness Mystique And The Merger Policy Debate: An International Perspective, Walter Adams, James W. Brock

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The nouvelle vague among prominent U.S. public policy spokesmen is the facilitation of corporate mergers and acquisitions, the promotion of corporate bigness, and the emasculation of the anti-merger law. They claim that this kind of bold new departure is needed to enable firms in the United States to challenge large foreign rivals and regain global competitiveness. These pronunciamentos, and the Weltanschauung which they reflect, are hardly novel. In form and substance, they are an uncanny (and not very imaginative) reincarnation of the mindset that governed economic policy making in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, as now, bigness was …