B8.
46. On hotels and gaming, see “ITT Accepts $9.8 Billion Bid, Forming the Biggest Hotel Chain,”
NYT
, October 21, 1997, 1; “Hilton Makes $6.5 Billion Bid for ITT,”
NYT
, January 28, 1997, D1; “Hilton Hotels to Buy Ball Entertainment for More Than $2 Billion,”
NYT
, June 7, 1996, D1; on gold mines, “A New Breed of Wolf at the Corporate Door,”
NYT
, March 19, 1997, D1; on department stores, see “Allen Questrom’s Quest,”
Business Week
, November 28, 1994, 116–17.
47. For quote, see
WSJ
, August 1, 1995, A2, A5. See also “Wave of Mergers Is Transforming American Banking,”
WSJ
, August 21, 1995, A1; and
Business Week
, April 20, 1998, 40. On the $31.4 billion merger of Northwest and Wells Fargo, see
WSJ
, June 9, 1998, A2.
48. On the Gannett chain, see Richard McCord,
The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus the Gannett Empire
(Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 1996); and
NYT
, August 7, 1997, B1. On the subject of acquisitions by the New York Times Company, see
NYT
, June 12, 1993, 47;
NYT
, February 19, 1996, D1; October 13, 1998, p. C8.
49. “More Merger Mania,” editorial,
NYT
, April 15, 1998, A24; “A Monster Merger,” editorial,
NYT
, April 8, 1998, A18; and “A Big Bank Merger, Again,”
NYT
, June 10, 1998, A28. In the last editorial, the paper said that “if mergers are well executed, they hold little threat to banking customers, who might even benefit from the combined institution being able to offer more services.”
50. Among such REITs was Starwood Lodging (headed by Barry Sternlicht), which in 1997 operated the biggest chain of hotels in the world; another was Simon-DeBartolo, a 1993 merged firm worth $16 billion. Simon-DeBartolo specialized in building shopping malls and strips. In the mid-1990s it owned the Mall ofAmerica (Bloomington, Minn.), the biggest mall in the country. For analysis of REITs and their history, see
National Real Estate Investor
, September 1993; S. L. Mintz, “Lukewarm Property,”
CFO: The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives
, May 1996; “The New World of Real Estate,”
Business Week
, September 22, 1997, 78–87; “REITs Come of Age,”
Business Week
, December 29, 1997, 152; and John Holusha, “Trusts Are Making Strides as Investors in New York Buildings,”
NYT
, January 21, 1998, B7.
51. Quoted in “Land of the Giants,”
BusinessWeek
, September 11, 1995, 34.
52. Quoted in
WSJ
, November 22, 1995, A1.
53.
Ibid.
, A1.
54. “Improved Distribution, Not Better Production Is Key Goal of Mergers,”
WSJ
, August 29, 1995, A1, A2.
55. “Without today’s permissive climate in Washington many of [the current] mergers would not have been possible,” said
BusinessWeek
in 1995 (September 11, 1995, p. 34). For a good survey of this governmental policy toward mergers from Reagan to Clinton, see series on “Amalgamated America,” in
WSJ
, especially “Concentration,” February 26, 1997, 1, 8; and “Trust in Markets,” February 27, 1997, 1.
56. Muller,
Intermodal Freight Transportation
, p. 28. On airline deregulation, see Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston,
The Evolution of the Airline Industry
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).
57. U.S. Department of Transportation,
1997 Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study
, II-6, IV-7, 9.
58. U.S. Department of Transportation,
1997 Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study
, especially review of deregulatory laws, IV-3-9; phone interview with Bob Withuhn, curator of transportation, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 16, 1996; Bob Gatty, “Why Railroads Are Making the Grade,”
Nation’s Business
71 (May 1983), 42–44.
59. For summary account of this bill, see
The Congressional Record
, House of Representatives, August 4, 1998, pp. H7011–7019; and for the limitations of the bill, see especially opposition by Henry Hyde, p. H7017. See also “A Sea-Change in Shipping,”
Journal of Commerce
, October 5, 1998, pp. 1A, 21B.
60. On surface freight