Latest news with #AntitrustDivision
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Columbus McKinnon says DOJ requests more information on Kito deal
In a regulatory filing, Columbus McKinnon (CMCO) stated, 'As previously disclosed, on February 10, 2025, Columbus McKinnon entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement with Kito Crosby Limited, the equityholders of Kito, and Ascend Overseas Limited, pursuant to which Columbus McKinnon agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding equity of Kito. In connection with the Acquisition, Columbus McKinnon and KKR (KKR) North America Fund XI L.P., the ultimate parent entity of Kito, each filed the required notification and report forms under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. On May 28, 2025, Columbus McKinnon and KKR each received a request for additional information and documentary material from the Antitrust Division in connection with the Antitrust Division's review of the Acquisition. The issuance of the Second Request extends the waiting period under the HSR Act until 30 days after both Columbus McKinnon and KKR have substantially complied with the Second Request, unless the waiting period is voluntarily extended by the parties or terminated earlier by the Antitrust Division. The parties have been working collaboratively with the Antitrust Division to bring its review of the Acquisition to a close as expeditiously as possible and will continue to do so. Completion of the Acquisition remains subject to the expiration or termination of the waiting period under the HSR Act and the satisfaction or waiver of the other customary closing conditions set forth in the Purchase Agreement.'
CNBC
3 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Jonathan Kanter on Trump tariff ruling: This is one big beautiful mess
Jonathan Kanter, former Assistant Attorney General for Justice Department's Antitrust Division, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss Google's antitrust case, the federal trade court's tariff ruling, Trump's executive order targeting top law firm WilmerHale, and more.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Antitrust Enforcer Says 'Big Is Bad'
The anti–free market views of the Trump administration's antitrust enforcers are coming into full view, and it's boding poorly for the American economy. Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, recently delivered her "America First Antitrust" speech, which outlined a populist agenda that punishes firms for being large. Days later, Mark Meador, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, published his "Antitrust Policy for the Conservative" essay, which evinces prejudice against big companies. "Big is bad," says Meador, who calls on conservatives to "reaffirm that concentrated economic power is just as dangerous as concentrated political power." Meador does not explain how market power is morally analogous to political power and the use of coercion but challenges conservatives to oppose bigness in private business the way they do in government. But there's good reason to be against one and not the other. Increasing the size and scope of government entails a commensurate reduction of the private sphere and personal liberty; Microsoft, Walmart, and Häagen-Dazs increasing their market shares does not. Meador disagrees, describing antitrust law as the means to prevent "anarchistic private tyranny" and encourages conservatives to "reject a laissez-faire or libertarian approach to antitrust law." Meador associates the libertarian approach principally with legal scholar Robert Bork's consumer welfare standard, which holds that the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the oldest antitrust statute enforced by the DOJ and FTC, was intended to and should promote economic efficiency. Meador rejects Bork's understanding of consumer welfare as economic efficiency, narrowly redefining it as "trading partner surplus." Replacing a holistic conception of consumer welfare with Meador's myopic one will prevent even economically efficient mergers and acquisitions from taking place, retarding innovation and productivity—a cost that Meador is willing for consumers to pay. Meador says that a conservative approach to antitrust law should be "more concerned with avoiding Type II errors [false negatives] than Type I errors [false positives]." This means antitrust officials should be more worried about accidentally allowing anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions than preventing competitive ones. Slater, however, lauded antitrust for its ability "to make targeted, incisive cuts to remove the cancer of collusion and monopoly abuse [rather than imposing] ex ante regulations." Slater praises antitrust for minimizing unnecessary economic intervention, which allows firms to serve consumers and expand the economic pie. Meador contradicts the DOJ's top antitrust official by calling for precisely the opposite. Meador describes permissionless innovation as a progressive impulse and says, "We do not celebrate the inexorable forward march of progress precisely because not all that is innovative is good." Skepticism of innovation recalls the Biden administration's permission-slip economy, which cost the economy an estimated $1.8 trillion. Meador also observes that "monopolists…often innovate to entrench and protect their monopoly rather than disrupt it." This is true; firms innovate to differentiate their products to obtain and retain pricing power to increase their profits. For example, Apple introduced the graphical user interface in January 1983 to steal Microsoft's market share, whose MS-DOS was a cumbersome command-line operating system. The primary beneficiary of such innovation is the consumer; the firm's motivation is irrelevant. Moreover, the example Meador cites as evidence of innovation not benefiting the consumer is that which profits from a government-granted monopoly over its intellectual property: the pharmaceutical industry. The solution to this inefficiency is less economic intervention by the state, not more of it. When firms are incapable of differentiating their products through in-house innovation, "there is still the possibility of acquisition to obviate the competitive threat," says Meador, citing the technology sector as an example. Meador recognizes that "the potential for acquisition has led to an explosion in VC funding for start-ups" and says this has diminished "truly disruptive innovation." While economists don't know if acquired startups' innovations reached their "full potential," Big Tech's Magnificent Seven—Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—accounted for over half of the S&P 500 index's 25 percent return and one-third of total U.S. market capitalization in 2024. Cracking down on Big Tech acquisitions decreases the expected profitability of acquiring startups (as antitrust enforcers intend), thereby disincentivizing entrepreneurship and innovation as an unintended result. Meador quotes Sen. John Sherman—the namesake of the aforementioned act, which has been used by the Trump and Biden administrations to prosecute Alphabet for its successful search engine (Google)—who said, "If the concentrated powers of this combination are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government." Meador, like Sherman, does not identify a principle to determine when the exercise of private property rights amounts to the exertion of a "kingly prerogative." If anyone is exercising such a prerogative it is President Donald Trump, who is using political power to act as "a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life," as Sherman was so worried, with his unconstitutional tariffs, subsidies, and industrial policy that arbitrarily reallocate capital to favored industries. Yet, the New Right opposes free trade even as they admit Trump's protectionism will impoverish Americans. Meador is unqualifiedly right that economics cannot identify what a person's or society's ends should be. He is also right that economics (like all sciences) "depends upon various assumptions and caveats, all of which can and often is rendered moot by marketplace realities and 'facts on the ground.'" As such, it is fallacious to claim that economic analysis of the anticipated effects of mergers, acquisitions, and other firm conduct can prescribe what the government should do—it can only attempt to describe what will happen. The limitations of the consumer welfare standard are reason for humility in its application, not its redefinition. Meador concludes conservatives must reject what he says are libertarianism's lies, but conservatives should reject Meador's false equivalency of economic and political power. The post Trump's Antitrust Enforcer Says 'Big Is Bad' appeared first on
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's 'America First Antitrust' Policy Will Put America Last
Abigail Slater delivered her first public address as assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice on Monday, where she argued for an "America First Antitrust" policy based on patriotism, textualism, and respect for precedent and the rule of law. Speaking at the University of Notre Dame, Slater claimed her antitrust regime will empower "America's forgotten men and women to shape their own economic destinies in the free market." In reality, her populist antitrust agenda will retard American innovation and economic growth. Slater, who was an economic policy adviser to Vice President J.D. Vance when he was in the Senate, opened her remarks by thanking President Donald Trump, who has "assailed the use of 'market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans,'" for giving her "the chance to defend the American people's rights at this critical juncture in our history." Slater explains that the Trump administration is "undertaking deregulation that will unleash innovation in AI and other technologies" but celebrates the DOJ's recent victory in the Google ad tech case, saying, "Our teams more often than not win the battle on behalf of the American people." Embroiling Big Tech firms in expensive antitrust suits stifles innovation by decreasing capital available for R&D and discouraging startup acquisition. Slater also condemns the "global labor arbitrage" for trading "American jobs for cheap manufacturing abroad" and "growing profit margins [that] diverted the economic gains for many goods from American consumers and workers to our coastal elites." But the facts contradict Slater's story: The percentage of U.S. households making $35,000 or less decreased from 1967 to 2017, while those making $100,000 or more increased, as explained by Mark Perry, senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. She also references the decline of manufacturing since the late 1960s, but nationwide manufacturing output steadily increased from 1970 to 2007, where it has since stabilized. Slater's skepticism of free markets was most prominently displayed when she explained the principles that will guide her approach to antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department. To Slater, the first objective for antitrust enforcers should be protecting individual liberty from government and corporate tyranny. While Slater rightly identifies freedom of choice as necessary for flourishing, she wrongly likens today's dominant firms to the government-granted monopolies of the colonial period, such as the British East India Company. Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics, says "It is very strange to compare a government-granted monopoly to any of the relevant 'monopolies' people worry about today." Ethan Yang, an adjunct research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, agrees, telling Reason, "Many of the so-called dominant firms that are in the antitrust crosshairs today have achieved their positions almost entirely on enterprise." The British East India Company only "maintained its position because it was granted a legal monopoly on all trade occurring in a certain part of the world by royal charter." Second, she believes antitrust enforcement should respect binding precedent and the original meaning of the statute. Slater says antitrust agencies should only enforce laws actually passed by Congress—not laws they wish Congress had passed. Slater invokes this principle to argue that "antitrust laws protect labor market competition." Antitrust has been used in the context of labor, explains Yang, but "its application is tricky because…it is much more difficult to classify as a market which is necessary to measure competition and the alleged anticompetitive effects of restrictive labor practices." Moreover, Slater's claim that labor antitrust is deeply rooted in common law tradition and Supreme Court precedent is wrong because "most of the labor antitrust has happened in the last 15 years," according to Albrecht. Slater's third principle is that antitrust litigation can serve as a substitute for regulation. Slater likens the former to a scalpel and the latter to a sledgehammer. Even though Slater rightly recognizes that "anti-competitive regulation can be co-opted by monopolies and their lobbyists" and "sap the free market of dynamism," she does not admit that antitrust's susceptibility to capture and do the same. The empirical record unambiguously shows that "antitrust, at least before the development of the consumer welfare standard, was employed to help competitors and a form of rent seeking," says Albrecht. Yang adds that, while antitrust enforcement may be less susceptible to corporate capture than regulation, it is "highly ideological and partisan because lawsuits can be launched at will by…agency leaders who often take direct orders from the President." Slater credits New Right intellectuals Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, and Sohrab Ahmari, founder of Compact magazine, for "driving the realignment in antitrust policy." Slater's "wish to move away from [a] deeply technocratic and elitist mindset" confounds her support of the New Right, whose economic program is explicitly technocratic, viewing trade and industrial policy as tools policymakers can and ought to use to remake the economy from on high. Slater is right that "personal liberty and economic liberty are closely connected." But her activist antitrust ideology will violate liberty, not protect it. The post Trump's 'America First Antitrust' Policy Will Put America Last appeared first on
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Did Trump tank the FTC's insulin suit? Observers in Ohio, elsewhere want to know
Billionaire Elon Musk, left accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump, right, and Musk's son, X Musk, speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by) The Federal Trade Commission late Tuesday stayed a lawsuit accusing pharmacy middlemen of gaming the system to inflate the price of insulin — a drug millions of Americans need to survive. When it did, it left experts in Ohio and elsewhere trying to figure out if President Donald Trump was trying to sabotage the commission's work, or if it was simply part of his vendetta against Democrats. Created in 1914, the FTC is tasked with stopping unfair trade practices — particularly those by big corporations that use their dominance to harm small businesses and consumers. Starting around 1980, Republican and then Democratic administrations — which appoint the agency's commissioners — greatly diminished the role of the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. The argument then prevailed that despite what the laws themselves said, the goal of antitrust law was efficiency, which would supposedly deliver better outcomes for consumers. But awareness has grown in recent years that the rise of big box stores, health conglomerates, and tech companies hasn't been to the uniform benefit of consumers. In response, the Biden administration began a new era of stepped-up enforcement of laws that had long been on the books. The FTC filed lawsuits against Amazon, to stop the Kroger-Albertson's merger, and it sued giant health conglomerates. It accused the latter companies of unfairly driving up insulin prices at the expense of diabetics — especially those with low incomes. That was the case that the FTC stayed on Monday. The agency did so because two Republican commissioners had recused themselves from the case, saying they had conflicts of interest. A third Republican commissioner hasn't yet been approved by the Senate. And Trump in March tried to fire the two Democratic appointees, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. The case was to be heard by the commissioners. But now there aren't any to hear it. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Bedoya and Slaughter are in court challenging the attempted firings, arguing that the president doesn't have the power to simply decree a change in the structure of a regulatory commission created by Congress. The suit quotes the Federal Trade Commission Act, which says the president can only remove commissioners 'for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.' So long as that lawsuit plays out, the FTC suit against the pharmacy middlemen won't. It alleges that the big three pharmacy middlemen excluded cheaper generic forms of insulin from insurance coverage in order to extract larger rebates from manufacturers' more costly products. The three biggest middlemen, or pharmacy benefit managers, control nearly 80% of the insured drug transactions in the United Sates. Each is a part of a conglomerate that also owns a major insurer — UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and Cigna-Express Scripts. As middlemen, the benefit managers decide which drugs are covered, and which of those have low or no copayments. The FTC suit says that since 2012, they've been increasingly aggressive about demanding ever-larger, non-transparent rebates — their critics call them kickbacks — from manufacturers in exchange for covering their drugs. With insulin, prices were effectively jacked up when the middlemen refused to cover some of the cheapest alternatives at all, the suit said. It's clear that for now, anyway, the insulin suit isn't going anywhere. What isn't clear is whether that's what Trump intended when he tried to remove Bedoya and Slaughter. 'Sadly, this was an entirely foreseeable consequence of illegally attempting to fire the minority commissioners,' they said in a joint statement Tuesday decrying the suspension of the insulin suit. Foreseeable, yes, but was it intentional? The White House press office didn't respond to questions Wednesday. On the one hand, Trump in the past has been critical of the pharmacy middlemen. In his first administration, he floated the idea of ending legal exemptions that allow them to collect rebates from manufacturers in exchange for covering their drugs. And in December, then President-elect Trump said of pharmacy benefit managers, 'The horrible middleman that makes more money, frankly, than the drug companies, and they don't do anything except they're a middleman,' USA Today reported. 'I don't know who these middlemen are, but they are rich.' Despite all that, Trump hasn't taken any meaningful action against the health conglomerates that own the middlemen — or against tech moguls such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who donated millions to his campaign and his inauguration. Meanwhile, Trump has at least temporarily crippled the antitrust watchdog that has tried to rein them in. Antonio Ciaccia is a Columbus-based drug-pricing expert who has followed the rise of drug middlemen since Trump's first term. He said the president is yet to back up his tough talk with concrete action. 'In his first term as president, Trump pushed to eliminate the anti-kickback law exemptions that ballooned the prices of medicines like insulin. The Biden Administration refused to implement the policy,' Ciaccia said. 'The FTC's lawsuit against (pharmacy benefit managers) over their role in inflating the prices of insulin was another opportunity to achieve Trump's original policy goals albeit via different means. Regardless of the intent, the recent shake-up at the FTC effectively ends that pursuit for the foreseeable future.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
