An Antitrust Counter-Revolution?
The current crisis, with its government bailouts and subsidies, has placed tremendous pressure on competition policy on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, whereas antitrust policy had come to focus on efficiency since its inception in late nineteenth-century America, it may revert to its original populist focus on the size of firms.
https://prosyn.org/QN4HyqK
BARCELONA – The current global financial crisis has made evident the tremendous pressures to which competition policy is subject on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, competition policy has suffered a setback mostly because of the distortional aid measures to financial intermediaries, as well as a suspension of merger rules to save institutions. Indeed, public provision of capital and other subsidies have made the playing field uneven, with weaker institutions ending up much better capitalized than healthier ones.