EconAir

INTRODUCTION I was, for many years, in charge of finding and analyzing acquisitions for a large company.   Then, for two years, I was an independent merger broker and took part in negotiations. MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS American corporations spend over $1 trillion a year buying other companies.   This is more than they spend on net new investment (minus data center investment).   Even more than they spend on boxes at pro sports stadiums. Buying another company is a risky corporate strategy.   The few studies I have read indicate that 70-80% of acquisitions are failures.   They do not earn the acquirer’s opportunity cost of capital.   Many are a total loss and result in future write-downs.   This failure rate from published research is similar to the information I collected.   My department would use discounted cash flow/net present value analysis to determine the maximum price we would pay for an acquisition (the present v...

BACKGROUND Information, to be useful, has to be new information to people who use or whose behavior is influenced by it. Discuss evolution of information technology and effects on bureaucracy and management. Organizational innovation. Typewriters, filing cabinets, file folders, staples, paper clips, carbon copies. Ask ChatGPT for fuller discussion. Writing - Iliad. Hundreds of years as a long oral poem, written down when Greece got an alphabet. First writing was mostly bureaucratic records, especially tax records, inventories and loan documents. Printing - permanent record like writing. Huge decrease in the unit cost in time and expense. Making multiple copies. Tremendous expansion of  availability of data, information, and knowledge. New ways to organize data for organizations - accounting, finance, engineering, technology. Digital technology and the hardware technology it is based on makes multinational corporations and global supply ecosystems possible. Baldwin and production co...

Famous Headline INTRODUCTION Before reading this essay, I strongly recommend you see a PBS video on YouTube. Type in Stock Market Crash 1929. Look for: US – The Crash of 1929 (PBS), ALLHISTORIES – PLAYLIST.  The documentary is  broken into 6 parts to show commercials. Or purchase the video on Amazon. Great documentary with wonderful photos, videos, and scenes from movies of the 1920s and the crash. Shows what a crazy time it was and how some of the manic behavior of the 1920s contributed to the frenzied speculation of the stock market in 1928 and 1929.    I also recommend you read Frederick Lewis Allen,  Only Yesterday; An Informal History of the 1920’s . This a wonderful popular history on the 1920s and the crash. It shows how the economic, social, and psychological changes in the 1920s contributed to the speculative frenzy in the stock market. The author lived through it all. You can skip some of the chapters the first time through; for example, skip Chapters ...