US COMPETITION OVERVIEW -

As President Obama nears the midpoint of his second term, merger activity suffered a slight year-over-year dip but has still recovered moderately from the first years of the global economic downturn. The following charts2 set out reporting and enforcement data for transactions reported to the US antitrust agencies – the Department of Justice, the Antitrust Division (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – over the past eight years.

The number of transactions receiving a second request remained steady in fiscal year 2013 at 47, even with a 7.2 per cent decrease in reported transactions. As the result, the overall rate of second requests rose slightly, continuing the trend of a significantly more active pre-challenge review in the Obama Administration compared with the last four years of the Bush Administration.

Originally published in The Mergers & Acquisitions Review - 2014, Eighth Edition.