Word: mergerer
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...another, the unprecedented merger wave sweeping across our economy has touched your life. The local bank is long gone. You've been reunited with the same dreadful HMO you thought you ditched a few years back. Your mutual-fund statement has a new logo. Offputting. Irritating. Confusing. Or, if you've been merged out of a job, debilitating...
...before we hang all the dealmakers, consider the flip side. Last week financial-services giants Travelers Group and Citicorp agreed to the largest merger in history, a stock swap worth some $76 billion. It's a titanic marriage that will dwarf everything else in banking, brokerages, insurance, ATMs, cold calls, lollipops, hamburgers and chutzpah. It makes the size of the next biggest merger, the pending $42 billion deal between MCI and WorldCom announced last October, look cheesy...
...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...