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.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-keynote-university-chicago-stigler

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