New Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and acting Antitrust Division chief Omeed Assefi endorsed the 2023 merger guidelines. There’s a new bipartisan consensus.

Some big news today on the political antitrust front. The most consequential antitrust power struggle you’ve never heard of has been won… by the good guys. The short story is the Trump administration just said they will enforce antitrust law to stop harmful mergers using the guidelines that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter helped create in 2023.

Here’s the longer version. For years, BIG has been writing about the problems with corporate consolidation, a phenomenon which raises prices, lowers quality, harms wages, and fosters shortages. And consolidation is a result of too many big corporate combinations, when two companies combine into one so they can reduce competition in a market. Corporate mergers, I’ve noted over and over, ruin everything. But mergers weren’t always common in America. So where did this consolidation craze come from? And how can it be stopped?