A Monopoly Donald Trump Can Pop

Ted

FYI: Among the mysteries about the incoming administration, Donald J. Trump’s approach to antitrust laws stands out for its importance. Mr. Trump gained a lot of voter support because of the stagnation of working-class living standards in the face of record corporate profits.

Sensing this, he channeled populist anger against elite corporations by, for example, calling the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

But the real challenge to competitive markets today does not come from mergers like this one. The great, but mostly unknown, antitrust story of our time is the astonishing rise of the institutional investor — a large company, like a mutual fund company, insurance company, pension fund or asset management firm, that buys stock in substantial quantities for the benefit of clients and customers — and the challenge that it poses to market competition.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opinion/a-monopoly-donald-trump-can-pop.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Mutual Funds&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

LewisBraham

This would destroy Vanguard and Blackrock as index funds must by default own every stock in an industry, not just a single one. This kind of antitrust action also has less than zero chance of becoming reality under the new regime. A better reform would be to require greater transparency and monitoring of the big players interactions with the largest companies in each industry to see if there is any actual collusion to keep prices on say airline tickets high for consumers. The notion that Vanguard and Blackrock feel that they are better at ushering in corporate reform of boardrooms and executive compensation via "private engagement," which even their own fund shareholders know nothing about, is a ludicrous one and no doubt encourages such collusion. All such corporate engagements especially when you're a shareholder of a significant size should be public, transparent and monitorable to see if they are harmful to fund shareholders, consumers and society in general. Of course, this reform also has a snowball's chance in hell of passing in the current environment.