Simon Johnson is at it again, advocating the use of antitrust to break up the banks because they are, you know, big, and antitrust is about busting up big companies, right?

Read the full piece here. 

Jim Van Dyke (who contributed to our interchange symposium) has an interesting post up today recounting a brief glimpse of life without payment cards…

Read the full piece here. 

As regular readers know, we’ve been following with (critical) interest the antitrust issues surrounding the seed industry in general and Monsanto in particular.  See, for example posts by me or Mike here, here and here.

Read the full piece here. 

Gretchen Morgenson doesn’t want poor people to have access to consumer credit. At least, that’s what I think she’s saying in her rambling NYT column this week.

Read the full piece here.

When I first read Josh’s post of antitrust links below, I thought “Drew Brees? Surely not THAT Drew Brees.”  Turns out, it IS that Drew Brees. I was very interested to read the QB’s take on American Needle and his plead for the Supreme Court to reject the NFL’s petition to be deemed “a single entity.”  However, of even more interest to me was Brees’ comment that the NFL is petitioning for a “single entity” designation that would, according to Brees, apply “for pretty much everything the league does.”

Read the full piece here.

Yesterday, in my contribution to the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog’s Section 5 symposium, I discussed the FTC’s use of Section 5 to evade the tough standards facing plaintiffs bringing Section 2 claims and how that evasion was likely to cost consumers by stripping out the error-cost protections embedded in modern monopolization law.  I also argued that the Commission’s various justifications for bringing the case under Section 5 were both unpersuasive and unprincipled.  Some of the justifications are to do with the general trend towards favoring Section 5 as a stand alone authority, others rely on the institutional expertise of the Commission relative to judges in federal district court, and still others on the nature of competition in the microprocessor market, e.g. Commissioner Rosch’s claim that the difficulty in distinguishing harm to competitors from harm to competition in this setting supports a Section 5 case.

Read the full piece here.

The FTC should be ashamed

Seriously.  What interpretation of events is there other than that the FTC knew it could not prevail in a Section 2 case and decided to go in search of a back-up?  Commissioners Rosch and Leibowitz have been making noise about Section 5 for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to put it to the test—to make some new law that would favor the Commission in cases like this one where it “knows” there is injury but the Section 2 case law makes prevailing difficult nonetheless.  They have “found” their case, and Intel, its shareholders, consumers and competition generally will suffer mightily for their hubris.

Read the full piece here.

Employing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to evade Section 2 monopolization law is not a legitimate use of Section 5.  This is, unfortunately, the only reasonable interpretation of the Commission’s choice to make Section 5 the primary hook of its Intel complaint.  While there is no doubt that Section 5 of the FTC Act was intended to allow the Commission to fill “gaps” in antitrust enforcement under the Sherman Act, the FTC’s attempts to pigeonhole its Section 5 complaint into this “gap” filling rationale is not persuasive.

Read the full piece here.

There is no annual fee for shopping at Wal-Mart, but there is an annual fee for shopping at Sam’s Club. Is there a consumer protection problem here?

Read the full piece here.