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The Art of No Deal

While we were preoccupied with trying to stop the Inflation Acceleration Act, this headline appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. We are still haunted by the economic implications:

We warned that this woman was a dangerous nutcase, and our worst fears have been confirmed. Lina Khan is a 30-something left-wing university professor who has zero real-world business experience. Now she is passing judgment on multi-billion dollar deals?

The most worrisome revelation in the WSJ article is how Ms. Kahn’s hostility to mergers is changing behavior in the marketplace. Why bother to spend millions on a merger and millions more litigating with the FTC just to get shot down by someone whose greatest business responsibility may have been a childhood lemonade stand? It’s a chilling example of how Biden’s unelected regulators can stunt business growth by their presence.

Ms. Kahn seems completely ignorant of the economic reality that on balance mergers and acquisitions are critical to American economic competitiveness and the sprouting of new businesses. Mergers add value to firms (and the 100 million plus Americans who own stock) and in most cases, it is the shareholders of the acquired companies, not the acquiring companies that come out way ahead. We are now living in a global marketplace where Lina Kahn’s concerns about monopolies are as outdated as trolley cars.

She is blocking mergers in airlines, restaurants, publishers, tech companies, auto dealerships, service stations, and on and on.

Are they trying to wreck the economy?

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