Trends in aggregate concentration in the United States

摘要

Back in 1976, a writer for New York magazine considered the wave of corporate mergers and takeovers then taking place and the implication that an increasing share of economic activity was occurring inside fewer corporations and penned a tongue-in-cheek essay tided "March 3, 1998: The Day They Couldn't Fill the 'Fortune' 500" (Tobias, 1976). Little did he know that in the mid-1970s, he had not yet seen the large merger wave of the 1980s and the tsunami merger wave of the late 1990s. The annual total value of large mergers hovered under USD100 billion per year through the 1960s and 1970s, according to the two main sources of data in this area, Mergerstat Review and Mergers & Acquisitions magazine. During the merger wave of the 1980s, the total value of mergers exceeded USD200 billion per year for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But from 1998 to 2000, the annual value of large mergers was well over USD1 trillion per year, involving from 8,000 to 10,000 separate deals each year. Even when the annual number or value of these large mergers is adjusted by measures that reflect the larger size of the U.S. economy, the merger wave of the late 1990s looms large in historical perspective.