Industry TV Recap: Mergers and Affirmations
How did we get into this mess? “Other people let it happen.”
Whitney Halberstram, played by Max Minghella, and Sir Henry Muck, played by Kit Harington.
Photographer: Simon Ridgway/HBOWhen in trouble, merge. It’s probably not taught in any business school, but as Industry reminds us, a little bit of M&A can hide a multitude of sins—if used adroitly. So it is that as the House of Tender collapses, its top executives, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) and Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), embark on a madcap scheme to merge away all their fraudulent fintech firm’s problems.
If you feel like you’ve seen this play out before, it’s because you probably have. Recent decades have provided examples—big and small—of troubled companies combining with others to head off a reckoning over their questionable balance sheets. In Britain there was Quindell, which became a serial acquirer of legal and insurance-claim-outsourcing firms before it all came crashing down a little more than a decade ago amid allegations of financial impropriety, though a later Serious Fraud Office investigation came to nothing. But by then the damage was done.