Lina Khan and the FTC should be coming after Washington not companies!
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I wrote a column many years ago, it’s called the Lilliputians on steroids. It’s getting worse. These government officials out there are, again, if you’re not familiar, Thomas Swift, you know, the Lilliputians, the little people in Gulliver’s Travels. Well, they’re out of control. Case in point, Lena Kahn. Doesn’t matter what type of merger and acquisition deal is out there. She is going to block it.
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She’s gonna block it. That’s what she’s going to do. Not because it’s going to benefit you and I as consumers. No, no, it’s because she’s a, again, a Lilliputian. If you go read Culver’s Travels, Swift basically was making fun of all the hoity-toity government officials back in England during his point in time. And again, like I said, the Lilliputians today,
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are on steroids. They are. All these acronym agencies we make fun of all the time, Judge, Jury, and Executioner, and it doesn’t benefit us, we the consumer. The unfortunate thing is, is that the true monopolies that are created here in this country are the ones that are created by government via regulatory capture. I mean, for crying out loud, we’ve got banks that are too big to fail. Hey Lena, why don’t you take a look at that?
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But no, no, no, no, no. You had, last week you had the FTC blocking Amgen’s acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics. And the FTC is all proud of itself, patent self on the back. Oh yeah, it’s the first pharmaceutical deal in recent memory that we’re challenging. Usually the FTC will go after deals like this when a drug company
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buys out a rival drug company, same product, in essence, the same thing. And that’s usually when you break those things up. This case, okay, we got Amgen and Horizon, they don’t make drugs that compete. They don’t make drugs that compete. And the FTC’s argument is that Amgen will use its negotiating clout with the pharmacy benefit managers
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to protect Horizon’s successful drugs from competition. Now, the drugs that Horizon makes treat thyroid eye disease and chronic refractory gout. These are really rare diseases. They’re rare diseases and companies like this that go out and…
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look to treat rare diseases like this. Obviously, the costs of these drugs are through the roof. I mean, the government itself estimates that it costs 300 to $500 million on average. On average, it can be over a billion dollars and up to 14 years to bring a treatment to market. Think about that. Again, again.
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Do you think anybody else, do you think there’s gonna be anybody else who’s getting into this market after the fact? Probably not, because it’s such a tiny, tiny market. Again, you need to understand the whole mergers and acquisitions business in of itself. And this is what Lena Kahn doesn’t understand because she’s never had a real job in her entire life. I’ve been doing this for some time.
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And I make fun of mergers and acquisitions all the time, because I love making fun of the consulting class, the Kinsey types there, and also the mergers and acquisitions departments at many of these big Wall Street firms. Not all mergers and acquisitions are bad, but I’d say most of them are. And the funny thing is, is that mergers and acquisitions oftentimes will take care of themselves.
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I think one of the biggest jokes of all time, I remember watching the press conference was AOL Time Warner. And I’m like, why? Why would you do that? I mean, you can go one after another and after another. And I’ve described this in the past at the McKinsey types, McKinsey types and Wall Street, and many guys, they understand that many of these CEOs out there, they know which ones have started a company and they know which ones are managing a company.
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And the ones that are managing a company, like I’ve said before, they’ve got the Napoleon complex there. And they can go in there and they can try to say, hey, listen, you want to build a legacy and build something bigger, and we can help you, and you can buy this and buy this. And they over-expand. And again, they end up going by the wayside. They end up falling apart more often than not. But some deals make sense. And to think that.
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To think that the, again, the FTC can understand deals like this that they know better and the market doesn’t, quite frankly, is stupid. The base case for the FTC stepping in is whether or not the consumer, the customer, is hurt by these deals.
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And again, she says, well, you know, we want more competitors to be able to enter a market down the road, whatever, okay? That’s gonna be the case sometimes. But I was thinking about it, I was trying to come up with a way to kind of make sense out of this for everybody. Think about Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola. And just top your head, how many different cola companies can you name off the top of your head?
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I top my head three, you have Pepsi, Coke and RC. I don’t know of any others. A lot of people drink products. So other companies come in, other companies come in, they develop other types of soft drink products, drink products, whatever it may be, look to compete. Some of them get bought. And it’s part of the whole thing, but.
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Many people getting involved in the cola business. I have seen some niche companies that I can’t remember from time to time, but overall, no. No, should, I mean, how would Lena Con break up Coca-Cola?
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I don’t know. Quite frankly, is it necessary?
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Now again, you can do a juxtaposition, you know, where I am calling for the breakup, and that’s the big banks. Big banks, the too big to fail banks, they’re conflicted.
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They’re conflicted. They’re involved in areas of business where they can just benefit themselves rather than their customer. And again, I challenge anybody out there to bait me on whether or not the repeal of Glass-Steagall back in 2000 was good for the consumer. I can go point by point, story after story, calamity after calamity to demonstrate how God awful it was for the consumer and…
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the general public at large. And I’ve been calling for the breakup of these big banks for an extended period of time. Sometimes as well, this is kind of interesting. I mentioned Coca-Cola. We’ve got two different companies out there providing, in essence, the software for phones, right? And Android, and you got Apple, iOS and Android. And-
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Again, let’s think about this for a second. You go back to other regulatory periods. For a while when Microsoft was king of the hill, that was a big case, they wanted to break up Microsoft. FTC was getting involved in that. Again, Microsoft did some stupid things as far as its business came back down to earth. That never happened. You take a look at Apple and its position now.
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its position now in the world and how it got there. But again, it almost went out of business. Apple almost went out of business. Apple, again, it’s the best industrial design company going. Took products that were already available, just made them better and built upon that. And again, they’ve got an ecosystem now where you’re in, you’re part of the Borg. I’m a part of the Apple Borg.
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It’s easy. It’s easy. I’m not complaining. I get a new phone every couple of years. I just got a new desktop. My other one lasted 10 bloody years for Crying Out Loud. I’m gonna complain about that.
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No, I don’t have any problem with that. But again, Apple is an example of a business, business that was insular, didn’t share, wouldn’t share its technology and managed to be successful. Now, do you think that the folks in Washington DC, you know, the Lena Con and these people in Washington DC, they can figure out which companies are gonna be able to do that and which ones are not? I’ll give you a complete juxtaposition. Go back to 1970s.
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1970s, remember Betamax? Betamax, yeah, it was, Betamax was a Sony technology that was superior to VHS. Was a superior technology to VHS, quality of the picture, sound. Why did VHS become the standard? VHS became the standard because they licensed out, that technology was licensed out to all companies.
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So it drove the price down, that was better for consumers. Every situation is unique and different. What is my point here? As again, you get these wizards of smart, you get these wizards of smart that claim that they can see into the future when it comes to the economy, what’s going to happen next. And they’re there to protect everybody. No, they’re there to protect their own jobs. They need to come up with an excuse for their existence.
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where there are true monopolies that exist in our society, again, too big to fail. Law of the land. Why aren’t you doing a damn thing about that? Makes no sense whatsoever. And you got the other one there. You got the Activision deal there. Why are you messing around with that? Microsoft buying Activision, why?
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I mean, they’re trying to compete with Sony and Nintendo. Why would you hurt our global competitiveness?
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And again, get the customers complaining in any of these scenarios. Are the customers complaining at all? Again, Lena Kahn wrote her, I don’t know, her master’s degree or one of her class papers at Yale, basically going after Amazon and its business model. I freaking love Amazon. I’m sorry, I do.
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I do. I can’t tell you how much time it saves me. I, you think I feel like going to CVS, CVS and trying to find a store clerk because they probably got two working in the entire store to unlock my Gillette razors? So I can get in and out of there? No, I buy them, same day delivery comes right to the house. Hell of a lot easier if you ask me.
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Is that good for the consumer, Lena? And that’s bad? Watchdog on Wall Street.