M&A Activity, 2017 - 2021

Today, monopolization is systemic across the American economy. In large part, that’s because corporations spend billions of dollars every year on mergers and acquisitions. But they do so only because judges and government enforcers, primarily at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, let them. And for the past forty years, these judges and enforcers have encouraged monopolization at the expense of workers, consumers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, communities, and democracy itself.

America’s concentration crisis did not emerge in the Trump years, but the Trump Administration, and particularly the economic crisis accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, made it worse. Although the Biden Administration has pledged to review, and possibly reverse, mergers and acquisitions that took place during the Trump years, basic, usable information about which corporations have engaged in M&A activity is largely unavailable to the public.

Given President Biden’s important pledge — and with public and policymaker concern about corporate concentration skyrocketing — Economic Liberties is publishing a detailed dataset of M&A activity that took place between January 2017 and January 2021. We relied on Mergr, among other sources, to collect and verify the data below.

For the sake of clarity, a subset of transactions are excluded from this dataset, including deals where a company was acquired by more than one firm, deals where minority stakes were made over time that resulted in a majority ownership stake, deals where divested assets or business lines were exchanged as part of the terms of the transaction, and Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deals, since SPACs are essentially a vehicle for financing and do not directly affect economic concentration.

For questions or to share information, please email info@economicliberties.us.