 Thank you all for coming today. My name is Barry Lynn, and I run the Open Markets Program at New America. And I'm going to start with just a little quote. America used to be the land of opportunity and optimism. Now opportunity is seen as the preserve of the elite. Two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is rigged in favor of vested interests. Optimism has turned to anger. Voters fury fuels the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and weakens insiders like Hillary Clinton. Now I didn't write those words, and nobody I know wrote those words. Those were words that were published in The Economist. So, and what they said, what The Economist said to explain this phenomena was that America has a monopoly problem. Power has been too concentrated in too few corporations, and people are using that power to concentrate wealth and concentrate control. So we're here to discuss that problem today, the monopoly problem. In many ways, power is more concentrated in America today than it has been in a century. In some ways, it's worse than it was a century ago during the time of the plutocrats. This is not something that just a few people are saying. We actually have scholars, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, who are confirming this, and they're linking this monopolization, this concentration of power to many of America's biggest problems. The incredible rise of inequality, declining growth, reduced job mobility, fewer jobs, lower wages. We're starting to see some reactions from people in power. The White House recently released an unprecedented executive order calling for agencies to take steps to encourage competition. The Senate Antitrust Subcommittee held a really unprecedented hearing, the most lively hearing in about 40 years, in which leaders from both parties agreed that antitrust enforcement agencies in the United States have not done enough to defend competition in America. Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the European Union is about to bring a third set of formal charges against Google for its abuse of its dominance over advertising. Both major candidates have already spoken about this problem. We believe it'll probably be back on the Democratic platform for the first time since 1992, when it was taken out during the campaign of Bill Clinton. We have a great conference today. We have some of the top voices in the anti-monopoly community here. We have some of the top academics. You'll learn who their names are in a moment. We also have some of the people who are most directly affected by this. You'll see that more in the next panel. We have authors here today to talk about the problems of concentration. We're gonna have a musician. We'll have journalists talking about this problem. We also have a pretty important keynote, which is by Senator Elizabeth Warren. She'll be delivering a new speech that she has prepared for this occasion. A couple of quick points. We're gonna have a lunch and we'll do that after Senator Warren speaks. That'll probably be about 12.45 or so. We'll also have a short coffee break between panels three and four. Anyway, we have a lot to cover. This is a really big problem. We want to stay on time. Before we pass it over to my first moderator, I do want to thank our panelists for coming today. We have had four people travel here from Europe for this. We've had people come here from Los Angeles and Chicago. And I also especially want to thank my co-sponsor, our co-sponsor today, which is the Capital Forum. Later, I'll introduce Teddy Downey, who's the publisher of the Capital Forum. This event is gonna be live streamed. We, I think we'll be able to catch some of it on CNN and MSNBC and maybe Fox. But anyway, I'm gonna introduce you now to the moderator of our first panel. And this is Sally Hubbard, and she is the senior correspondent at the Capital Forum, which is a really great publication, which focuses mainly on monopoly problems. Sally is a former assistant attorney general in New York, and she served under attorney generals, Spitzer, Cuomo, and Schneiderman. So Sally knows America's monopoly problem about as well as anybody. So anyway, thank you all. Thank you, Barry. And good morning, everyone. I'm really excited to talk about these important issues with you all today. I'll start by introducing our panelists. And I'm gonna start at the far end of the table with Mark Jarsolek. He's the vice president for economic policy at American Progress. And he has worked on economic policy matters as chief economist at the Joint Economic Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, and at Better Markets. He's practiced antitrust and securities law at the FTC. Sitting next to him is Lena Kahn. Lena is a fellow with the Open Markets Program at New America, where she researches the concentration of power in America's political economy, and also the evolution of antitrust laws. From 2011 to 2014, Lena was a policy analyst for the program, and she is the co-author of the forthcoming article, Market Power and Inequality, The Antitrust Counter-Revolution and Its Discontents. Seated next to Lena is Guy Rolnick. Guy is a clinical associate professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the deputy publisher of Ha Aretz newspaper. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Marker, which is Israel's leading financial newspaper. Guy is a longtime leader of Israel's anti-monopoly movement. And closest to me here is Bert. Bert Forr is the founder and former president of the American Antitrust Institute. Before founding the AAI in 1998, he worked in private law practice in Washington, D.C., and he also served as the assistant director and acting deputy director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition. Just last week, Bert received the Consumer Federation of America's Esther Peterson Award for Consumer Service. So we're gonna begin with some prepared remarks, and then we'll get into a Q&A. Our first speaker today is Mark Jarsoulek. Thanks, Ellie. And I'd like to thank Barry Lynn and New America for organizing this meeting today. I think these are important topics, and it's really great that we're able to focus more attention on them. I'm just gonna talk briefly about two questions, and let me just say by way of shameless self-promotion that the material I'm talking about is reviewed in more detail in our report we just released today at Center for American Progress entitled Reviving Antitrust. So the two questions are these. One, what's the evidence for an overall increase in market power in the US economy? And the second, slightly more general one, what are some of the tangible effects of increased market power? So to talk about the first question that is the evidence for increased market power in the US economy, I'd like to focus on four things. And those four things are increased concentration, changes in the entry and exit of firms, the divergence of profitability across different industries, and the investment behavior of business in America. So first in terms of concentration, I think that anyone who looks carefully at the data will see that there is significant evidence of increased concentration across markets in the United States. To cite just one piece of evidence, there's a work by the economist who looked at concentration across 900 industrial sectors between 1997 and 2012. They concluded that in about two thirds of those sectors, there was an increase in concentration. And among those sectors where there was increased concentration, it increased about 25% over that time period. Now the increase in concentration is important because it does change the behavior of firms who are operating in increasingly concentrated environments. You can see this in theory, in elementary game theory shows fairly convincingly that even firms that are competing on price change their behavior relative to one another once the structure of the industry becomes more concentrated. And you can also see it in the behavior and the analysis of market participants, especially in the financial market. In the report I referenced, we discussed some work done by analysts at Goldman Sachs. This 2014 report was called Does Consolidation Create Value? And they looked at six industries to see if consolidation did in fact lead to higher market returns, higher profitability. And their conclusion was this, oligopolistic market structure can turn a cutthroat commodity industry into a highly profitable one. Oligopolistic markets are powerful because they simultaneously satisfy multiple critical components of sustainable competitive advantage. A smaller set of relevant peers faces lower competitive intensity, greater stickiness and pricing power with customers due to reduced choice, scale cost benefits including stronger leverage over suppliers and higher barriers to new entrants all at once. So the people who make their living looking at the way markets operate are in line with the views of people who do theoretical and academic work. A second kind of marker of the evolution of the US economy has to do with the entry and exit of new firms. So if you look at the data for the United States between say 1977 and I think the data will go through about 2014, there is in the normal operation of the economy births and deaths of firms. But normally the births exceed the deaths and for decades that's been the pattern in the US but in recent years the difference between entry and exit has narrowed and at the current moment it's about equal. That is the net increase of firms has gone to approximately zero. That's consistent with, although it can be explained by other factors as well, difficulties in entry for new competitors in markets. A third marker of a declining competition and increased market power is the increased divergence of profitability across industries. I mean normally there are differences in profits in industrial sectors and the sectors that you think of as high profit that is pharma, healthcare, IT and others have for long periods of time earned higher profits than say commodity producing industries. But a new study done by Tim Kohler at McKinsey has shown that if you look at the ranking of industries between and compare the period 65 to 95 and 95 to 2013 that the high profit industries are beginning to pull away markedly from other industries. That is it's pretty clear that the normal forces of competition which you would think of as causing convergence of profits or at least preventing bigger divergences over time aren't functioning in the usual way. And the final kind of marker that I would look at to see how the overall economy is functioning is the investment behavior of firms. So if you look at the net business investment of corporations in the United States relative to their after tax profits, the ratio is normally about 80%. About 80% of the value of corporate profits is reflected in investment demand for plant equipment and the other things that corporations need to operate. So that ratio of 80% is persistent up until about 2000. And from 2000 on, so this predates the financial crisis, the ratio of investment to after tax profitability falls to about 40%, right? So this is also a period when corporate profits relative to GDP are rising. So that raises the question of why in a world where profits are rising, corporations are choosing not to invest to expand an attempt to capture some of those profits for themselves. The incentives seem to be there, but the kinds of responses you would expect in a competitive system aren't showing up. Okay, so those four markers, I think all point in the same direction. You could offer different explanations for each one of them, but taken together, they seem to form a pattern of evidence that suggests that an increase in market power and a decline in competition. Let me just turn briefly to some other tangible effects of competition that seem to be appearing in the economy. First and first is the increase in non-competitive pricing that seems to be following from concentration-increasing mergers. There are a couple of really good retrospective meta-studies of the academic work which tries to say, which tries to examine the effect of mergers of firms in industries where the result of the merger is an increase in concentration. And the outcome of these meta-studies is pretty remarkable. The first study is a book by John Cuoka, Merger's Merger Control and Remedies. And one of the things that Cuocas emphasizes is that if he looks at the 47 retrospective studies of mergers, in two thirds of those cases, the concentration-increasing merger raised relative prices relative to some control group. And the price increase was remarkable, about 9%. A similar study of kind of close calls that is mergers that people thought might be challenged by competition agencies but weren't by Orly Ashenfelter of Princeton, comes to a very similar qualitative conclusion that there's kind of overwhelming evidence that concentration-increasing mergers, especially in highly concentrated industries, cause significant increases in relative prices. So that's the kind of thing that you would expect to see on the basis of standard monopoly theory, but there are other things that are produced by increases in concentration and declining competition as well. And let me just talk about one of them cause I think I'm coming to the end here. There's a very nice study by Onagi in 2009 of the effects of mergers of pharmaceutical firms. So there was a wave of mergers of fairly large pharmaceutical firms, I think between 98 and 2004. And the author of this study looks at the effect of these mergers on innovation by the merged firms. And the conclusion is that these mergers, where the firms were able to increase the concentration of their industries resulted in decreased innovation on several dimensions, less spending on R&D, less patenting, less productivity in terms of patents. So that in addition to the kinds of distributional and price effects you see and would expect on the basis of standard economic analysis, you can also see evidence that innovation which in the pharmaceutical industry, nominally in any rate, is the lifeblood of the industry is affected as well. And declining competition causes a decline in innovation. So taken together, I think these markers of decreased competition and increased market power suggest there's a big problem in the US economy. And I think when you look at a more micro level at what happens in terms of prices, what happens in terms of innovation and on several other dimensions, you can see that it's producing significant distortions. And for that reason, there's a very good reason to hope that we can have a much more vigorous application of antitrust enforcement by our antitrust agencies. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Our next speaker is Lena Kahn. Thanks, Ellie. And thanks to Barry Lynn and Teddy Downey for organizing this terrific event. I'm gonna be discussing a paper that I co-authored with Sandeep Vahisen, who's here in the audience, called Market Power and Inequality, the Antitrust Counterrevolution and Its Discontents. And more generally, I'm gonna be talking about three things. One is just to touch on the scope of our monopoly problem, the fact that concentration is not unique to a handful of markets, but is in fact now a defining feature of our economy. Second is to talk about the effects of this monopoly problem. Mark did a great job highlighting what some of the big picture outcomes are. I'm gonna be focusing specifically on how extreme consolidation may have regressive wealth and income effects. And lastly is just to talk about how this monopoly problem is the product of design. It's not inevitable and it's a political choice. For decades, we actually had laws and policies in place to prevent this exact state of affairs. So just to start off by talking about the scope of the problem, I think as we're seeing growing recognition both from prominent thinkers and mainstream publications that several industries are now suffering from a lack of competition, there can be a tendency to focus on some of the major industries. So just look at airlines and hospitals and cable, which is important and makes sense because these are some of these sectors that eat up the most consumer dollars. But I think that it risks understating the problem. I think one of the things I'm most struck by is continuously finding all these super esoteric and obscure industries that are also highly consolidated. So yes, we see this trend in banking and cable, but we also see it in sectors like semi-conductors and eyeglasses and TV advertising and milk and earthquake insurance. So I think it's important to recognize that this transformation from competition to consolidation has really occurred at the level of the very bones in plumbing of our economy, that it's a systemic problem. I think moreover, oftentimes the top line numbers also risk understating the problems because these are national figures. So yes, nationally the top four chicken processors may control 50 to 60% of the market, but in any given region a single firm may control 90 to 100% of the market, which means that practically a farmer doesn't have any options. So I think we really need to understand this as a systemic problem and see that it's sweeping all across the economy. Secondly, looking at the way in which monopolization harms us, I think as Mark mentioned, you know, it harms us as consumers. It also has effects on innovation. The aspect that Sandeep and I focus on in our paper is the fact that monopolization facilitates regressive wealth transfers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, and we argue has contributed to economic inequality. So we do a basic review of a few major industries to show how this may be the case. So take the airline industry, a sector where we've seen a host of mergers of the last decade. So we had nine major carriers at the beginning of the 2000s. We now effectively have four. Subsequently we've seen continuous increases in ticket prices, extra fees for all sorts of things, even as oil prices have plummeted. So airlines are making very healthy profits now, and yet they've continued to raise fares and degrade service. DOJ actually suspects this may be because airlines are colluding to restrict capacity, which was actually something that was totally predicted at the time when DOJ was reviewing these mergers, but it approved them anyway, and now is basically investigating the very conduct that it helped bring about. We see a similar trend in healthcare. So hospital markets have undergone a few waves of mergers, one in the early 1990s, followed by a more recent one in the wake of the Affordable Care Act. We've seen around 500 hospital mergers since 2010, 112, which were in 2015 alone, nearly half of all hospital markets in the US are now designated as highly concentrated, while virtually no hospital markets are considered highly competitive. There have been a few studies that show that hospital consolidation has indeed led to higher healthcare prices. One study found that prices can increase from anywhere between 10 to 40% following a merger. A recent study from a few Yale academics found that the price of an average patient stay at a monopoly hospital is almost $2,000 higher than when there are four or more competitors in a market. We've seen the same thing in the pharmaceutical industry. There are significant evidence that major players have been using their dominance in anti-competitive ways by engaging in practices like pay for delay settlements where dominant companies will pay generics to delay entry. They also engage in something called product hopping where they will tweak products and still manage to extend patent protections. Both of these exclusionary practices have significant redistributive effects because they mean that consumers are having to pay far more for essential drugs. One scholar estimated that this anti-competitive conduct has cost consumers approximately $14 billion annually. We've seen a similar trend in the telecom industry. The sector as a whole has been characterized by significant consolidation in both wired and wireless markets. In mobile, we see four firms now control 98% of the market. If Sprint T-Mobile managed to merge, as they're trying to do, that'll be three firms. Over the last few years, there's been a host of evidence that these firms are no longer really competing. AT&T and Verizon have introduced data caps and tiered pricing. Conduct, which is really just pure muscle, it's just raw market power. As a result, Americans are paying more for mobile services even while they've had to cut back on other services. The same is true in cable. Comcast and Time Warner control over two-thirds of the national broadband market. And even as the costs of operating, those networks has declined. Cable companies have continued to increase prices while also degrading service. Studies by the Open Technology Institute show that U.S. consumers pay more for slower internet than consumers in other countries. And consolidation is continuing. So last year, the DOJ and FCC approved the AT&T Direct TV merger. Regulators also recently permitted Charter and Time Warner to merge. Interestingly, Time Warner stopped upgrading its broadband speeds shortly after the merger closed. So I think across these sectors, we've seen rising concentration followed by price hikes and degradation of service, which means practically that Americans are paying more for the same or even for the worst quality of service in products. John Cuoka, whose work Mark mentioned, has done some terrific work on this. And he found that on average, prices have increased by between 7.2 to 10% after mergers. So again, this is not an isolated problem. We repeatedly see enforcers approve mergers that end up raising prices for consumers. I think the fact that consolidation across the board has led to higher prices is damning because it means that antitrust has failed even on its own terms. So higher consumer prices is something that enforcers emphasize they do still care about, but it's clear that even by that very narrow, and I would argue inadequate standard, policy has failed. I'll go over three other effects of increased concentration that I think also contributes to inequality. One is the effects on workers and producers. So increased consolidation reduces the number of potential employers in any given sector, which leads to greater inequality of bargaining power. In some instances we've seen actual collusion between employers to suppress wages. So in Chicago a few years ago, there was a huge scheme among hospitals not to hire each other's nurses, which had the effect of keeping their wages low. We saw a similar scheme in Silicon Valley where some major tech companies agreed not to put each other's workers, which again, had the effect of suppressing wages. I should add that this is not just true in our relationship as workers, but also as independent entrepreneurs and producers that what this level of consolidation does is often make us dependent on a handful of companies. And so whether we can or can't make a living becomes subject to their arbitrary whim. So this is true of chicken farmers whose livelihood often depends on at the mercy of a single producer, but it's also true of independent authors who are increasingly dependent on Amazon to list their books, to rank them. So across the board I think independent producers have seen incomes drop because of the market power of these middlemen. I think two other ways in which concentration has contributed to inequality is through a decline in entrepreneurship. I think owning one's own business has been a traditional form of asset building and upward mobility. So the fact that we're seeing a decline means that a path of upward mobility has been closed off. And I think lastly market power has regressive effects because concentration of economic power concentrates political power, which enables major firms to further rig policies in their favor and entrench their dominance, which I know of is something we're gonna keep hearing about today. So thanks so much. So good afternoon to you. Good morning. So just an hour ago I was told that I don't have a PowerPoint screen behind me. So if you'll be so kind and we distributed this presentation because I'd like to go over quickly a few ideas. So I feel that after 30 minutes of discussion this morning we already established the fact that we do have a monopoly problem. So maybe we can take it from here and ask ourselves what can be done. And I was asked to describe what we've been doing in Israel in the last 10 years. Israel is a very small country compared to the United States but in the last three years, as I was studying what's happening in the anti-monopoly and the concentration in the United States, I find a lot of similarities that I want to share with you. So the first question would be, are we talking about anti-monopoly or monopoly or are we talking about concentration? And I want to draw the difference between these two terms. So the first one is that when we think about monopoly as we heard from Lena just now, we tend to think as it is mostly economic problem of high concentration in industries and lack of vibrant competition. And I'd like to think about another problem which sometimes looms larger above monopoly and this is what I call concentration. And the way we defined it is more of a political, economical and cultural problem. This is an entire ecosystem that is rooted in the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few players in the economies. So what were the features of this concentration problem in Israel? So it developed in the 15 years ago in the 2000 concentration of economic power that was held in the government and labor union moved to five to 10, maybe 15 business groups. The 90s, like in many countries around the world, were a period of reforms, globalization, liberalization and increased competition. But after 2003 and in the United States we just heard that it started in 2000. We saw gradual consolidation of power in the hands of few business group. We saw a lot of tacit collusion meaning I will not compete with your businesses, you will not compete with mine. The end result was that around half of the market cap of Israeli stock exchange was held by 10 or 15 business groups. Some of them were pyramids, pyramids that we've seen here in the United States 100 years ago, holding companies that are characterized by a large gap between ownership and control. Some of these pyramids controlled both operating companies, mostly local monopolies and financial companies, banks and insurance companies. In some, the radical example of course is that we had one family, two cousins, controlling the largest conglomerate and the largest bank and together they held 20 to 25% of the entire financial assets in Israel. In the banking sector we had two banks that controlled 60% of all deposits and loans. Banks were the only, the sole investment advisors and 80% of the time they sold their own products. We had four newspapers that were, all of them were leveraged directly or indirectly with significant loans from those two banks. Most had also close ties between the controlling shareholders and large business groups. Major TV channel that was introduced in the 90s with very high ratings, sort of a monopoly on public discourse was controlled by five to seven business groups and banks. And then to reiterate what we heard about mobile, so we had three mobile communication companies that were controlled by those pyramids. The average monthly bill ranged from $100 to $200, resulting in very high profit margins and cash flow that were used to service those leveraged layers of the pyramids. Food and beverage prices in Israel went up dramatically during this period. They were 20 to 30% higher than the OECD. And of course, talking about the culture, so talking about the entire ecosystem, we had five corporate law firms and five PR and lobby firms that represented most pyramids. And of course had strong ties with regulators, academics, senior journalists, and media owners, sometimes in the form of revolving doors. So what was done? So in 2003 to 2005, we had a campaign to break banks and separate commercial and advisory activities from asset management. We called it the Israeli Glass-Steagall. At that point in time, we had political will because of a crisis in the economy and a new finance minister. We had a quick win there in two years. Banks were forced to sell all of their asset management activities, and the result of bond market developed quickly. The performance of mutual funds improved. The market became more competitive, and the Israeli banks arrived in 2008 to the financial crisis in a better shape, and they avoided bailouts. In 2009, using the financial crisis as a leverage, we campaigned to prevent the use of taxpayer money to bailout leverage business group. And that was done by the way, amid pressure by the newspapers controlled by the business groups to have a bailout. We also campaigned to introduce competition into the three firm, Mobile Cartel, which we called the Private Text Militias. Between 2009 and 2011, we leveraged the financial crisis to wage the campaign against concentration, crony capitalism, and monopolies in the banking sector. In 2010, the campaign focused on Louis Brandeis, and we asked a lot of people who is the Israeli Louis Brandeis, and we pointed to the similarities between the gilded age and the modern Israeli economy. In 2010, the pressure yielded the first win, Professor Stanley Fisher, now the Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve here in the United States, governor of the Senkel Bank, and Prime Minister Netanyahu from the concentration committee. Pressure by media outlets that were controlled by the Taikuns was to rename it Competitiveness Committee, because they wouldn't acknowledge that there is a problem of monopoly and concentration. And this is something that we'll probably see here in the United States if we wage campaigns again, monopoly. In 2010 to 2011, eight leading regulators in the committee of concentration decreed that there is no smoking gun, not enough empirical evidence, very difficult to define concentration, and four of those regulators quit the committee before it completed its work and went to work for the business group. And this is, of course, the revolving door that we see here in Washington every day. Now comes the surprise. In July 2011, the summer of 2011, social protests broke in Israel. The campaign channeled that energy to the idea of monopolies, to break monopolies and tackle concentration using media and a coalition of NGO and grassroots organizations. In this point in time, Netanyahu risks losing control of the country while hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets, so he weighs his options and decides to relaunch the concentration committee. In November 2011, government committee tasked with responding to the social unrest, acknowledges that Israel suffers some high concentration and a monopoly problem, and a problem of regulatory capture. In February 2012, the concentration committee publishes empirical data on the concentration of corporate governance in Israel, Conglomerates. The concentration is highest in the OECD. There are multiple failures of corporate governance, regulatory capture, and leverage business groups pose a systemic risk. In May 2012, two new players are authorized to enter the mobile telecommunication market. The tender was designed to push for low prices, and sure enough, when competition comes in, prices drop between 50% to 90%. And I'll soon talk about the American example. In 2013, an anti-concentration bill is approved by all parties in the parliament, opposition and coalition, pyramids are broken up, pyramids have to sell holding in financial firms, and government from now on must take market concentration and monopoly into accounting all its action, privatization, outsourcing, and all other decision. In 2014, and now we're talking about a campaign that is going right now, a new campaign for the introduction of competition in the banking sector. In 2015, politician who won popularity with the mobile reform gets 10 seats in the house and is nominated to be the finance minister. And next month, a committee tasked with introducing competition into the banking sector will recommend forcing banks to sell credit card companies, open new banks to create competition, and the creation of an ungovernment-sponsored IT infrastructure that will help bring in new competition. Now, we'll talk briefly about the similarities with the United States. So the first question, does the United States have a monopoly problem? The answer is yes. I would like to add to the empirical data that we heard this morning, another paper written by Groulon Larkin and Michaely last year that surveys all the industries in the United States. And so that more than 90% of the industries experience significant increase in concentration. We heard about the White House acknowledging it for the first time two or three months ago. Now, the question is, does America have a concentration in the sense of what I mentioned, the Israeli sense? And my answer to that is positive. Only we have different channels of power. So unlike Israel that had a small club of business groups that prevented reforms, competition, and influence media and politics using the sheer size in the United States' power flows in different channels. First of all, the campaign contributions. Then, of course, the sprawling lobbying industry with huge clout in DC that is embedded deeply in the culture of politics and policy. We have a pro-business as opposed to pro-market funding of think tanks, academia, experts, revolving doors. We have a 10 times fold and 50 times fold gap between paying senior government and the business sector. We have, as we heard, reduced antitrust informants for probably three decades. And now we're seeing the emergence of the digital monopolies platforms with huge political power. The similarities between Israel in 2010 and the United States in 2016 are the following. We still have little discourse on competition monopoly and concentration. We have little understanding of the political nature of concentration and monopoly. The success of the high tech sector, Israel is called the startup nation. United States has Silicon Valley, creates a mirage of a pro-market, poor entrepreneurship competitive market, which is not the case in many local industries. And of course, the entire discourse is overwhelmed by wage issues. They dominate the political discourse, whether it's terror, abortions, immigration, minimum wage taxes, very little is left to talk about those issues. And of course, growing discontent among the middle class with wages and cost of living. What are the challenges if we do want to wage an anti-monopoly or anti-concentration campaign? So first of all, we have the problem, probably the biggest of them all is the cultural capture. Americans do believe that they have a competitive market economy. I call it, we invaded Facebook, we have Google, we have Apple and this is all very true. But when you look at the rest of the economy, it's very concentrated. Then of course, we have a pro-business lobby that advocates for small government and minimal intervention, while market politics sometimes require intervention by antistasks. Oh, sorry, it is okay, I will end it here. So in terms of what needed, I just want to give you one example, the mobile market. So we did some calculations, two professors from Chicago and Purdue about what will happen if we have competition in the mobile market in the United States. So the annual saving to American consumers would amount to $70 billion annually, just in one industry. We're talking about Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. And I think that such examples are easy to understand and this is the way we should go about it, focus the public attention or the capture of media, politicians, academics, experts and regulators. Thank you very much. Next up is Bert for... Thank you. Barry asked me the question, do we have a monopolization problem? For a detailed and current discussion that emphatically says yes, go to the website of the American Antitrust Institute and search for transition report to read the draft chapter of the book that we're preparing for the next administration, whichever administration that might be and whatever their varying attitudes toward antitrust might be. Won't say anything more on that. The draft emphasizes ways in which dominant firms exclude competitors from their marketplace. For example, by predation, foreclosure of rivals and the abuse of patents. Now, if a monopoly means a single dominant firm, it seems to me that there are actually very few monopolies. These monopoly monsters are not roaming loose within the United States today, although some are operating in regulated industries that may be less than completely tamed. I'm just, this is a semantic point basically, because what we do have, as you've already heard, is a severe problem of over-concentration. That is markets and industries with only a small handful of competitors, a small handful of dominating players who are exercising power on the selling or the buying sides of commerce, or both. Antitrust at its best gives options on how to live our lives in the commercial sphere, which is critical not only to an efficient economy, but to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness as promised in the Declaration of Independence. When we give up diversity, it should only be where we are strongly convinced that the inefficiency cost of maintaining diversity is greater than what we lose by consolidation. Too often, that test has really been ignored on the false presumption that bigger is almost always better. We do not have simple and workable economic models for the world of oligopoly, in which there are more than one, but only a few powerful players. Our merger controls simply do not go far enough. We usually stop mergers of two companies to one, or three to two, but often at great cost to both the government and the parties because of economic arguments that analysis has come to demand. I think our calculus should be remodeled to put a burden on companies wanting to merge from say six substantial firms to a lesser number so that they would have to demonstrate that the merger is in public interest rather than starting from the point that the government must prove the merger will have direct anti-competitive effects. That would be quite a change. We also need to reinvigorate two traditional aspects of our merger control laws that have fallen out of favor. The incipiency doctrine, which is in the statute, and the potential competition doctrine. I'm not gonna have time to go into those right now. Another aspect of stopping concentration is to keep competitors from acting in coordination as if they are a single monopolistic entity. So agreements unreasonably in restraint of trade, such as price fixing, are treated as per say illegal felonies. Enforcement against horizontal collusion is generally strong and commendable, but where there are high levels of concentration, explicit agreements are not needed. And the courts have held probably correctly that something more than parallel behavior is needed before criminal liability can be established. Recognizing this, perhaps there should be legislation for highly concentrated industries meeting certain conditions where a collusion is likely that would subject parallel behavior in the absence of a proven agreement to injunctive remedies. Anti-trust enforcement has not performed adequately in dealing with vertical restraints where there is a dominant player involved. When an Amazon or a Google can integrate independent applications into their platforms or can provide competitive advantages to the applications in which they have a financial interest, section two of the Sherman Act should be invoked. As indeed, it was invoked in the famous Microsoft case, but there without significant effect because only a weak behavioral remedy was imposed. Behavioral remedies are typically much less effective than structural remedies, but there's been too much reluctance to deal with industry structure. A section two of the Sherman Act is our primary law against monopolization and it has failed us. Enforcement eats up a lot of resources due to the complexity and sophisticated evidentiary requirements that have evolved. And so such cases are too rare. One problem may be the statute's use of the word monopoly, getting back to where I started, which requires very high market shares to be proved. We should do well to empower the FTC to use section five of its enabling act to reach anti-competitive behavior by dominant firms in a manner that would bring us more in line with the European Union's lower threshold for concern. And I've been talking about market concentration and we've heard a little bit about aggregate concentration without using that name. What this measure shows is not how large a market share a company has in a specified product and geographic market where companies are direct competitors, but how the combined assets of leading companies compare to the size of the industry or even the size of the whole economy. I think that we're gonna have to figure out how to take aggregate concentration into better account. Sometimes both the forest and the trees are important. Some earlier traditions of political economy can be drawn upon, but getting beyond the Chicago school's myopic focus on microeconomics is essential. We should ask under what circumstances is great size alone dangerous or inefficient or unnecessary? And what are the best ways to deal with such circumstances taking into account a host of considerations including avoiding subjective and unpredictable decision-making as well as administrability. And none of this is easy. We're gonna need to rethink our attitudes toward conglomeration, for example, which today escapes antitrust attention. But the public is now awakened to the problems of firms that are too big to fail, too complex to manage, and too powerful to control. For real change, we must somehow convince Congress to expand the laws in ways that reflect the fact that we're dealing with problems of power and politics as well as economics. Thank you. Okay, so Elizabeth Warren will be here in four or five minutes. So we'll just ask a couple of questions in the meantime. I guess the main point that I would like to bring home, that was all the panelists spoke about, was that the narrow focus on price has been a disservice for the roots of antitrust, but are really about power and bigness. And Lena has done a lot of really groundbreaking work connecting market power with political power and monopoly power with economic inequality. So what I'm just curious is, one, why no one's talking about this, how are they getting away with it? And two, how can we make antitrust and the intersection with power and inequality something that the average citizen can understand? Well, how are they getting away with it, Lena? Is it the prices convincing everyone that low prices is what, if we can get low prices at Walmart, then we don't have to care about concentration? I mean, I think that has been a big part of it. I think it's really striking. I mean, Sandeep and I in our paper talk about it as a coup because antitrust, you have to understand, was not passed as an economic regulation. It was really passed as a political law to distribute political economic power with the understanding that concentration of economic power threatens democracy in the same way that a monarchy would. So the idea that the contemporary antitrust has been totally deprived of this political valence is pretty striking. You know, we talk about in our paper the way in which dominant firms are able to translate concentrated economic power into political power through lobbying and campaign finance and regulatory capture. But I think that's only one part of it, that our experience of concentrated economic power itself is deeply political. So I hope that's something that will come out more. Okay, Senator Warren has arrived, so we will have to wrap up. Okay, I guess we're gonna leave the stage. Thank you. Thank you.