Chicago, IL ~ Thursday, April 21, 2022 Antitrust Enforcement: The Road to Recovery
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
I. Introduction
It is wonderful to be back at the Stigler Center. Five years ago, I attended the Center's inaugural antitrust and competition conference. That first conference asked an important question: "Is There a Concentration Problem in America?" In retrospect, that particular conference functioned as a critical inflection point in the conversation regarding corporate concentration and the state of antitrust enforcement - a conversation that we are still having today, but against the backdrop of a dramatically different enforcement and political environment.
I have vivid memories of attending a lunchtime keynote, much like this one, where Judge Richard Posner quipped with a degree of seriousness and a bit of humor: "antitrust is dead, isn't it?"[1] It was a provocative statement, to be sure, but a fair question. Judge Posner was saying the quiet part out loud. Indeed, the purpose of the conference was, in many ways, to assess whether antitrust enforcement still had a pulse and whether it could be nursed back to health.
It turns out that antitrust was not actually dead. If anything, the patient was on the table for open heart surgery.