Predicting what antitrust enforcement regimes in the current economic environment is a tricky business.  I’ve done my best here.  One probably cannot think of a better source for such predictions than those from the soon-to-be AAG Christine Varney, who recently spoke at an American Antitrust Institute panel on Section 2 enforcement (you can hear the panel audio at the link).  I had an RA transcribe Varney’s remarks so please note that all remarks attributed as quotations here may not be exact.

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George Bittlingmayer (University of Kansas) and my colleague Tom Hazlett look at the market response to the stimulus and find it none too enthusiastic…

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So, let me get this straight. We’re in a major recession triggered by a collapse in the housing market, itself the inevitable result of government policies, led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to get the wrong loans to the wrong people so they could buy the wrong houses. The Obama Administration’s remedy is not to let Fannie and Freddie die a long-overdue and merciful death, but to prop them up, to give them additional powers, and to subsidize private mortgage lenders who extend yet more credit to more borrowers who can’t pay it back, thus making what might have been a temporary misallocation of the housing stock into a permanent one. Brilliant!

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As I noted elsewhere yesterday, the “stimulus” bill making its way through Congress is a fine illustration of the Higgs effect, the tendency of government to expand massively in response to “crises,” real or imagined. Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” thesis is exactly backward: “disasters” are inevitably followed by huge increases in the public sector at the expense of the private. Anyway, if you have any doubt that the current legislation has precious little to do with economic stimulus, consider the details of the House’s proposed $825 billion package, which includes:

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Yesterday I criticized Brad DeLong for, essentially, acting like a child. Today I want to draw attention to three posts from Brad DeLong–in none of which does he act like a child.

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On Thursday President-elect Obama named law professor Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an executive-branch office with the mission of analyzing and coordinating federal regulation. Most recently, Sunstein is known for his work with Richard Thaler on “choice architecture” and behavioral public policy, including their book Nudge.

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There has been a great deal of speculation and discussion in this blog and around the antitrust community regarding what will happen with the DOJ Section 2 Report.  Rightly so.  It is a document with the potential to influence both agency monopolization enforcement decisions, international antitrust enforcement, and U.S. doctrine itself in federal court.  What precisely happens with the Section 2 Report is also of considerable significance given the confluence of events that suggest, at least to me, a significant increase in monopolization enforcement (see also some more general predictions about the Obama antitrust regime).

Read the full piece here. 

Stories like this one suggest that winning Olympic gold in Beijing have catapulted team members into better seasons. Here’s a quote from Lebron James…

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The Law Market, Larry Ribstein’s new and important book with Erin O’Hara looks great and is available here from Oxford University Press.  The book description from the website sets the stage…

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