Forbes – It may be 2015, but hedge funds are revisiting 1990s-era merger ideas like a marriage of Staples and Office Depot. Only, instead of reflecting the heady, ‘stock is toilet paper’ zeitgeist of that decade, the new crop of deals are being floated as a sober-minded way to wrench out cost savings in industries that have been upended by changing technology and consumer habits.
Mergers that would have been seen as empire building are now resurfacing, in large part because of vocal, bottom-line oriented hedge funds, as a way to cope with a bleak outlook, declining profit margins and over-supply.
