Matt Levine, Columnist

Levine on Wall Street: Mergers and McMuffins

A Greek taxi driver explains the debt crisis. Warren Buffett's stockbroker explains his breakfast order. And Yahoo names its Nameless ATB.

February 4, 2015 at 12:59 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Mergers.

Staples is buying Office Depot for $11 a share in cash and stock, completing a roll-up of indistinguishable (to me) office supply stores that began when Office Depot acquired OfficeMax in 2013. Activist hedge fund Starboard Value has been involved since the beginning, with stakes in both Office Depot and Staples, and has been pushing this deal hard. It also pushed Yahoo's Alibaba spin-off, so it's having a good year; here you can read a comparison of Starboard to Tom Brady, though I worry a little about what happens when it has no more office-supply worlds to conquer. Anyway, umm, antitrust? "Staples and Office Depot had tried merging only to be blocked by regulators in a 1997 lawsuit," but, man, remember 1997? In 1997 RadioShack was not a punch line. I feel like the rule for the 2015 economy should be that pretty much any merger of brick-and-mortar retailers is pro-competition, unless those retailers are dollar stores.