Criticism
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EU authorities' application of merger law in practice has been criticized for acting for protectionist reasons rather than sound economic reasons. For example, the EU blocked a proposed merger of General Electric and Honeywell on grounds of the possibility of "leverage" in other markets and "portfolio effects", even though United States regulators found that the merger would improve competition and reduce prices. Assistant Attorney General Charles James, along with a number of academics, called the EU's use of "portfolio effects" to protect competitors, rather than competition, "antithetical to the goals of antitrust law enforcement." United States Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill called the rejection of the GE-Honeywell merger "off the wall" and complained of European Union regulators "They are the closest thing you can find to an autocratic organization that can successfully impose their will on things that one would think are outside their scope of attention."
Read more about this topic: European Union Merger Law
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)
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—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)