Given the election on Tuesday, I’m going to do something a little different for this round-up. I’ll still have good and bad monopoly themed news for paid subscribers, but first I'll give a short view on the stakes of the election through the lens of antitrust and competition policy.

What Happens if Trump Wins?

If Trump wins, antitrust policy will likely become more lax, with a possible merger boom on the horizon and more corporate consolidation. Republican Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Melissa Holyoak previewed one possible angle, suggesting last week she’d try to repeal the new tougher merger guidelines because they cite too much “old case law” and strip out economics. I doubt she’ll be the new Chair of the FTC under Trump, but she represents a key part of the GOP coalition, which is the libertarian Chamber of Commerce type. My conservative friends tell me the Chamber has no pull on the right anymore, which I want to be true. But if it were true, then Holyoak wouldn’t be a commissioner. But she is. And let’s remember, Elon Musk joyfully noted that Lina Khan will be fired.

That said, there’s room for a little bit of optimism in this scenario. In Trump’s first term, he did bring the initial Google antitrust suit and a case against Meta. Most importantly, as Adam Tooze noted, his administration delivered Operation Warp Speed, using competition and government procurement to develop and deploy a vaccine within a year of Covid hitting the U.S. So there’s room for optimism. There are also wild cards of varying levels. There’s RFK Jr. worrying ag lobbyists over his pledge to remove toxins from food, which is unlikely to happen. But J.D. Vance wants to break up big tech, and he’s very much a key player in Trump-world.

Finally, there’s a thin possibility that things get extremely bleak if Trump uses the power of government the way he sometimes suggests he might. He just sued 60 Minutes for $10 billion in damages in a North Texas courtroom over an allegedly deceptively edited Kamala Harris interview, and he regularly says he’ll strip broadcasts licenses or prosecute tech firms for displaying content he doesn’t like. The interview Dave Dayen and I did on Organized Money with national security journalist Ken Klippenstein - who actually was censored by big tech working with the Trump campaign and the FBI, gives a preview of the scariest version of events. I can’t recommend it enough.

What Happens if Kamala Wins?

If Kamala wins, my guess is that antitrust policy continues on its current trajectory, largely because support for antitrust in the Democratic Party is becoming a consensus position. For instance, centrist House Democrat Sharice Davids, who is in a swing district, just called for a revival of the Robinson-Patman Act on discriminatory pricing. Harris herself would be unlikely to choose aggressive enforcers were she building from scratch, as she tends to trust billionaires and brag about validators like Goldman Sachs. But does she want to pick a fight to kick anti-monopoly regulators out of government now that they are there? I doubt it.

The monopolization cases against Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Ticketmaster, and Visa will likely continue, as will cases to address health care roll-ups, and Wall Street will continue to be frustrated on legal risk for big mergers. Price-fixing cases against algorithmic price-setting among landlords, and in poultry, turkey and pork markets, as well as action to address the cost of inhalers, EpiPen style auto-injectors, and in seeds and chemicals, will also wind their way through courts. We’ll probably see real action on surveillance pricing, a revival of antitrust laws that will help small stores and producers (Robinson-Patman), action to address credit cards and bank account lock-in, and some moves to de-concentrate airline control over key hubs. I could go on, but you get the point. There will be a lot of loosening of economic coercion.

That said, there are two major problems in a Harris win. The first is what I’ll call the tyranny of the meek. While I write about the best of Biden-world, there is of course a large government, and most people in it don’t think about corporate concentration. The Harris administration, like the Biden administration, is going to be absolutely full of people hostile or indifferent to the anti-monopoly philosophy, and they will exist in uneasy tension with the anti-monopoly faction.

The second is there are huge swaths of the government, most of it actually, that work at cross-purposes to a more open and competitive market system. The Federal Reserve, Treasury, Pentagon, national security agencies, the Department of Agriculture, the IRS, Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, and so on and so forth, are all staffed by people who have little concern for corporate power, and generally see big business as their allies. To take just one example, the Commerce Department is starting to consider pushing to have Intel merger its way out of trouble. That’s a major mistake, but one characteristic of the poor policy planning that happens when you don’t think about market power.

Finally, there is also the bleakest scenario in a Harris victory, which is that Harris, with a GOP Senate, does actually roll back antitrust and governs like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. In that case, we’ll see significant consolidation across big tech, Hollywood will die, and the U.S. will continue to deindustrialize. That scenario will end with the parties fully realigning in a new chaotic era of U.S. politics.

My Prediction?

So what’s my best guess? Right now I think Harris is likely to be the next President. I have no great insight here, to be clear. On elections I just follow polls and conventional wisdom, and I am right or wrong with the crowd. I suspect anti-monopolists will continue to have an important governing role to play, because the idea of constraining corporate power is popular. And ultimately that’s what matters, because in America, the public does get what they want, even if it takes awhile.

Whoever wins, there’s one certainty in terms of policy, and that is that in 2025, the Trump tax cuts expire, which will spark a debate over taxes. I don’t know how that will play out, but taxes are a core part of market structure.

If you want more, I co-authored a long report comparing Trump and Biden on antitrust. And now, the good and bad news about monopolies, after the paywall, including some news about McDonald’s ice cream machines, sad Wall Street arbitrage traders, and accounting fraud in the AI world...