Word: antitrust
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Broad & Debatable. The decision is one of the broadest-and most debatable-ever made with regard to antitrust laws. The FTC has long worried about the increasing concentration in the food-merchandising industry. In earlier decisions it ordered three of the largest U.S. dairy chains, Foremost, Borden and Beatrice, to divest themselves of small companies they had acquired. It recently ordered Grand Union Stores to get rid of nine stores, and Consolidated Foods to spin off three chains as well as a dairy and a bakery; it is still investigating the Kroger Co. for 42 chain-store acquisitions dating...
...National case, 449 of the stores were in "new market" areas where National had never operated before. For the first time, the FTC penalized a company on grounds not of local restraint of trade but of antitrust violations resulting from "national concentration." The FTC's majority reasoning was largely based on local pricing variations within National's network. In areas where National's share of the market was high, so was the markup on prices; conversely, in more competitive areas, prices were lower. In Denver, for instance, where National had acquired 64.1% of the market, the average...
Does bigness, as such, constitute a violation of the Clayton Antitrust Act? Federal Trade Commission lawyers deny that the FTC has ever argued that it does. Nevertheless, the FTC surely appeared to be nearing such a doctrine in 1962 when it ordered Procter & Gamble to sell off Clorox Chemical Co., which P. & G. had acquired seven years earlier (TIME, Dec. 24). At the time of acquisition, Clorox held 49% of the U.S. market for liquid household bleaches. By buying the biggest bleach maker, the FTC contended, P. & G. avoided the risks of going into the field...
...merger act of 1960, approved any linkup in which community benefit seemed to outweigh the diminishing of competition. But in 1963, reviewing the case of a Philadelphia merger, the Supreme Court ruled that, regardless of economic benefit, a bank merger could still be a legal violation of the Clayton Antitrust...
...bars monopolies, re-establishes the principle of community benefit, allows the Justice Department 30 days to object to mergers it dislikes. But the wording is so vague that it will almost certainly end up in the courts again for definition. If the Supreme Court stands by its earlier Clayton antitrust opinion, the whole commotion could start all over again...