Antitrust Guidelines For Collaborations Among Competitors

Federal antitrust laws were originally promulgated to protect interstate economic commerce, not to protect specific isolated defendants. One of the prime exceptions was for combinations in restraint of trade, i.e. vertical mergers, and any horizontal merger which affects interstate or international commerce. When the feds investigated those situations they found that virtually all of them arose from vertical or horizontal combinations because all these were economically legitimate in the first place.

The courts began to restrict these cases, yet few of the original industries that started this type of mergers survived. Today the Federal Trade Commission requires parties that have such a combination to disclose whether they would buy all their competitors, and if they did not, they are required to negotiate for better terms with the other party, to write down their profits from the price difference.

The Commission added the requirement in 1966, and the President has added additional antitrust laws to “drive down” cartelization and concentration since. The result: these types of cases, once regarded as “isolated” and thus without any antitrust problems, have become very common, so common that they even apply to members of the Federal Trade Commission itself, such as antitrust lawyers, economists, and economists.

Here’s the history of this increase in the number of cases, and where we see them.

The first known merger and its antitrust problems

The story of merger cases begins with the merger of two banks by banks rather than an independent investment company, like Goldman Sachs. The new bank, Chartis Bank, originally raised $26.3m in capital and bought the assets of the old bank, Commonwealth Bank. The new bank added new assets but created a new subsidiary to promote this merger, which will also make loans.

Chartis Bank first sought out new loans from existing lenders but instead the bank created a new subsidiary in Delaware, the “New York Community Corporation,” in 1971 and organized it in the name of the “New York Community Bank” and named it Chartis Community Financial Bank, Inc. When the New York Bank entered Chapter 7 in 1975 it changed the name to Chartis Community Bank Group.

In 1976, when Commonwealth went out of business, Bank of New York Corporation bought up Commonwealth and chartered Bank of New York Corporation.