Word: antitrusters
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Last week, citing a "growing concern" that too much U.S. business is going into too few big baskets, the FTC announced that it is undertaking a thoroughgoing study of the conglomerate phenomenon. Chief FTC Investigator Harrison Houghton, 56, plans to tackle not only antitrust problems but also such areas as efficiency and profitability of the "multimarket companies"-as the conglomerates like to call themselves...
Zeroing In. The FTC is only the latest agency to zero in on the controversial conglomerates. President Johnson has appointed a group of academic antitrust experts to study and recommend policy toward the companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is studying their financial reporting techniques. The Justice Department, criticized as being soft on antitrust, recently became acutely aware of the fact that antitrust law has lagged behind the phenomenon of conglomerates...
Horizontal mergers (between competitors) and vertical mergers (between users and suppliers) have long been severely limited by well-established antitrust law. The status of conglomerate mergers, between companies not in direct competition, remains uncertain. Only last May, Justice issued a 27-page merger guideline suggesting that conglomerates would be opposed if, for instance, the merger would prevent two noncompeting partners from entering each other's fields on their own. Thus, this month a federal District Court upheld a key Justice challenge to a merger of Wilson Sporting Goods, a subsidiary of LTV, with a small maker of gymnastic equipment...
...market. Before the current inquiry winds up, the commission expects it to widen into the most comprehensive investigation of the stock exchanges in a generation. The SEC plans to delve into everything from access to the markets by nonmember brokers to the question of whether some exchange rules violate antitrust laws, as the Justice Department contends. Whatever the final outcome, it is already clear that Wall Street faces some fundamental changes in its way of doing business...
...still to tackle a host of other issues, most importantly A.T. & T.'s relations with Western Electric, the nation's eleventh biggest manufacturing company. Though Bell avoided divestiture of Western Electric on antitrust grounds through a 1956 consent decree with the Justice Department, other questions are being raised about the subsidiary, which manufactures almost all Bell System equipment. Critics charge that Bell deliberately pays inflated Western prices in order to increase the Bell System rate base by raising the value of its plant. A.T. & T. denies this, pointing to Western's slim (4.1% last year) margin...