FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

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

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

We got a special episode for listeners today.

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

We do, a very special episode. We had a live event over in Washington, DC. It was a very cool event, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

It was really fun. It's been a while, you know, we do live events, we do live recordings from time to time. It'd been a while since we put out a full evening of programming, a full show, if you will.

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

Well, also our first show in DC.

Joe Weisenthal (0:47)

And our first live public show in DC. We'd been wanting to do one for a while. We had a bunch of great guests. I actually really like going down to DC.

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

Yeah, and it was a great crowd as well. I think we have the only audience that would devote two and a half hours on a Wednesday night to listening about the Jones Act and antitrust policy.

Joe Weisenthal (1:08)

Yes, that's right. It was sort of a late night too. It was sort of awkward timing because it was sort of dinner, so people had to skip.

Tracy Alloway (1:14)

But there was popcorn included with the tickets.

Joe Weisenthal (1:17)

It was popcorn. Anyway, so we're going to release all of the conversations that we had on that evening as episodes. But to start, we had a conversation about antitrust.

Tracy Alloway (1:27)

We spoke to Andrew Ferguson. He's the new chair of the FTC for the Trump administration. Obviously, there's a lot of curiosity about how much continuity there may or may not be between antitrust under the Biden administration, under Lina Khan, who we've also spoken to on the podcast and what this new era might look like. So it was really interesting to sit down with him and get a better sense of it.

Joe Weisenthal (1:49)

That's right. And it's got pretty interesting implications, really, for multiple reasons. I mean, if you recall, one of the themes sort of when the election happened was a lot of excitement on Wall Street because of a perception that there would be a lot of mergers and deals would get a green light, that they would be going forward. The new era of dealmaking activity, incidentally, the new chair, Andrew Ferguson, kept the merger guidelines that were put in place under his predecessor, but there are clearly going to be differences. There are areas of alignment, there are areas of differences. And so we talked to Andrew about sort of what a conservative or what a MAGA vision of antitrust might look like.

Tracy Alloway (2:30)

MAGA M&A was my suggestion, I think, and he took it. So all right, here it is, our live conversation with the new FTC chief, Andrew Ferguson.

Joe Weisenthal (2:39)

Thank you so much for coming. I'm really annoyed, actually, because one of your lawyers gave me the perfect first question for the podcast today. I was like, oh, this is amazing. And then you sort of walked back, I don't exactly know what happened, so that dulled it a little bit. But anyway, apparently in court today, one of your lawyers said, we need a pause for this case against Amazon because we don't have the resources and we can't pay for transcripts. I was like, oh, this is an amazing first question for Andrew and then you walked away. Is there a constraint though between this impulse, and we'll get into it in terms of headcount, and your desire for what looks like going to be a vigorous new antitrust enforcement approach?

Andrew N. Ferguson (3:30)

Thank you for having me. Lot to unwrap there.

Joe Weisenthal (3:32)

Yeah.

Andrew N. Ferguson (3:33)

First on constraints, no.

Joe Weisenthal (3:35)

Okay.

Andrew N. Ferguson (3:35)

I've got the people I need to protect Americans from monopolies, to protect them from fraud.

I don't think anyone in Washington has taken the threat that Big Tech poses to American consumers more seriously than I have. When President Trump announced my appointment, this is one of the things he said he really cared about was taking the threats that Big Tech posed to American consumers very seriously. I will throw every resource the agency has at prosecuting cases against Big Tech that we've got going. So unequivocally no. There are no resource constraints on protecting Americans from monopolies and fraud.

Joe Weisenthal (4:10)

Can you explain what happened today?

Andrew N. Ferguson (4:13)

I think a lawyer had a bad day in court. He was wrong. He filed a letter almost immediately after saying I was wrong. We don't have resource constraints and we are ready to prosecute this case on whatever timeline the court wants for us. So we're ready to go.