Too many mergers are damaging the economy. This is happening in a number of ways that I'll hopefully get into, but the biggest effect it is having is on the free market. The free market, and the concept of supply and demand, depend on a high amount of consumer choice. When consumers have many choices, it forces businesses to achieve a high level of service for a lower price. The less players there are in a market, the lower amount of choice consumers have.
This is playing out in a number of industries right now. According to the New York Times, "consolidated businesses can raise prices more easily without worrying about losing customers" which dents the amount of total products and services the average costumer can obtain. This is especially hard on small businesses. Think about it: if your cell phone bill is going up because you're down to only a few choices, it lessens the amount of money you have left to eat at your local restaurants.
This also hurts investors and the financial sector, as JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon notes in the Bloomberg article below (even though he omits how he helped this happen). Less possible investments to make means less financial advisors are needed, less analysts because there are less companies to analyze, and this is before we factor in the scourge of short-term dividend-chasing activist investors (stay tuned for a post about them in due time).
We need to return to the time I think our idiot president t.rump is talking about when he says "make America Great Again", namely the late 1940s through the early 1990s. This was a time when large outfits like AT&T and the International Boxing Federation, to name only a few, were broken up to foster more market competition. Many people know this, but we often gloss over just how much harder it was to even merge to be that big in the first place. We need to get back to this before corporate monopolies complete their cornering of markets and eventual takeover of governments, because especially when driven by activist investors this will only entrench a rigidly unequal class system and those people don't seem to have any compassion for people who were not born as fortunate as they were.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-04-05/jamie-dimon-forgot-to-mention-mergers-are-part-of-the-problem
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/how-mergers-damage-the-economy.html
