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The merger was completed in 2010, so the Obama administration. However, the country was coming out of the great recession and the last thing the administration
by makestuff 2y ago
The merger was completed in 2010, so the Obama administration. However, the country was coming out of the great recession and the last thing the administration needed was bad PR for "stopping a merger that would prevent people from losing their jobs".
- CPLX 2y agoYour first sentence here is correct. The second sentence is ridiculous. The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years. The record is pretty easy to understand.
- paxys 2y agoYup. We are in our current predicament because the previous 4 or 5 administrations, whether D or R, have let corporations run amok with M&A and general anticompetitive behavior, offering only token resistance. Biden has finally signaled a shift in the last year or two, but it remains to be seen how far these actions will go (and how much Congress and the courts will allow).
- ryandvm 2y agoThis is because corporations are permitted to influence politics with money. This is an absurd predicament. The more money you allow into politics, the more politics becomes about money.
- gorbachev 2y agoTo be fair, TicketMaster has been pioneering anti-competitive practices for as long as it has existed, long before the merger with LiveNation.
- cdme 2y agoIt's been downhill in a lot of ways since Reagan's administration.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years. It might be more accurate to say that rubber-stamping mergers maxed-out under the Obama DoJ. Comcast - NBCUniversal (2011) AT&T - T-Mobile (2011) Express Scripts - Medco Health Solutions (2012) Google - Motorola Mobility (2012) Anheuser-Busch InBev - Grupo Modelo (2013) US Airways - American Airlines (2013) Oracle - Sun Microsystems (2010) Comcast - Time Warner Cable (2014) Heinz - Kraft Foods (2015) AT&T - DirecTV (2015) Administrations before and after were almost-but-maybe-a-tiny-bit-less eager to approve competition+job killing mergers. What DoJs were not eager to do was push back against pressure from Elected Congresspeople who 1) held DoJ purse strings and 2) had elections that needed funding.
- paxys 2y agoThe policies were largely unchanged before and after. What was unique about this period was quantitative easing & lowering of interest rates to ~0. Companies were suddenly flush with cash and had nothing to do with it, because keeping it in the bank wasn't an option. So they went on a shopping spree.
- tzs 2y agoThe proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile was cancelled after the Obama DoJ said they were opposed and filed a lawsuit to stop it.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoThat's a good catch. It's what I get for relying on GPT3.5+memory -enough time to properly vet the results.