This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 15th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The question needs to be asked and

apparently it needs to be asked again and again.

What exactly would replace the consumer welfare standard for federal approval of corporate

mergers?

Cato's Jennifer Huddleston offers her thoughts on new proposed merger guidelines.

We might question whether or not from an economic perspective,

federal permission to engage in large mergers is necessary,

and that's a sort of a separate discussion but until now how have the

feds approved or not approved and on what basis have they made decisions about large mergers?

In the past there was a set of merger guidelines that were largely focused on consumers and

consumer welfare. These were based on relatively objective economic standards

to try and evaluate whether consumers would be harmed by potential mergers between large companies

and what, if any, impact an increase in the concentration could have.

One of the things that we've seen recently at the FTC and the DOJ

in kind of changing norms around antitrust is a shift away from this economics and objective focused approach

to something that is much more subjective and based on their desired policy outcomes.

The latest example of this are new proposed merger guidelines

that were recently released by the DOJ and the FTC and will be up for comment

until about September 18.

So up for comment, people want to know what these new merger guidelines whether or not there

which I guess is a rulemaking right? Right so these are it's a bit different from kind of your traditional process there, but these new guidelines would be something that would be used by policy enforcers.

...