Lately, business could really use a friend. Regulatory panic has followed fresh on the heels of the financial meltdown. Grand political ideas that competing interest groups can smother in good times tend to burst out in post-bust regulatory orgies. Legislators tend to focus on reining in unbridled business with little concern for how laws might reduce the economic blessings business can confer. When reform’s fires rage, rhetoric rules, difficulties melt away and compromises suddenly materialize, wrapped in vague statutory language that grant broad discretion to regulatory agencies.

Read the full piece here.

Judge Posner offers his thoughts on financial reform, mostly negative, at Bloomberg.   The thrust of the essay is that the financial regulation produced by the political process has, at best, a poor nexus to the actual causes of the economic crisis, and that what we are left with is primary reorganization and reshuffling to look busy.  Judge Posner discusses the political advantages to reshuffling as a response to government failure…

Read the full piece here.

Compared to the nominations of Justices Alito, Roberts and Sotomayor, there has been little excitement for the antitrust community on the most recent Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan.  But there is something.   The WSJ Law Blog reports that while Kagan refused to “praise the Leegin decision.”   Legal Times reports that in response to Senator Kohl’s questions about recent Supreme Court antitrust activity, including Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, Kagan offered some thoughts on the manner in which economic theory should be incorporated into antitrust doctrine…

Read the full piece here. 

Apparently, the Illinois Attorney General is investigating Lollapalooza for potential antitrust violations arising out of exclusivity clauses that the concert promoter includes in the contracts signed with artists who play the show.

Read the full piece here. 

Danny Sokol has posted the most downloaded antitrust law professors.  I come in 4th behind Damien Geradin, David Evans, and Herb Hovenkamp.   It is flattering to be in company like that by any measure.  Cool.  But, as Danny points out, what is even cooler is that George Mason is one of only a handful of schools with more than one faculty member making the list, with my colleague, co-author, and fellow Bruin economist Bruce Kobayashi coming in at #15.

Read the full piece here. 

As a sea of oil slops over sand, oysters and pelicans in the Gulf, it seems natural to blame the entity that made this happen– BP . The Gulf disaster could have easily been avoided–from the well design, to the defective seals, to the haphazard response, topped off with the lack of any backup plan. It doesn’t help that BP is a big, rich, oil company. The company will likely be sued and castigated in courts and markets.

There is a nice example in the WSJ concerning the economics of vertical contractual arrangements.  I’ve noted previously the apparent trend in the soda industry toward vertical integration and the link to the economics of promotional shelf space.  In particular, incentive conflicts between manufacturers and retailers of differentiated products over the use of promotional shelf space are pervasive.

Read the full piece here. 

One of my summer writing projects is a response to Einer Elhauge’s recent, highly acclaimed article, Tying, Bundled Discounts, and the Death of the Single Monopoly Profit Theory.  In the article, which appeared in the December 2009 Harvard Law Review, Elhauge defends current tying doctrine, which declares tie-ins to be per se illegal when the defendant has market power in the tying product market and the tie-in affects a “not insubstantial” volume of commerce in the tied product market.

Read the full piece here. 

Danny Sokol points to the Obama administration’s most recent effort to “reinvigorate” competition policy: some new proposed rules adding new sections to the existing regulations under the Packers & Stockyards Act. Emerging from the joint DOJ/ USDA agriculture workshops (see comments from Manne & Wright here; TOTM archives on agricultural antitrust here), the USDA must not have come away to impressed with the DOJ’s ability to enforce the antitrust laws on the behalf of consumers.  Either that, or the USDA was never too interested in consumers in the first place.

Read the full piece here.