Word: merger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wealth cards.' For example, you will be able to pay for your sports car by instantly drawing on part of the wealth inherent in your vacation house." Finance, suddenly packed with microchips, could become a banker-free zone. Hence the drive of McColl, who is responding to an immutable merger of the laws of finance and the laws of modern business: reinvent yourself...
...profits, totaling $18.5 billion. Last year a report by the U.S. Public Interest Group (USPIRG) found that consumers paid 15% more to maintain a regular checking account at a big bank than at a small bank. Similar results were found by a Federal Reserve report to Congress last June. "Merger mania is making the fee-gouging big banks even bigger," complains Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for USPIRG. "Fewer and bigger banks mean consumers face fewer choices, less competition and even higher fees...
...clout, easier access to capital, lower costs. Those are what allow a company to keep prices down, provide better service, win business and keep profits up--the favored recipe for large-scale corporate survival in the global, capitalist '90s and a prime driver of the record $919 billion in mergers last year. By comparison, the 1980s (when the press screamed about "merger mania") were strictly peewee league. The biggest single year of deals in the greed decade was 1988, with $353 billion...
...deals will, of course, result in more lost jobs as well as other dislocations and inconveniences for employees. But one clear benefit of the merger trend is that it goes hand-in-hand with companies' unrelenting focus on keeping costs and prices down. From computers to cars to commissions on stock trades to the rate on your mortgage, the 1990s have been a buyer's market. In no small part that disinflationary environment derives from the robust activity of dealmakers like Weill in mixing and matching to get the most out of every asset...
...planned. "When you create these oversize companies, they become vulnerable by definition," says Porter Bibb, a senior investment banker at Ladenburg Thalmann. Big firms can't react to small opportunities, so new businesses pop up to fill the void. Some inevitably grow enough to challenge the giants. Indeed, every merger phase in the U.S. in the past 30 years has been followed by a period of divestitures as companies retreated to their "core competencies...