Antitrust Enforcers Block the JetBlue-Spirit Merger

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” - Winston Churchill “The airline industry,” wrote Boston-based Judge William Young yesterday in an opinion blocking JetBlue’s attempted acquisition of Spirit Airlines, “is an oligopoly that has become more concentrated due to a series of mergers in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with a small group of firms in control of the vast majority of the market.” Ten years ago, only a very aggressive liberal judge with deep historical knowledge would have the confidence to write something like this. Today, recognizing America is in a monopoly crisis has become conventional wisdom, so much so that this judge, an 82 year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, openly talked about the effects of this concentration problem in a merger opinion blo

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” - Winston Churchill “The airline industry,” wrote Boston-based Judge William Young yesterday in an opinion blocking JetBlue’s attempted acquisition of Spirit Airlines, “is an oligopoly that has become more concentrated due to a series of mergers in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with a small group of firms in control of the vast