Wu, Khan and Kanter declared the past 40 years of merger enforcement a failure overseen by feckless enforcers. It's time for a report card. How did they do? What lessons for the Trump Administration?
One quibble - You're probably right that the lack of consents means more mergers let through without any constraints, but we can't say that for *certain*. It's possible that the mergers that would have gotten consents under a "normal" regime were simply abandoned. Of course, if that's true, it surely means that some mergers that *should* have gone through without consents were also abandoned.
No doubt that’s correct, Geoff. We cannot say for certain. These sort of data are not capable of that kind of precision. The mix of deals changes too as the piece notes. But — we can say some useful things about activity level, activity level relative to expectations, etc.
One quibble - You're probably right that the lack of consents means more mergers let through without any constraints, but we can't say that for *certain*. It's possible that the mergers that would have gotten consents under a "normal" regime were simply abandoned. Of course, if that's true, it surely means that some mergers that *should* have gone through without consents were also abandoned.
No doubt that’s correct, Geoff. We cannot say for certain. These sort of data are not capable of that kind of precision. The mix of deals changes too as the piece notes. But — we can say some useful things about activity level, activity level relative to expectations, etc.