Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan is often referred to as a neo or hipster Brandeisian in reference to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. This is because Brandeis’s “big is presumed bad” approach to antitrust clearly influenced Chair Khan’s “holistic” approach. However, a more apt title for Chair Khan may be the Miley Cyrus of regulatory policy because whenever a business is considering a merger or acquisition, Chair Khan’s FTC comes in like a wrecking ball.
Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has filed a record number of lawsuits and second requests challenging mergers and acquisitions. This has led some observers to refer to an FTC-imposed “merger tax.”. CNBC commentator Jim Cramer calls Khan a “one woman wrecking crew” for the impact her approach to antitrust enforcement is having on the stock market. Cramer has observed that Khan and her allies justify her approach to antitrust as necessary to address the threat to competitive markets, and even democracy, posed by big corporations. Yet, while Khan may be particularly concerned about big tech companies like Amazon, Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and What’sApp), and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube), Khan’s main victims are actually small businesses.
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