DOJ's Jonathan Kanter on the Bidenomics Approach to Antitrust

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:14)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

Joe, you remember last month, we spoke with Jared Bernstein, who's the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and we were talking about Bidenomics.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Yeah, great chat. Always appreciate sort of getting a sense of how policymakers are thinking about things.

And obviously, we've talked a lot about this sort of like industrial policy, domestic investment side, but there is still more.

Tracy Alloway (0:40)

Yeah, so he outlined these kind of three basic planks of Bidenomics, and you already mentioned the big one, which is public investment slash industrial policy, whatever you wanna call it.

The second one is sort of empowering workers. And then there's this third one about promoting competition. And we touched on it with Jared. We spoke a little bit about how the Biden administration is approaching antitrust, but I think it's one of those topics we really need to get into because it keeps coming up in various ways.

Joe Weisenthal (1:10)

Can I just say, I don't know anything about this topic. That's true for most episodes that we do, but I feel very comfortable saying that the law is not an area in which, I'm used to reading like cell side research about like, okay, the Fed is gonna do this, so inflation is gonna do this.

And when it comes to things like sort of like the legal philosophies related to mergers, et cetera, like I really genuinely know very little, maybe nothing.

Tracy Alloway (1:39)

There's a market opportunity out there to become the antitrust guy on Twitter. So maybe that should be our goal. But you have to admit, it does keep coming up. So we recorded an episode with Scott Hildenbrand recently about bank consolidation and whether or not we're gonna be seeing a lot more bank mergers in the wake of the deposit drama in March.

And then it came up again, I think on our episode with Josh Wolf, right? Where he was talking about how big tech companies are investing in artificial intelligence, but they're doing it in a very specific way to possibly evade regulatory scrutiny.

Joe Weisenthal (2:18)

Yeah, that was one of the things I hadn't appreciated before. And he pointed out that you have all these big companies making these huge investments, VC looking investment in AI startups.

And he posited that one reason they may be making these investments, Microsoft making investments, Google making investments is because, well, maybe antitrust authorities aren't gonna be very happy if they buy some of these companies, but they can maybe perhaps make something that resembles a VC style investment. So it's coming up enough in different sectoral conversations that we have that I think we need to drill deeper into the environment right now.

Tracy Alloway (2:53)

Absolutely. Well, I am very pleased to say that we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We're gonna be speaking with Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. So Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Jonathan Kanter (3:07)

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Tracy Alloway (3:11)

Maybe just to begin with, you can give us an overview of what does antitrust actually mean in 2023 versus maybe in previous administrations or previous decades.

Jonathan Kanter (3:23)

Yeah, so let's take a look back through history and think about the importance of a competition in a competitive economy. It's been the cornerstone of our society since the Tea Party, but you can think back historically to standard oil and AT&T, IBM, Microsoft.

At major inflection points in our economy, we've confronted monopoly choke points. And antitrust has been, some have referred to it as the Magna Carta free enterprise. It's the way in which we open up our opportunity so that companies who want to compete can compete on the merits. So antitrust can deliver lower prices, it can deliver better wages, better working conditions.

It could deliver opportunities to build and grow a business.

These are the arteries of commerce and Congress made a value judgment over 100 years ago that competition matters. And so our job is to enforce the law.

And sitting here in 2023, you mentioned Bidenomics, you mentioned the interest in antitrust globally and domestically. And that flows from, I think, an appreciation on so many different dimensions that we can't have a democratic society, we can't have a free society, and we can't have a market-based economy without opportunities for competition. And so our job is to enforce the law in order to keep competition thriving in our country and to do so in a way that's consistent with the will of Congress.