Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Policy Analysis
Volume
739
Publisher
Cato Institute
Publication Date
10-22-2013
Journal Article Version
Version of Record
First Page
1
Last Page
40
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Abstract
During his presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama criticized sharply the lax antitrust law enforcement record of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, his first assistant attorney general for antitrust even went so far as to suggest that the Great Recession was, at least in part, caused by federal antitrust policy failures during the previous eight years. This paper sets out to investigate how and in what ways antitrust enforcement has changed since President Obama took office in 2009. We review four recent antitrust cases and the behavioral remedies that were imposed on the defendants in those matters in detail. We find that the Obama administration has been significantly more active in enforcing the antitrust laws with respect to proposed mergers than his two predecessors in the White House had been. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission, together with the Department of Justice, withdrew a thoughtful report on the enforcement of Section 2 of the Sherman Act and issued new merger guidelines and a new merger policy remedy guide, all of which have moved antitrust law enforcement away from traditional structural remedies in favor of very intrusive behavioral remedies in an unprecedented fashion. That policy shift has further transformed antitrust law enforcers into regulatory agencies, a mission for which they are not well-suited, resulting in the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission being more vulnerable to rent seeking.
Recommended Citation
Shughart, William F. II and Thomas, Diana W., "Antitrust Enforcement in the Obama Adminstration's First Term: A Regulatory Approach" (2013). Economics and Finance Faculty Publications. Paper 970.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/econ_facpubs/970
