Two antitrust experts penned an interesting opinion piece in the Atlantic magazine that makes a compelling case for banning huge merger deals altogether. According to results of research they conducted, out of the 78 proposed mergers from 2015 to 2019 in which the smaller firm was valued at more than $10 billion, the federal government attempted to block a grand total of only five on antitrust grounds, and successfully stopped just three of them, wrote Robert Lande, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute. “In general, corporate consolidation does not improve business productivity,” they said in the article. “Melissa Schilling, a business professor at New York University, has concluded that ‘most mergers do not create value for anyone, except perhaps the investment bankers who negotiated the deal.’ Those findings make the government’s willingness to rubber-stamp so many recent mergers all the more remarkable.”