WASHINGTON – Ahead of today’s Senate Antitrust Subcommittee’s “Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century: The Case for Antitrust Reform” hearing, the American Economic Liberties Project released a new dataset that finds that more than 80 percent of U.S. corporations valued at more than $100 billion have faced antitrust scrutiny at some point in the last thirty years, including monopolization claims, merger challenges, price fixing suits, and no-poach suits.
“This dataset shows that when firms are too big, they tend to abuse their dominance through illegal business practices,” said Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. “One way to stop the problem of corporate bigness from getting worse is to bar firms above certain size thresholds from engaging in mergers. Currently, stopping a merger requires costly antitrust litigation, significant prosecutorial discretion, and unwieldy rule of reason analysis by judges unequipped to handle market analysis.”
“This dataset provides support for a Congressional ban on mergers above a certain size,” added Stoller. “Legislative reform that holds certain business practices by dominant firms to be an illegal abuse of dominance would help protect against predatory conduct.”
The dataset shows why a merger ban on companies valued at more than $100 billion is critical to rebalancing power in our economy towards working people, small businesses, and communities across the country. The dataset includes everything from Apple, valued at $1.953 trillion, to Walmart, valued at $361.81 billion, and Comcast, valued at $254.112 billion.
View the dataset here.
Learn more about Economic Liberties here.
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Common Dreams | Radio Free (2021-03-11T15:11:38+00:00) Economic Liberties Releases New Dataset Ahead of Senate Antitrust Hearing. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/11/economic-liberties-releases-new-dataset-ahead-of-senate-antitrust-hearing/
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