A Top Antitrust Lawyer on How Increased Competition Could Fight Inflation

actually turned out to be true. But anyway, Okay, we're going to go on a really long tangent if we keep heading in that direction. No, my favorite conspiracy theory is well, it has to do with inflation, um, and eggs and cholesterol. And yeah, this is a good one. Not many people know this, but in the nineteen sixties when there was high inflation and uh, the president was

very worried about it. This is Lyndon B. Johnson. Back then, he was trying to come up with all these different ways to maybe get prices to start coming down, and one of the things he did was target eggs and he basically told the Surgeon General to issue alerts um all about the risk of cholesterol in eggs to try to get people to buy fewer of them. And you know, even to this day, people still think there's lots of

cholesterol in eggs and that they're unhealthy. And a lot of that traces back to Lyndon Johnson trying to fight inflation fifty years ago or sixty years ago. I should say, So, you said this is a conspiracy theory, But is it true, Like did this actually happen or is it just people think this was the sequence of events? No? No, no, this actually happened. But basically there was a conspiracy to tell the public that eggs were terribly unhealthy when in

fact they aren't. That's crazy. So the reason I'm bringing it up is because there are clearly concerns about inflation right now. I think um CPI is at something like six point eight percent, and when people think about inflation, I think the first thing their minds turned to is interest rates and monetary policy. Inflation is high, so maybe the Fed should start raising rates, But of course there are these different ways to actually try to bring prices down. Right.

This is really the key thing, which is that you know, obviously, you know, people think of inflation is the purview of the FED and monetary policy and monetary aggregate Milton Friedman, Inflation is always an everywhere monetary phenomenon. But like we see it this year, if we had if we had had to say, like more used cars or more semiconductors to make cars or etcetera, we know that headline inflation

would be lower, and that's just a fact. And so like we clearly see the existence, especially right now, what I would say is non monetary inflation. And maybe some economists would get annoyed by that or they would disagree or whatever, but like we could point to maybe overall it's not just about bottlenecks or whatever, but we could certainly point to at times the existence of forces that are not clearly related to the faith that push up

the aggregates of price and disease without question. And you know, in other areas like medical care, like and I don't think like the high cost of medical care is something that like obviously is attributable to monetary policy, no um. And we are starting to see politicians pay more attention

to these specific issues. So we've been talking a lot about attempts to ease supply chain congestion, and I have to say one of the more interesting efforts that is currently going on has to do with antitrust legislation, which is not necessarily something that you would think of when you think of supply chain problems. Yeah, no, I think

that's like really interesting. And you know, obviously these are sort of like slow moving things and they're probably a limit to what you could do in the next few months.

But the idea that a few companies have incredible amount of buying power because of concentration, because of lack of competition, it seems like a very interesting avenue and one that even at least in the medium to longer term, if not right away in the next few months, could increase the sort of like productive capacity overall if we have

more competitive markets exactly. So we are going to be digging into that question of whether or not you can use antitrust enforcement to try to bring down inflation and ease some of these supply constraints bring down things like food prices. And we do have the perfect guest to talk about. We're going to be speaking with Craig Sebald. He's a partner at Vincent and Alkins and an expert

in anti trust. So, Craig, welcome to the show. Well, Tracy and Joe, it's my pleasure to be with you, and I'm excited to talk to you about some of my favorite subjects, anti trust, politics, and a little history. Great, I had a question for you too. I really I worked on this because it's hard to combine a joke that includes anti trust and supply chain. But here it goes, how many anti trust lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? How many? None? The light bulbs are

late and not shipping. So that was pretty good. I like it. I like it. It's solid, it's tough materially anti trust. That's the best I can do. Well, I mean, on that note, maybe you could just to begin with you could start by defining what antitrust actually is and how it could relate to supply chain problems. Yeah, let me just give you a quick overview. In the United the States, we have three basic antitrust laws, and well, in the United States, high prices in ament themselves are

not in any trust violation. We do worry and the greatest sin for the any trust area is actions that were that cause higher prices. So we have three laws as always saying. One is the Sherman Act, and the German Act goes back to have Sherman Act Section one, which regulates agreements and restraint and trade, and we're looking at price fixing, bid rigging, those type of agreements between

competitors that raise prices. Those are illegal. The second major antitrust law we have is Section two of the Sherman Act, which regulates monopolies. This is getting a lot of press these days because the government's challenges to Google, to facebooks, those are all under Section two. What's interesting under our law, it's not illegal in the United States to be a monopolist, but it's illegal to engage in monopolization. And what do

I mean by that. It means it's okay to be big in the United States, but it's not okay to be big and do bad things. And one of the bad things could be taking actions to raise prices. And so one of the things that we worry about with the big tech companies is what actions they're doing to make markets less competitive. And then finally, we have our merger control laws, which go back to the Clayton Next

section seven, which regulate anti competitive mergers. And when we review mergers, and we have a whole regime here in the United States. Um and actually we have a unique system in the United States because we have to antitrust agencies. One wasn't apparently not good enough for the United States. We have the Justice Department Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission, both with authority to investigate matters under the

intrust draws challenged mergers. And the greatest sin with mergers is a merger that increases concentration and raises prices. So increased prices through bad actions are something that the antitrust laws are good at going after. So let me ask you a question about anti trust as applied. Because there is our antitrust regulation, there is an impression and that in recent years that by and large anti trust on any of the avenues that you identified has not been

pursued particularly vigorously. That in the past our anti trust laws were taken more seriously, that regulator has had a greater appetite to enforce them, whatever they are, and that by and large these days there's not a lot of regulatory activity, or there hasn't been up until recently. Is that a fair characterization or is that just sort of like a medium meth, you know, I would say it's a mixed record. Over the last few years, we are clearly,

I think, poise for much more antitrust enforcement. The Biden administration any trust regulators are very aggressive and has signaled that they're going to be aggressive in the market. There's almost an attitude of what's happened before didn't work, We're gonna change things and do more. When I say it's a mixed record, when we look at enforcement, we've been fairly strong in terms of our criminal enforcement, and that's

an important point. The anti trust laws in the United States are prosecuted both criminally, so people go to jail for anti trust crimes and civilly, and so the criminal enforcement program has been very active. In the last twenty years. There's been a lot of cases involving international cartels, and

both Republican and Democratic administrations have gone after them. There's been a fairly rigorous merger enforcement, although I think there's questions about whether we've let too many mergers go through, and we'll talk about that as we talk about shipping.

The one area there hasn't been many cases, and I do signal a change in this is the monopolization cases you look at, you know, just a couple of years ago, we were bringing zero monopoly cases and uh, that started to change at the end of the Trump administration with the high tech suits, and so I think they're looking to reinvigorate the monopolization cases that they're they're looking at these days. So you sort of tease this a few minutes ago when you when you mentioned that we're going

to get into some history. But one of the interesting things when it comes to supply chains and antitrust is that there's actually a carve out for shipping companies. So there's an antitrust exemption. Could you maybe walk us through what that is and how that came to be. So in the antitrust general, there are exemptions to the antitrust rules. The courts have been very consistent in saying anti trust exemption should be applied very carefully and they should construed

very nearly. One of the most famous antitrust exemptions that exist is Major League Baseball. There is an exemption from Major League Baseball. They are not challenged. What's interesting, They get the benefit of that. But other professional sports football, the n c a, A, golf, others words don't have the benefit of that. So that's a very famous one.

And actually there was some concern the summer over even that exemption, because when Baseball decided not to have its um All Star Game in Georgia this summer, there was some talk about getting read of that exemption. Putting that

side talking about the shipping exemption. So it goes back to this notion that shipping used to be a highly regulated area, and so because of the highly regulatory nature of it, that there was felt that the shippers would need to be able to work together to organize how they ship freight, to maximize storage capacity, to work together on rates, and so because of this regulatory structure, there was given an antitrust exemption, and the exemption allowed that

that the shippers could agree on rates tariffs they charge so long as those were filed with the Federal Maritime Commission and approved by the Federal Maritime Commission. So you can have a classic cartel, but so long as under this exemption they were filed with the Federal Maritime Commission, it was allowed. That's kind of evolved over the years as we've had deregulation in the shipping industry, so that

there is still then exemption, but it's fairly limited. You can still technically file tariffs, but people don't do that. All the shipping contracts are private contracts these days, so those are those are not any trust exempt. Where the exemption really lies is that you can have what they call conferences, and I think that's just a light way to talk about competitor meetings where you can have competitor meetings where they can talk about rates, but they can't

agree upon the rates. Now they have to if they have if they talk about them. Again, it's this filing notion. Uh, they still have to file what they're talking about with the Federal Maritime Commission, but they can't agree on it. So it's a little odd, I have to admit, because it's a pretty fine line to be able to say, oh, we're gonna talk about rates and have a general agreement that we may or may not agree to. So it's a pretty fine line and it causes I think a

lot of issues in the shipping industry. And as you say, it's not just one of the shipping industry. We see this in some other industries as well. So, first of all, when it comes to shipping, and you know, this is this is an area we've talked about a fair amount. Most of these companies are US based, and I'm just curious or the big ones anyway that we talked about.

I'm just curious about the extent to which US regulators have reached into this space versus you know, how much does that further challenge the ability of US regulators, even in any legal regime, to do anything on shipping competitiveness the US Any trust laws, I would say, are not unlimited in their jurisdiction, but very fulsome in their jurisdictions. So any action caused by a foreign company that has a direct enforeseeable effect on US commerce is subject to

challenge by the Justice Department. So you could have a conspiracy. We see this all the time in the cases I work on, where two companies to business people of real prices in some foreign country. They're even in the United States, but yeah, the US government can go challenge them and challenge the conduct in US sports. So a couple of

years ago, there's this coalition of the shipping companies. They get together and talk about race, talking about something that we're just talking about under the exemption, and they came to San Francisco for their meeting. You knew who visited their meeting. Anti trust lawyers and the FBI. They came in and rated this meeting and they handed out subpoenas

to everybody in the room. So I can you imagine you're in this hotel room with all these your it's, it's, it's, it's it's a group of shipping executives, and it's all the CEOs, all the top guys. So they all come to San Francisco for this meeting to talk about these things that they're allowed to talk about under the exemption, and who bust in is the FBI and the entrut Division handing out subpoenas like their candy. Clearly they did

this investigation was interesting. They did an investigation of the shipping industry. I think they were worried about the alliances and some of the other things. Ultimately there were no action brought, so uh, you know, I think the exemptions did take a bit of a part of that and

why the Justice Department didn't move forward on that. But it just shows you that the view that here you had thirteen fourteen four and executives all getting subpoenas, so that the jurisdiction is very broad from the Justice Department's perspective, Why don't we get into um like specific actions that the US government the antitrust authorities could take in order to remedy supply chain issues, because we already mentioned shipping,

that's one aspect of it. But of course another thing they could do is try to go after large monopoly players in consumer goods and try to bring down prices that way. So could you maybe get into some specifics of what could happen here, what sort of enforcement actions are realistic. So there are several actually that are ongoing at the moment. The Federal Train Commission just announced that they're doing an investigation of the supply chain issues. They

sent out inquiries to a number of US companies. These are the big companies like Amazon, Broger, Procter, and Gambill Tysons, those that are trying to bring products in the United States to try to understand what the problems are. So that's the first step. They're doing an investigation. Now, this is under a rule at the FTC that allows the FTC to investigate industry wide practices that may have any

trust problems. So this is really a first step This is to say, is there an any trust competitive problem? What that could lead to if they say, gee, they're do soon to be any trust problems are investigations. The Justice Department or the FTC could open up civil The Justice Department could open a civil or criminal investigation of thinks that there are any trust problems. One of the problems about any trust though, is it is very very slow.

So while we have these problems now, you know, investigation can take a year, two years. All any trust cases are driven by documents and evidence. It takes a long time, especially if you're getting them from foreign companies. It's it's can be troubling. There's issues about getting them from foreign companies.

Quite frankly, foreign companies like China have blocking statutes which don't allow foreign companies to reduced documents to the U. S Government without the Chinese governments signing off on it. And so these investigations can get bogged down. And then even if they bring a case, anti trust cases are super slow, and so you could have a case filed and not even have a court date for four or five, six,

seven years. So we could be on three different supply chain events past where we are today, before we start having any trust case about what's happening right now. So any trust can be helpful, but it's certainly not an immediate solution to the problems we're having today. So this actually leads me right into my next question. And you know, we sort of said in the intro it's like, oh, right,

you know, well, we're talking about inflation right now. Anti trust isn't going to do anything in the next few months. But one of the themes that we come back to a lot on this show is that a lot of what we've run into now is this sort of like compounding price that we pay for diminished markets or at

your feed markets. And we had this long period after the Great Financial Crisis in which many industries, maybe due to you know, usually talk about mediocre growth or mediocre and demand simply did not invest particularly much in capacity, and we pay the price. Now, maybe we don't pay the price during periods of low demand, but as soon as GDP grows rapidly, we pay the price of atrophied capacity.

And I'm curious, like, okay, long term, like yeah, or we accepted in the short term anti trust can't do much, but what about in the medium or longer term, like is the idea that if we had more robust anti trust and we had more competitive markets as the norm, that perhaps productive economic capacity overall in any cycle would be greater than it is today. I think that's true.

I think you'll see it, especially in merger enforcement. When I was in law school, I had a professor that talked about the fact that we see every forty years kind of the antitrust pendulums wing. When I was going to law school was right after the Regaan administration. Regulation was disfavored, let the markets do their own thing, let not have very big government enforcement. And I think you're starting to see this movement towards more regulation towards more enforcement.

I think there is a realization by some of our lawmakers, by some of our regulators that maybe they let things go too far. So if you look, for instance, I'm involved in the case right now against some of the railroad companies for some logistics issues for some fees that they put in place almost twenty years ago at this point. But you're like a railroad industry. We used to have

a very vibrant railroad industry with lots of competitors. It was highly regulated then we had this movement and make it not regulated, and now we're down to four major railroads which control almost of all the all the railroad traffic in the United States. And the same as was shipping, you had a American competitors, you have foreign competitors. From I understand, now you're down to basically nine shippers of control almost all of the export products in the United States.

There are no US producers. And on top of it, you have these three alliances. And so I think you're starting to see people say, did we go too far and letting some of these mergers go through? And so I think you're seeing this reflected in that we need to take a harder look at some of the mergers going on now to make sure it doesn't go any further. So, just on that note, does it feel like attitudes towards

antitrust enforcement are starting to change? And I guess another way of saying that is, does it feel like there's bipartisan support for more antitrust legislation? Inflation being one of the few things I think that both parties agree um is actually bad and so doing something or anything about

it might be a good thing. I used to not worry about antitrust letters insolation, because I just never thought it had much of a chance to pass, because you always had the setup where the Democrats were more pro enforcement, more willing to think about new legislation, and then the Republican Party at least ten twenty thirty years ago, was the party of country club, Republicans chamber of commerce and

didn't want to have it. That has changed dramatically in the last year or two, as you see the Republican Party move away from big business to become more populist. And so now you're seeing this merging of kind of the left, which has traditionally wanted anti trust enforcement in the right. Now that's more anti business. The summer I

was struck. I was reading pulling from the Gallop organization that talked about confidence in big business, and they asked Republicans and Democrats whether they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in business. And just from this year to last year, Republicans confidence in big business declined by twelve point. Only only of Republicans have confidence

in big business. And they track kind of the net confidence in each so the percentage, so that compares the percentage expressing high confidence in business minus those expressing little or no confidence. And so in the past, the Republican Party over years, I mean over decades was kind of plus ten, twelve, fifteen percent in favor of big business, you know where it was last year negative. That's incredible,

it's incredible. So the Republican Party is no longer and it's really in line worth where the Democratic Party is. And so bringing it back to shipping, there was this kind of out of nowhere there was this new anti trust bill called Ocean Shipping Reform Act, and it was to kind of consistent when we're talking about give the Federal Maritime Commission more regulatory powers, more oversight powers, more teeth to worry about some of the things we've been

talking about. The thing that amazes me this bill new any trust legislation passed in the House of Representatives. And we're talking about the House of Revery just divided and everything. This passed three sixty four to sixty. I mean, that is about as one side as you can't have in this. And here's here's the thing. You think, Joe and Tracy think about this. This is the lineup of people who

voted for this. You had people like on the right list, Cheney, Devin Newness, Kevin McCarthy vote for this well, also Madison Cathorne, So some of the new guys coming in. But then you also had ok Ceo Cortez Omar the Democrats. So can you imagine a bill where you would have Kevin McCarthy and AOC both supporting it. But that's what we're seeing any trust, Sorry, what's the name of this bill? I had totally missed this. What what's the name of

this bill? Because now I'm definitely gonna have to like go. Yeah. So it's called the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, and it was just passed by the House in December. The Senate seems very receptive to it. The Biden administration has indicated that they would approve it. It It was a bipartisan bill. One of the congressman was a Republican congressman from South Dakota, which is kind of funny that South Dakota will be worried about shipping, but they are because they would have products.

He has a been consisient that needs to get Lactose to New Zealand and a Democratic sponsor as well. So it just didn't have a lot of hearings that didn't have a lot. It's just kind of popped up on the radar and got improved. And so I think the Senden's going to improve it, and I think the Biden administration is gonna prove it. And what it does, if you're interested, is gives the as I said, the Federal

Maritime Commission more powers. One of the things that's really focused on is some of these fees, these demerged fees that people are incurring. Apparently people are paying incredible fees as their product is sitting in a port and not being shipped, and there are people throughout the country, shippers that are very upset about it. So it puts upon the shippers and the dock honders that they have to show that the fees are reasonable. The burden is on

them to prove it's reasonable. There's reporting requirements. It authorizes the Federal Maritime Commission to have investigations related to fees and charges. It prevents ocean carriers from declining opportunities for US exports. So there was apparently an issue that was a great concern where products would come to the United States and then empty containers would leave without being anything in it, uh, and so they want to stop that. So it's a pretty comprehensive bill in the shipping area

that's going to be targets. So it's right on point with what we're talking about. Wow, Yeah, Joe, this is one of the things that when we spoke to John Porcari, the White House's envoy to the Ports, we actually asked him about this, but he kind of didn't answer the question,

which is one reason why we're having this follow up conversations. Yeah, right right, I I remember that now, and I remember this sort of like the lack of substance or the lack of a very clear response about where this was going. Something that I'm sort of interested in is what I guess I would say is the other side of the coin whenever. So you mentioned, okay, shipping and rail and you know, we could talk about with the optimal number

of competitors of the space or so forth. But another area that we've talked about a lot on the show is trucking, which seems like it has it's a hundred degrees different the barriers to entry into the space or essentially non existent huge boom and bus cycles even in boom times right now, companies regularly go out of business

due to lack of pricing power. Do you see industries in which essentially would benefit from, you know, some sort of greater barriers to entry, in which the supply of goods, the supply, the stableness of prices, might benefit from some sort of like you know where where maybe make it a little bit harder to enter and exit the exit the industry. Well, that's a dangerous question for an anti trust lawyer, but you know, I think that, you know,

I think the answer might be more government regulation. You know, back in the early seventies eighties, there used to be tons of regulation who could drive trucks and which is kind of a backdoor way of it's a kind of

a backdoor anti trust on some level. So maybe you don't necessarily cap the competitors or whatever, but but you like make it a little the bar a little bit higher, and believe or not there is a ton of any trust activity in this area because there's another calling sessions and the intrust laws, but it's really granted in constitutional rights. Competitors and get together in the lobby the government to do legislative things that may have a adverse competitive effect.

But because you're lobbying, because you're structing your First Amendment right, you get pushed for legislation that I wouldn't have the effect of recent barriers that would make it part of competitors in that all exempt from challenge under the ins

because it's part of your right dempetition. I want to go back to the what we were talking about with the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of and the Federal Maritime Commissioned the of m C, because I guess my question is how well suited is the Commission to actually take on antitrust issues because my understanding is this is not something that they've been doing historically because of that antitrust exemption that you just described, So presumably this would be

a pretty big shift for them. It would be I mean, let's start out with one fundamental problem of the fantasy is a really small organization. I looked at up yesterday. They're only a hundred thirty employees at the FMC. There's five commissioners, and they only have a budget of thirty million dollars or so. Hoping that we'll see Congress fund

them more. One thing that it's happened, so this summer, one of the big things that happened in any Trust in one was that President Biden and issued this Executive Order on any Trust right around July fourth, and he has asked all the agencies to work to just look and try to solve lots of antitrust problems. He'd used the world that there's been too much consolidation, too many any trust things have let slide, and so he's really

invigorated the government to look for warning trust issues. And so one of the things he's worried about his shipping and coming out of that. Just in a couple of days after the Justice Department in a trust division and the FMC has signed an MU pledging to work more close together. So I don't think it's gonna be the FMC by itself, but I think also working with the

Justice Department. Now, the slip side of this is the Justice Department in the ANEC have more resources, but there's still also resource constrain in the middle of a major merger wave and they are overwhelmed with the number of mergers that they have to review. They're taking on big tax, they're doing lots of investigations. So yeah, they'll be interesting going after shipping, But when you put their list of priorities in the top ten, but it's not probably at

the very top. So we're dealing with two agencies, the FMC and the antitrust agencies, who are going to be fairly resourced constrained. Can you just talk a little bit more about math and numbers of the short staffing or the capacity constraints, because you know, you have this idea is like, oh, no private entity could ever match the government, but realistically, of course they can. And these institutions only have so many lawyers at any given time, I'm and

only so much budget. What does it often look like in terms of the amount you know, in terms of the legal firepower for some of these mergers versus on the private side versus the public side. Some of the agencies have a number of attorneys and economists that are staffed up to look at these but you know, you're dealing with companies that are very sophisticated that have outside council. I work for Vinca, Milicans and we are a big law firm in the United States, but we have only

we have a set and twenty attorneys. Uh, there's law firms have three thousand and two thousand attorneys. So you're dealing with situation where you know, companies can afford a lot of attorneys, and you come to meetings and the attorney the merchant parties may have twenty three attorneys and the araman may have five or attorneys in the ECONO,

so it is an issue. So we're talking about obviously supply chains and logistics, and I want to like just go back to something again on the sort of market structure. And you mentioned the number of competitors are un rail and obviously the number of competitors that are in shipping, and one of the aspects of both of those industries is there is a sort of like I guess I

would say, very limited constrained public infrastructure. There's only so many ports that are available and they're sort of like quasi public or quasi private, and there's only so many rail tracks available, and it's sort of, you know, on rail is sort of reminiscence of the cable up companies where there's always been challenges with shipping. How much are these industries inherently constrained in terms of what the government can do by simply like the lack of like public

infrastructure basically to support new competitors. I think you're seeing it with the new legislation we were just talking about. I think the one thing they could do is step in and try to regulate more. The notion that you're going to have the Federal Maritime Commission regulate rates and think about what's reasonable, I think is something that we may see more of. That's probably as much as they can do. I mean, we're a capitalist society, and we

can't start doing industrial planning. I don't think so. I think we'll just see probably more legis more regulation. So maybe just to summit all up, what what's your sort of gut sense about the degree to which antitrust enforcement or legislation would actually bring down inflation and ease some of these supply chain pressures that we've been talking about. I think it will be a useful tool, but it's not going to be the cure all. As I said, some of these cases just last for a long time.

I'm involved in two cases right now that involves supply chain management. Mentioned when earlier. We're litigating against the railroads related to fuel searcharges that were imposed in two thousand three. Uh So we're dealing with that and I am involved in another case where we're dealing with supply shortages from kind of the two thousand fifteen two thousand sixteen era. So antitrust is generally retrospective, obviously looking at problems in

the past. What it can be helpful though, is as these cases get decided, the case laws established, and you know, I think it will have an impact on how people do business. I also think one of the things coming out of this is that compliance of big companies is going to be very important. If you know that there's

gonna be an increased regulatory environment. And we've just been talking about the United States, it's the European Commission, and it's Australians, it's it's the Chinese, it's everybody is becoming more antitrust focused and uh focus. So if you're a company, I think it's gonna be more important to have very

strong compliance programs. In fact, the Justice Department has a program that if you can come in and show that you had an extremely good compliance program, even though you have some antitrust problems, you can get some benefits and some leniency from the Justice Department as a result of that. Um So, I think that's going to be important, and maybe stepping up the compliance will have some impact. But so I think it's kind of where the secondary effects

of any trust cases. I will say one thing that has a mediate effect is if the Justice Department sends you a grand jury criminal subpoena in your company, gets the attention of the CEO and the general counsel and a lot of other folks in the company, and so that can sometimes have a interrom effect at change behavior if it's illegal, but it's just a slow it's it's

a useful tool, but it's a slow moving tool. Well, Craig, that was That was really fascinating, and I'm glad you could walk us through one of the more interesting ways of fighting inflation. Thank you so much, My pleasure, enjoy talking to you. That was fascinating. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it. So, Joe, obviously, I thought that was really interesting and one of the things that keeps coming out of these conversations, and you know, Jene Siroka kind of talked about it to the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, is this idea of Okay, maybe antitrust enforcement isn't going to actually do what it's supposed to do or what it's explicitly written to do for a very long time because it's tough to push

those enforcement actions through. But maybe the threat of future enforcement action is enough to start some sort of change of behavior within the shipping industry itself. And this again seems to be a recurring theme, Like just the idea of getting people involved in the supply chain to actually change habits that have been ingrained for decades at this point, that that seems to be something that people are really

trying to do right now. Yeah, no, absolutely, this idea of like okay, and he made that point about compliance departments and the changing norms. I do think like ultimately, like okay, anti competitive behavior, part of the competitive behavior is actually competing and investing and trying to win and market share and offering something better. And I do think that like one of the problems I have with this in general or is like okay, but what is going

to actually get people to invest and increase capacity? And I still feel like, you know, obviously the legal aspect is a big part of it, and maybe a very big part of it, but I'm still like trying to wrap my head or as like yeah, well, Okay, you can change norms around pricing or fees or penalties or whatever, But what is going to like increase competition in like the sort of like pure capitalist sense, right, But conversely, you could argue that anti competitive behavior right now leads

to higher shipping prices and so people have very very little incentive to actually increase capacity because they're already making

billions of dollars. And I think I didn't didn't Marisk like unveil quarterly profit recently that was like its highest in over a century something like that, And it seems like this is like the type of thing which is like the goal is hopefully to like I guess I would say, like reach new equilibrium or like change overall like norms throughout multiple cycles going forward, rather than something that we hope is going to solve the problem now, but you know, maybe at the margins there will be

some uh, some potential solution. Now. Yeah. The other interesting thing I mean on that note is this idea of deregulation cycles and the idea that this actually has a lot of bipartisan support. So maybe we are starting to enter a new cycle where people are more interested, where where Washington is more interested in actually bringing down some of the monopolies. And again Craig was talking about this,

but we've already seen that in tech. But it is really striking this sort of spectrum of interest that this is attracting from both the left and the right. Yeah. No, I thought that was probably one of the most interesting. And it's like sort of like tropism and the sort of like disdain for anyone in power. I guess I've always been like, it's a little bit skeptical at this idea that, Okay, are we actually ever going to pass legislation?

But you know, he pointed out a pretty big bills passed the House, and maybe this changing political environment will have some real downstream legislative effects. Maybe have been too skeptical of this sort of like changing public mood actually changing and changing public law. You've underestimated people's hatred of big business. I guess, yeah, maybe I have, and now I have to really sort of change some of my

my priors that they speak. No, I haven't really underestimated people's hatred, underestimated whether that hatred will change laws, and maybe it will. Yeah, Okay, that's fair. Yeah, um, okay, Well, shall we leave it there let's leave it there, all right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Wasn't All. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our producer on Twitter,

Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Followed the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levi at Francesca Today and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening, O