Hello there, great to see you again.

I hope you've made it to the end of the week in one piece

and that you're about to ease into a relaxing weekend.

This is Emlex's podcast, everything you need to know from the world of

regulatory affairs with the assistance of our reporters deeply embedded in the centres of regulatory

power all around the world. I'm James Panicki, a senior editor here at Emlex. Now, you don't

need to be in the market for Taylor Swift tickets to know that antitrust regulators in the US have come in for some criticism of late.

Nonetheless, there's some evidence to suggest that the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice are asserting themselves in relatively new ways.

For example, the DOJ is undertaking a review of

company boards. Why is that? I hear you ask. Well, the antitrust officials are digging deep

into the statute books to prevent the same people from sitting on boards of competing

companies. The assumption, of course, is that boardroom overlaps can

dampen competition and lead to potentially illegal exchanges of information. Our San Francisco-based

senior correspondent, Mike Acton, is exactly the kind of person you'd want to write a piece

of analysis on this issue, and luckily for us, he has done just

that. And he joins us now from our offices in the city by the bay. Mike, firstly, what is

Section 8 of the Clayton Act? And what do we need to know about how it works? So the Clayton

Act is one of the major federal antitrust laws,

and it was passed in 1914. And Section 8 basically applies to the question of people sitting

on the boards of competing companies. It prohibits individuals from sitting on the boards of

competitors, subject to certain sales thresholds,

and there are some exceptions for sectors like banking.

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