The Trump administration achieved a landmark antitrust victory this week. The Justice Department was gearing up to oppose drugmaker Bayer's plan to buy agribusiness giant Monsanto for $66 billion. Bayer only won approval by agreeing to sell off $9 billion worth of assets. It's the biggest such divestment in the history of U.S. antitrust enforcement.
It also demonstrated that, in the area of antitrust at least, President Trump may actually be an improvement over Barack Obama.
The basic point of antitrust law is to prevent companies from gaining a market position that allows them to squash competitors, and thus force either consumers or other businesses to come to them alone for goods or services. Once antitrust regulators determine that a company has that market position (or in this case, that a proposed merger will give it that market position) they must decide what to do about it.
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