Name: Here’s What Congress Can Do About Mega-Mergers
Uploaded: 2016-04-07
Duration: 4 min 11 s
Description: On the heels of Pfizer and Allergan calling off a $160 billion deal

Pfizer, Allergan, this is kind of a crazy situation. The deals dead, right Jen? It's dead, they walked away. They called it quits and, yeah, $ 160 billion merger. It would have been the largest corporate inversion ever, if no more. The question on my mind is, you know, we've been talking about corporate inversions for a long time. I mean, is this? Setting a precedent. Is this very narrowly affecting the Pfizer, Allergan deal? What should we take away from this? Well I think it really shows that the government really is determined to stop corporate inversions but, which is needed in order to you know for tax. Reform and what we need to do for our country, but the way that they went about it is pretty questionable because it really does seem like it was engineered specifically to block this deal. And the Allergan CEO even said that he didn't think it could block any other deal, in fact he said you know. To do it so late in the game, specifically to block this deal was actually un- American. Un- American, that's crazy. And that's kind of the question, my next one is what's the big battle here? Let's go beyond Pfizer and Allergan here. What, companies are constantly harping on the American tax system. They're saying the burden's too high. They're gonna run overseas. Where should we go from here? Because tax reform is what they keep saying. Tax reform, tax reform, tax reform. But reform goes both ways. That word doesn't really mean a whole lot, right? Right, and to be honest there have been so many corporate inversions that Pfizer is actually one of the only major pharmaceutical companies even left in the U. S. because all the other ones have left because it was Better for there bottom line to move over seas, so the fact that we're doing it now is gonna be somewhat anti competitive for Faiser, and I think more is needed. In order to really prevent inversions we're going to actually need something to happen in congress, because who knows that these rules will even stand up in court. Right. So. the president had Actually so worst say about this. Let's hear what he had to say. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] In fact a lot of these loopholes come at the expense of middle class families because that lost revenue has to be made up somewhere. Alternatively it means that we're not investing as much as we should in schools. And making college more affordable. And putting people back to work, rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our infrastructure, creating more opportunities for our children. So, this is important stuff and these new actions by the Treasury Department build on steps that we've already taken to make this system fair but I want to be clear. While the treasury departments will make it more difficult and less lucrative for companies to exploit this particular corporate inversions loophole. Only Congress can close it for good. And only Congress can make sure that all the other loopholes that are being taken advantage of. Are closed. [ SOUND ] So, why, Erin, is the president so worked up about this? And I use worked up lightly because Barack Obama has very flat delivery. Pretty even keel. And when I watch that I can't help but think about our current political landscape with Presidential candidates on both sides are talking about bringing jobs back to America, not letting corporations move over seas. Both Trump and Bernie Sanders have been harping on this and I feel like this is a little ding for Obama to say. Listen, you guys can't do anything about this, this is Congress' job. And I feel like that's his kind of way of inserting himself into the political conversation. Yeah. And let me change gears a little bit. You cover technology. Do you take away any impact of these inversion thing on tech companies? It's only interesting to me from the prospective of there's been a real Slow down and emanate from the big tech giants this year and I think that's only going to increase. And there's a lot of kind of monopolies, especially Google is fighting anti- trust stuff in Europe right now. So I think that they're gonna look at this and also think okay, let's not work on mergers this year. [ NOISE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

On the heels of Pfizer and Allergan calling off a $160 billion deal