Washington, D.C. – Today, the FTC and DOJ released new merger guidelines. They are designed to help the public, business community, practitioners, and courts understand the factors and frameworks the Agencies consider when investigating mergers. The proposed guidelines will be followed by a comment period that will finish by September 18th, 2023 and the President is expected to speak about this later today.  The following is a statement from Adam Ruben, Vice President of Campaigns and Political Strategy on the proposed guidelines:   

Today’s rampant corporate consolidation and virtually unchecked corporate power harms us all. The DOJ and FTC’s proposed guidelines provide clear guidance to enforcers to prevent some of the worst abuses in our modern economy, like tech firms that preserve monopoly power by buying up incipient rivals or private equity firms engaging in a string of small acquisitions to corner a market. We look forward to working to ensure the final guidelines do as much as possible to rein in monopoly power and protect the public. It is also vital that agencies resist corporate efforts to weaken the guidelines and examine more ways to protect vulnerable citizens along with consumers. We applaud the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission for taking another step in supporting President Biden’s whole-of-government approach to tackling monopoly power on so many fronts — from banning non-competes employment clauses that restrict workers to proposing new rules to protect farmers from exploitation. Only by curtailing monopoly power on all fronts can we hope to rein in the behemoth of consolidated corporate power in the economy.