US President Donald Trump's administration says they will continue Biden-era antitrust regulation. Vanderbilt Law School associate dean for research and professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth joins Catalysts with Madison Mills and Alexandra Canal to discuss what this development means for merger and acquisition (M&A) dealmaking activity.
"In somewhat of a surprising move, the Trump administration, at least the [Federal Trade Commission] FTC, has announced that they're going to keep the merger guidelines in place, at least for now," Haw Allensworth says.
The legal expert adds, "They're going to let mergers go through that didn't go through under Biden. I would have thought that is more likely, and maybe that's what got priced into the market, but the confidence in that prediction never should have been high."
Haw Allensworth notes that antitrust regulation under Trump 1.0 was "tougher than what came before, and not as tough as the Biden administration," but points out that "it's very hard to really make any generalizations about Trump 2 from Trump 1, as we're seeing across the administration's choices."
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.