The News
The FTC’s reaffirmation of Biden-era merger rules should dispel Wall Street’s hopes Trump would usher in a dealmaking boom.
“Rewriting guidelines after every election would be destabilizing,” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said. “Enforcement agencies should avoid a wholesale change in guidelines with every new administration… Firms must be able to make plans without worrying that guidelines are tossed away every four years. Courts will not rely on guidelines that are transparently partisan either.”
Ferguson’s comments are “a reaffirmation that what we actually did is innately conservative,” said Josh Tzuker, who was chief of staff to Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust under Biden.
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Liz’s view
Wholesale, destabilizing, and transparently partisan rewriting of guidelines in ways that worry constituents and undermine courts is Trump’s whole bit!
In their enthusiasm for Trump, corporate executives have focused on the things he says that they like (deregulation, lower taxes) and dismissed ones they don’t as bluffs (trade wars, immigration crackdown, inflationary policies, politically motivated investigations).
A likely outcome here is that corporate America gets all of the destabilizing, norm-shattering Trump they feared and none of the destabilizing, norm-shattering Trump they wanted.
Rohan’s view
Vice President JD Vance and “Khanservative” allies like Sen. Josh Hawley are as suspicious of big business as progressives are, and antitrust enforcement is a topic where the horseshoe theory of politics holds — where the far left and far right tend to agree.
Trump’s merger cops holding to Biden’s agenda shows that even Big Tech’s cozying up to the administration may not have changed their mind toward corporate power.