DOJ antitrust chief touts blocked mergers

Justice Department antitrust division chief Jonathan Kanter praised his agency’s record of stopping mergers in concentrated markets Tuesday amid ongoing tensions between policymakers and big business that are reshaping party alliances.

Kanter — who has overseen merger cancellations ranging from the airline industry to book publishing, as well as the first criminal monopolization legal win in decades — said that amped antitrust enforcement is on the right track.

“We took these actions to address the trends toward concentration of industry and put a stop to anticompetitive behavior before it takes hold,” Kanter said at the Anti-Monoply Summit event hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, mentioning cases in the shipping, construction, piping and insulation sectors.

He also touted the deterrence effect that increased antitrust enforcement is having in sectors considering further consolidation.

“Look no further than the 20-plus mergers abandoned in response to the antitrust division’s concerns in just the last two-and-a-half years,” he said.

The Justice Department won its first criminal anti-monopoly case in decades in 2022 when an asphalt contractor pleaded guilty to violating the Sherman Act.

The contractor approached a competitor about entering into a “strategic partnership,” proposing that they stop competing for highway crack-sealing projects in the same regions to establish local monopolies.

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

The bolder antitrust moves are part of a wider initiative to increase commercial enforcement at regulatory agencies ranging from the U.S. Trade Representative, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

The crackdown has had businesses fuming, with merger attorneys calling out officials as standing in the way of commerce.

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

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said in February that FTC boss Lina Khan was one of the few Biden administration officials who he considered to be doing “a pretty good job” even as he acknowledged that some in his party considered her to be engaged in a “fundamental evil thing.”

Also pulling away from staunchly pro-business orthodoxies is Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who has launched an investigation into funding sources for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful business lobbies in the U.S.

Smith told the Chamber in May that he had “numerous concerns about activities of tax-exempt organizations like yours.”

Economists have increasingly looked at private-sector consolidation and increased market power as a problematic factor in driving markups and inflation.

One influential academic paper from 2020 by Jan de Loecker and others documented an increase in average market power that “can account for a number of secular trends in the past four decades, most notably the declining labor and capital shares as well as the decrease in labor market dynamism.”