DOJ antitrust chief touts blocked mergers

Jonathan Cantor, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, on Wednesday tore down the department’s track record of blocking mergers in concentrated markets, amid continuing tensions between policymakers and big business as political coalitions rebuild. praised.

Cantor, who has overseen the halting of mergers from airlines to book publishing and the first criminal monopoly wins in decades, said strengthening antitrust enforcement was on the right track.

“We took these steps to address trends in industrial concentration and stop anticompetitive behavior before it becomes entrenched,” Kantor said at an anti-monopoly summit event hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project. He touched on examples from the shipping and construction industries. , piping and insulation field.

He also emphasized that stronger antitrust enforcement is having a deterrent effect in areas where further consolidation is being considered.

“Look no further than over 20 mergers that have been abandoned in response to antitrust division concerns over the past two-and-a-half years,” he said.

First victory for the Department of Justice Criminal antitrust cases Decades later, in 2022, an asphalt contractor pleads guilty to violating the Sherman Act.

The contractor approached its competitors about entering into a “strategic partnership,” offering to stop competing on highway crack seal projects in the same area and establish a regional monopoly.

The contractor was sentenced to three years’ probation, six months of home detention and a $27,000 fine.

The bolder antitrust moves are part of a broader effort to strengthen commercial enforcement at regulators from the U.S. Trade Representative to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

The crackdown has outraged companies and merger lawyers have accused officials of interfering with commerce.

But the push to take away some of the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by the corporate sector appears to have bipartisan momentum.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said in February that he was one of the few Biden administration officials who thought FTC Director Lina Khan was “doing a pretty good job,” and some in his party Although he admits that he thinks of her that way, he is committing “fundamentally evil acts”.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Missouri) has also distanced himself from staunch pro-business traditionalism and said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful business lobbies in the country, is funding the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We have started an investigation regarding this.

“There are a lot of concerns about the activities of tax-exempt organizations like yours,” Smith told the Chamber of Commerce in May.

Economists have increasingly focused on private sector consolidation and growing market power as problematic drivers of markups and inflation.

An influential 2020 academic paper by Jan de Recker et al. documents an increase in average market power, which is “in line with a number of long-term trends over the past 40 years, most notably labor “Market dynamism can explain the decline in power and the share of capital, and the decline in the labor force.” ”