Geoff Manne on the Merger Guidelines

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was cited by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a timeline about the Federal Trade Commission’s recent turn toward populist rulemaking. You can read the full piece here.

The FTC and US Department of Justice together released the Draft Merger Guidelines in July 2023. The Mercatus Center’s Alden Abbott called the draft “an anti-merger manifesto.” The Draft Guidelines prioritized speculative harms while largely disregarding proven benefits. While focusing on the potential downsides of mergers, the Draft lacked proper consideration of potential gains in efficiency and consumer welfare. Many criticized the Draft Guidelines for its reliance on old case law and ignoring more modern precedent. Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law & Economics, pointed out that the average year of cases cited (weighted by the number of citations) is 1975.