Solution: Economics Meta

Answer: SHUT ELECTRICAL DOWN

Written by Kenny Young

All of the answers in this round are the names of large companies. Those company names are far too long to fit into the blanks provided, but their stock symbols will fit nicely:

The mergers and acquisitions are formed by “merging” pairs of ticker symbols, “acquiring” two extra letters, and then “reorg-ing” the result by anagramming it to make a word with the acquired letters going in the numbered slots. Anagram tools such as Nutrimatic or Qat really help here. Keeping the loop going by using each ticker symbol in two consecutive sets of blanks gives these results:

And pulling all the numbered blanks into one string yields:

This pun on “trickle-down economics” is the answer.