Economists are now wielding as big an influence on anti-trust merger reviews as lawyers, according to the Washington Post. It cited the presence of four economists last month when executives from Comcast and Time Warner Cable met with Federal Communications Commission staffers to discuss the merger. Whilst accompanied by antitrust and communications lawyers, the newspaper pointed out the that the economists were there to deal with questions the antitrust regulators have about a deal, from data on products, companies, markets and industries. They earn in the region of $1,000 an hour. “People think lawyers run the world,” Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the merger, told the Washington Post. “These are the people the companies hire to help the lawyers do that.”
Source: Washington Post
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