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Image: A Subway staff member holding a footlong sandwich.Scott Bairstow / Alamy Stock
Right before Thanksgiving, Josh Sisco wrote that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the $9.6 billion purchase of Subway by private equity firm Roark Capital creates a sandwich shop monopoly, by placing Subway under the same ownership as Jimmy John’s, Arby’s, McAlister’s Deli, and Schlotzky’s. The acquisition would allow Roark to control over 40,000... Read More
Image: A control contest in 2015 designed to replace Dupont’s managers failed, with the decisive votes being cast by the top four shareholders of DuPont (Vanguard, BlackRock, State Steet, and Capital Research), who also held a sizable financial stake in Monsanto.
Seven years ago, Einer Elhauge published a call to arms. In a provocative essay in the Harvard Law Review, he urged the antitrust agencies to bring enforcement actions against what he called horizontal shareholding and what we now call common ownership. Common ownership raises antitrust concerns because investors own shares in two or more competitors.... Read More
Image: In U.S. v. Baker Hughes, Judge Thomas changed the language of the Clayton Act, despite considering himself to be a textualist. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP file
How many times have you heard from an antitrust scholar or practitioner that merely possessing a monopoly does not run afoul of the antitrust laws? That a violation requires the use of a restraint to extend that monopoly into another market, or to preserve the original monopoly to constitute a violation? Here’s a surprise. Both... Read More
Image: Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell testifies before Congress earlier this year. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua via Getty Image
After more than a year of aggressive rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has now held them steady after each of the past two Federal Open Market Committee meetings. After peaking at levels not seen in decades, inflation has leveled off in the three-to-four percent range for months now. On top of that, job openings, and... Read More
Image: The best evidence of Amazon’s dominance is how hard the company has worked for years to squash any investigation into its actions.
Over 100 years ago, Congress responded to railroad and oil monopolies’ stranglehold on the economy by passing the United States’ first-ever antitrust laws. When those reforms weren’t enough, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers and small businesses from predation. Today, unchecked monopolies again threaten economic competition and our democratic institutions, so it’s... Read More
Image: The FTC's Complaint alleges that Amazon ties its fulfillment services to access to Amazon Prime.
The Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon of illegally maintaining its monopoly, extracting supra-competitive fees on merchants that use Amazon’s platform. If and when the fact-finder determines that Amazon violated the antitrust laws, we propose structural remedies to address the competitive harms. Behavioral remedies have fallen out of favor among antitrust scholars. But the success... Read More
Image: Women pressers on strike for higher wages by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library
America’s working people and their elected representatives in the labor movement have been an untapped resource for antitrust enforcers. That should change. Not only are workers an underutilized source of information about the likely effects of a merger, but their labor organizations also offer an effective counter to employer power. As signaled with the Executive... Read More
Image: Portrait of William H. Draper, Under Secretary of War, 1947; Under Secretary of the Army, 1947-1949; U. S. Special Representative in Europe with the rank of Ambassador, 1952-1953.
“Their goal is simply to mislead, bewilder, confound, and delay and delay and delay until once again we lose our way, and fail to throw off the leash the monopolists have fastened on our neck.” – Barry Lynn Today, the name Draper is associated with either a fictional adman or a successful real-life venture capital... Read More
Image: A well-functioning democracy requires that the people should be able to structure markets through their local political institutions.
For years, journalists have reported numerous instances of worker exploitation, hazardous working conditions, and poverty wages in the nail salon and fast food industries. In a blockbuster 2015 New York Times investigation, for example, journalists found that New York nail salonists were “paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid…[and] endure all manner of... Read More
Image: In Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, Brian, a false prophet, drops his shoe and his gourd. His followers splinter into camps of shoe followers and gourd followers.
It has become quite common to accuse antitrust enforcers of bias and seek their recusal. FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ Antitrust Division AAG Jonathan Kanter have been the subject of calls for recusal in cases involving corporate giants such as Meta, Amazon, and Google. The argument is that these individuals are biased in their... Read More
Image: A Subway staff member holding a footlong sandwich.Scott Bairstow / Alamy Stock
Right before Thanksgiving, Josh Sisco wrote that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the $9.6 billion purchase of Subway by private equity firm Roark Capital creates a sandwich shop monopoly, by placing Subway under the same ownership as Jimmy John’s, Arby’s, McAlister’s Deli, and Schlotzky’s. The acquisition would allow Roark to control over 40,000... Read More

Seven years ago, Einer Elhauge published a call to arms. In a provocative essay in the Harvard Law Review, he urged the antitrust agencies to bring enforcement actions against what he called horizontal shareholding and what we now call common ownership. Common ownership raises antitrust concerns because investors own shares in two or more competitors.... Read More

Image: A control contest in 2015 designed to replace Dupont’s managers failed, with the decisive votes being cast by the top four shareholders of DuPont (Vanguard, BlackRock, State Steet, and Capital Research), who also held a sizable financial stake in Monsanto.

How many times have you heard from an antitrust scholar or practitioner that merely possessing a monopoly does not run afoul of the antitrust laws? That a violation requires the use of a restraint to extend that monopoly into another market, or to preserve the original monopoly to constitute a violation? Here’s a surprise. Both... Read More

Image: In U.S. v. Baker Hughes, Judge Thomas changed the language of the Clayton Act, despite considering himself to be a textualist. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP file

After more than a year of aggressive rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has now held them steady after each of the past two Federal Open Market Committee meetings. After peaking at levels not seen in decades, inflation has leveled off in the three-to-four percent range for months now. On top of that, job openings, and... Read More

Image: Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell testifies before Congress earlier this year. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua via Getty Image

Over 100 years ago, Congress responded to railroad and oil monopolies’ stranglehold on the economy by passing the United States’ first-ever antitrust laws. When those reforms weren’t enough, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers and small businesses from predation. Today, unchecked monopolies again threaten economic competition and our democratic institutions, so it’s... Read More

Image: The best evidence of Amazon’s dominance is how hard the company has worked for years to squash any investigation into its actions.

The Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon of illegally maintaining its monopoly, extracting supra-competitive fees on merchants that use Amazon’s platform. If and when the fact-finder determines that Amazon violated the antitrust laws, we propose structural remedies to address the competitive harms. Behavioral remedies have fallen out of favor among antitrust scholars. But the success... Read More

Image: The FTC's Complaint alleges that Amazon ties its fulfillment services to access to Amazon Prime.

America’s working people and their elected representatives in the labor movement have been an untapped resource for antitrust enforcers. That should change. Not only are workers an underutilized source of information about the likely effects of a merger, but their labor organizations also offer an effective counter to employer power. As signaled with the Executive... Read More

Image: Women pressers on strike for higher wages by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library

“Their goal is simply to mislead, bewilder, confound, and delay and delay and delay until once again we lose our way, and fail to throw off the leash the monopolists have fastened on our neck.” – Barry Lynn Today, the name Draper is associated with either a fictional adman or a successful real-life venture capital... Read More

Image: Portrait of William H. Draper, Under Secretary of War, 1947; Under Secretary of the Army, 1947-1949; U. S. Special Representative in Europe with the rank of Ambassador, 1952-1953.

For years, journalists have reported numerous instances of worker exploitation, hazardous working conditions, and poverty wages in the nail salon and fast food industries. In a blockbuster 2015 New York Times investigation, for example, journalists found that New York nail salonists were “paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid…[and] endure all manner of... Read More

Image: A well-functioning democracy requires that the people should be able to structure markets through their local political institutions.

It has become quite common to accuse antitrust enforcers of bias and seek their recusal. FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ Antitrust Division AAG Jonathan Kanter have been the subject of calls for recusal in cases involving corporate giants such as Meta, Amazon, and Google. The argument is that these individuals are biased in their... Read More

Image: In Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, Brian, a false prophet, drops his shoe and his gourd. His followers splinter into camps of shoe followers and gourd followers.

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