The US Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit to block a tie-up between supermarket giants
Merging companies in the past offered to sell off some assets, or divest, in order to assuage regulators’ concerns about monopoly power or other harms from their deal. But some of those selloffs went off the rails. For example, Albertsons in a 2015 deal with Safeway agreed to divest grocery stores that then went bankrupt.
Given the flawed track record, the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust ...