This week the Senate is scheduled to hear debate over the latest financial regulation reform bill (also known as the Dodd Bill).  Part of the Dodd Bill incorporated aspects from a bill from Senator Schumer introduced last summer, against which I testified, called the “Shareholder’s Bill of Rights.”  In light of this week’s momentous events, I thought it might be a good time to post my draft of an “Investor’s Bill of Rights” that I have been thinking about.

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David Balto has penned a short apologia of the FTC’s Intel case (HT: Danny Sokol).  Unfortunately his defense (and, unfortunately, the FTC’s case) is woefully misguided.

Balto writes…

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Will someone remind me just why the USDA and DOJ are hosting their little Antitrust in Ag roadshow this year?

The Associated Press reports today that the USDA is set to release a new set of regulations on the livestock and poultry industries. Reporter Christopher Leonard describes the new regulations as “the most sweeping antitrust rules covering the meat industry in decades, potentially altering the balance of power between meat companies and the farmers who raise their animals.”

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Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein offers a novel explanation for “regulatory failure.”  The D.C. Circuit, has, Pearlstein asserts, “has intimidated, undermined and demoralized the regulatory apparatus” by giving insufficient deference to regulators and “opinions that routinely ignore the plain language of statute and the clear intent of Congress.”   Pearlstein holds up three Republican appointees as examples of this sort of runaway anti-regulatory judicial activism.  Strong stuff.  What’s the evidence?  Pearlstein relies on the recent Comcast v. FCC, an opinion authored by Judge Tatel (Clinton appointee, in case you were wondering).  It is also worth noting that two of the judges cited have taken senior status and only Kavanaugh joined recently.  Pearlstein then refers to the D.C. Circuit’s review of the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Rambus.  He describes it as follows…

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Wednesday, April 7, J.P. Stadtmueller, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, gave the green light for DOJ’s antitrust case against Dean Foods to move forward. Dean had filed a motion to dismiss based on its assertion that the DOJ had failed to provide sufficient evidence to support the DOJ’s antitrust claim and had failed to provide a sufficiently specific definition of the relevant market in which the anti-competitive effects were alleged to exist.  Stadtmueller concludes his ruling by stating…

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News items continue to pile up suggesting that the FTC is likely to challenge Google’s acquisition of mobile application and website advertising provider, AdMob. See this recent article from the Wall Street Journal and this from Yahoo!, for example.

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I don’t think I suffer from any phobias (heck, I’m not even afraid of clowns, though some would argue that suggests a lack of prudence on my part).  I’m not sure Professors Whitman and Rizzo do either, despite Professor Thaler’s gentle ribbing.  While Whitman can surely defend himself, I can’t resist pointing out that Thaler’s example of Prohibition is illustrative of Whitman’s point.

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Bob Greene (CNN) argues that celebrity endorsements are meaningless.  Worse than that, according to Greene, celebrity endorsements necessarily amount to a raw deal for consumers…

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