By titrating the purchase prices, PE companies - like #Blackstone, owners of Chamberlain and all the other garage-door makers - can acquire a monopoly without ever raising a regulatory red flag.

But antitrust enforcers aren't helpless. Under (the long dormant) Section 7 of the #ClaytonAct, competition regulators can block mergers that lead to "incipient monopolization."

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Private equity's rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good - but unenforced - law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the "incipiency standard" - Sec 7 of the #ClaytonAct - the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
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The Sherman Act - and its successors, like the #ClaytonAct, are landmark laws in that they explicitly seek to protect workers and customers from corporate power. Antitrust is about making sure that no corporation gets so powerful that it's too big to fail, nor too big to jail - that a company can't get so big that it subverts the political process, capturing its own regulators:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

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That is, Bork claimed that a close reading of existing antitrust laws - the #ShermanAct, the #ClaytonAct, the #FTCAct - would reveal that Congress didn't want regulators or judges to prevent or break up monopolies. No no no! These laws were only drafted to punish *bad* monopolies.

A "bad monopoly" is one that uses its market power to raise prices or lower quality.

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The DoJ's interest is important. As with so many antitrust failures, the problem isn't in the law, but in its enforcement. Section 7 of the #ClaytonAct prohibits serial acquisitions under its "#IncipientMonopolization" standard. Acquisitions are banned "where the effect of such acquisition may be to substantially lessen competition between the corporation whose stock is so acquired and the corporation making the acquisition."

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