I had the pleasure last week of participating in a bailout panel at William & Mary Law School. The William & Mary Federalist Society, which hosted the event, asked each panelist to address three topics: what led to the current situation, how the bailout plan will (or won’t) fix things, and suggestions for implementing a bailout plan. I’ve already blogged a bit about the first two topics — here I speculate on one of the causes of the mess (Fannie/Freddie); here I discuss the original (“buy troubled assets”) versus revised (“inject capital directly into financial institutions”) bailout plans. I thought I’d take a few moments to blog about the third topic — suggestions for implementing the bailout plan.

Read the full piece here. 

My colleague Tom Hazlett strikes again in Barron’s on Google’s transformation from its initial reluctance to advertise and its desire to stick to the non-profit sector to an unrelenting market driven approach to its discovery that search-term clicks were … well … profitable.

Read the full piece here. 

You may recall we’ve been blogging quite a bit about the FTC and DOJ scuffle over Section 2 (See here and here). On Thursday, December 11th, the ABA Antitrust Division is sponsoring a Teleseminar that will feature my former FTC colleague Ken Glazer (Deputy Director, Bureau of Competition, Federal Trade Commission), Bill Kolasky (WilmerHale, and rumored candidate for AG job), and James J. O’Connell, Jr. (Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice).  Jennifer Driscoll (Mayer Brown) will be moderating.

Read the full piece here. 

That is from Maxine Waters (HT: Luke Froeb). It is increasingly difficult these days to figure out whether socialization/ nationalization is a threat or a promise.

Read the full piece here.

Please join me in support for poor, beleaguered gas station owners, the victims of unconscionable price gouging by ruthless consumers who are taking advantage of market conditions to reduce their demand for gasoline, driving down the price by nearly $2 per gallon over the last four months.

Read the full piece here.

So, now that the election is over, it must be time to start speculating as to who will fill what spots in the Obama administration. I already made some predictions about what an Obama antitrust regime might look like, but who will be running the show at the DOJ and the FTC? The Deal reports some possibilities at DOJ: Doug Melamed, William Kolasky, Jan McDavid, and Bill Baer.

Read the full piece here.

Danny Sokol makes some predictions about Post-Obama antitrust, and about my disappointment in what he perceives to be the likely direction of antitrust policy in the Obama administration…

Read the full piece here. 

The NY Times (HT: Danny Sokol) decided to run an editorial blasts the DOJ’s Section 2 Report, asserting that the “antitrust division is supposed to be the agency looking out for the interests of American consumers, not big companies — a role it has clearly forgotten over the last eight years” citing the familiar bullet points (e.g. “Throughout the entire Bush administration, it has not brought a single case against a dominant firm for anticompetitive behavior and “it has argued enthusiastically on behalf of monopolists before the Supreme Court”).  Its a superficial treatment of the issues at best (see here or here for my views and some links to others).

Read the full piece here.

The Mizzou campus is all atwitter today over a scheduled appearance this evening by the world’s biggest celebrity — my old constitutional law prof, Barack Obama. As I write this, I’m watching the Obama folks prepare for the rally, which is to take place on the quad my office overlooks. I must say, it’s a pretty impressive operation.

Read the full piece here.