Trump Victory Clouds Outlook for Time Warner-AT&T, Other Mergers (reuters.com)

U.S. corporate dealmakers were likely to put major merger plans on hold as they assess whether U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will follow through on his populist promises and a threat to block AT&T's purchase of Time Warner, or act more like traditional business-friendly Republican administrations. From the report:Trump's rhetoric and the personal nature of the campaign, which included little discussion of policy, left many uncertain about the new U.S. leader's plans, including how his administration will handle mega-mergers. Wall Street braced for a drop in deals, with Goldman Sachs on Wednesday projecting a 20 to 30 percent downside for earnings of banks that focus on merger and acquisition advice, and Jefferies saying that uncertainty about Trump's policy on trade, healthcare, taxes and energy could hamper underwriting activity and M&A globally. "I think a lot of deals will hit the pause button for a bit until we get some clarity on whether President Trump will moderate or be as disruptive as some expect," said a senior Wall Street banker who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak with the media. "It's going to be a tough environment for everything until we see how [Trump] behaves as a leader," the banker added.

Comments

I somehow think Trump wont stop any mergers

[JoeyRox]

Rhetoric wins elections but actions speak louder than words. Trump spent his entire career having to skirt around regulations to get things done so I highly doubt he's going to do anything that gets in the way of business doing whatever it wants to do, including performing anti-competitive mergers.

Re:I somehow think Trump wont stop any mergers

[swb]

Trump truly is a wildcard and nobody really knows what he will actually do in power, but he openly acknowledged the pay-to-play nature of politics and taking advantage of it as a businessman.

But he also said that that was broken and shouldn't be happening, and that one of his strengths was that he was best positioned to fix it because he knew exactly how it was broken as an insider participant.

I think it's certainly possible that he could block anti-competitive mergers based on his campaign rhetoric, and more importantly, the open contempt for him that establishment insiders had for him and his campaign, Republicans included. He doesn't owe those people *anything*, if anything they owe him -- he delivered the White House *and* the downticket vote.

Personally I think it's a mistake to see him as just another big business Republican -- if that was the case, he wouldn't have faced such withering criticism from the Republican establishment and probably wouldn't have run at all. He probably would have just kept writing checks to stooges in DC.

Re:I somehow think Trump wont stop any mergers

[blogagog]

Trump had to skirt some horrid regulations. Now he has the power to just remove those regulations. I too, doubt he will do anything bad for the economy. But monopolies are bad for the economy. If the merger doesn't go through by Jan 17th, It never will.

Re:I somehow think Trump wont stop any mergers

[Mashiki]

Obama had a long record(elected in politics in 1997), well as long as it was counted as "here" in the legislative house in Illinois. No, Obama had a history, he was in politics before coming president. Trump on the other hand has no political history, in turn doesn't even have the political ties that someone like Obama did at a state level.

Re:I somehow think Trump wont stop any mergers

[Solandri]

But he also said that that was broken and shouldn't be happening, and that one of his strengths was that he was best positioned to fix it because he knew exactly how it was broken as an insider participant.

There is something to this. A long time ago domain names started being sold for about $5/yr instead of ~$100/yr. Shortly after, around the mid-90s when NCSA Mosaic (the first web browser) came out, I was playing with it and browsing the few websites which existed. A labmate asked if I wanted to see a movie. We tried calling the theater to find out what was playing (that was what you did in those days - the theater set up a line with a recording of the movies and playtimes), but kept getting a busy signal. Then it occurred to me that this was Boston and the nearby businesses were pretty up to date with the latest technology. Maybe the theater had a website with playtimes. So I did a bit of searching (Yahoo was more or less a topically-sorted bulletin board back then) but couldn't find any movie theater sites.

Frustrated, I remarked to my friend that someone should just buy the domain movies.com, collect theater locations and movie playtimes, and put them on a single site to make this easy for everyone. Then it occurred to me - *I* could do that. The thought played in my head for about 10 seconds, before I decided that, no, it wouldn't be proper for me to do it. Someone in the movie or movie theater business should be the one to do that. That was their business, their turf, and I had no right to encroach on it and take a potential web-based ease of access (not to mention money-making) opportunity away from them. My domain was ocean sciences and robotics.

Fast forward a decade. I found out that a friend I hadn't seen since we were kids also had stumbled upon the same idea around the same time. He's a good guy, well principled, but was more unscrupulous than I when it came to business. He didn't have any qualms about grabbing any available domain name to be put to use as an indexing site (i.e. landing page) where he got click-through ad revenue. He'd collected something like a hundred thousand common word and common phrase domains, and built it into a multi-million dollar business.

Around the same time, there was growing frustration about domain name squatting. Some big corporations were upset that someone had grabbed a .com domain matching their trademarked company name, and were refusing to release it unless they were paid large amounts of money. Likewise, some small people had legitimately registered and been using a domain, only to have some big corporation try to bully them into giving it up. ICANN was going to hold meetings and discussions about how best to resolve these domain name disputes. I had my noble opinion of course, but I was a nobody in the domain name business. I was not invited. My friend, unscrupulous though he was, was a big player - he was invited.

The point is really driven home if you've ever tried to do business in Asia. The corruption there is so rampant (or at least was a decade ago) that you simply can't do business legitimately. If you try to stick to your principles, you'll just go out of business. You have to pay the bribes if you want to get anywhere. I ran into a similar thing while helping a friend in Chicago deal with some legal trouble about a building he owned. Turns out a lot of the government officials and inspectors there expect bribes. Don't pay them, and they will sink you with delays, violations, and fines. That's what had gotten my friend in trouble - he refused to pay bribes out of principle. (I resolved it by having him hire a law firm to "deal with" the "paperwork", and they paid the requisite bribes.)

This is not to say Trump will be some savior who will fix this corruption. I'm skeptical he is, but I'm not going to dismiss his claim out of hand. I'm willing to wait and see what happens. I'm just saying that it's true that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty playing the game in order to know how it's played and what needs fixing.

Re:I'm glad Trump won!!

[SirSlud]

Low information voters for the win!

Maybe you should read more?

[SuperKendall]

Trump may owe money on loans to various banks - but they are LOANS he has to repay.

Hillary was "given" money from all of the largest corporations, and may foreign nations, given outright... her "repayment" was going to be be very different indeed....

Trump only owes them money, what Hillary owed them would have been paid in our tears.

Also why would you think Trump would be MORE lenient on banks to whom he owes money? Why would he not instead be one of their biggest critics having to deal with them to get money for projects the same way the rest of us do.

Re:Trump will be for it....

[plopez]

Everyone has a price. But many of us just don't know what it is yet.

Re:Whether you love or hate him

[Anonymous Coward]

what else is he going to fuck up along the way?

Yesterday morning I overheard my babyboomer former flower children fauxsocialist parents talking to one of my siblings warning them to get out of the US because trump is planning on building concentraion camps as his first act will be to take control of the congress. HFS, They were almost to the point of tears and 100% believe this.

It's like all of the rightwing nutjobs conspiracy theories (FEMA deathcamps) didn't have anywhere to go and became leftwing nutjob conspiracy theories overnight

It's dead in the water

[inhuman_4]

Time Warner was one of Hilary's biggest donors, and their subsidiary CNN bashed Trump nonstop. You really think Trump wants to see those people consolidate even more power? Not going to happen. Time Warner invested big into Clinton to get this merger through and the investment didn't workout.

Further

[s.petry]

The media needs to be demonopolized. It is my sincere hope that after 30 years of complaining about a corrupt media we finally have enough of a voice to get the DOJ to address this under the Sherman Act.

Free speech is fine, but propaganda is not the same thing. The MSM in the US has become an arm of the Democratic party and what we used to laugh at in the USSR's Pravda. Worse however, is that people in Russia at least knew beyond any doubt that their media was state run propaganda while many in the US actually believe the reality TV shows are real.