Antitrust at the Agencies Roundup: Pruning the Data Tree Edition
In my last roundup, I puzzled over the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) suit to block Amgen’s acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics. The deal involved no product overlaps whatsoever (i.e., no horizontal competition), a target firm acknowledged to have no competitors for the orphan drugs at issue, and nobody poised to enter into competition either.
I won’t recapitulate the details of my confusion here, but I will point to a new piece by Bill MacLeod (a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Section and a former FTC bureau director) and David Evans, in which they raise an issue I didn’t cover: “The Federal Trade Commission may have filed the first merger complaint in a generation that could be dismissed for failure to state a claim.” Which would not look good.