The merger was completed in 2010, so the Obama administration. However, the country was coming out of the great recession and the last thing the administration needed was bad PR for "stopping a merger that would prevent people from losing their jobs".
The second sentence is ridiculous. The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years. The record is pretty easy to understand.
> The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years.
It might be more accurate to say that rubber-stamping mergers maxed-out under the Obama DoJ.
Comcast - NBCUniversal (2011)
AT&T - T-Mobile (2011)
Express Scripts - Medco Health Solutions (2012)
Google - Motorola Mobility (2012)
Anheuser-Busch InBev - Grupo Modelo (2013)
US Airways - American Airlines (2013)
Oracle - Sun Microsystems (2010)
Comcast - Time Warner Cable (2014)
Heinz - Kraft Foods (2015)
AT&T - DirecTV (2015)
Administrations before and after were almost-but-maybe-a-tiny-bit-less eager to approve competition+job killing mergers.
What DoJs were not eager to do was push back against pressure from Elected Congresspeople who 1) held DoJ purse strings and 2) had elections that needed funding.
The policies were largely unchanged before and after. What was unique about this period was quantitative easing & lowering of interest rates to ~0. Companies were suddenly flush with cash and had nothing to do with it, because keeping it in the bank wasn't an option. So they went on a shopping spree.
Yup. We are in our current predicament because the previous 4 or 5 administrations, whether D or R, have let corporations run amok with M&A and general anticompetitive behavior, offering only token resistance. Biden has finally signaled a shift in the last year or two, but it remains to be seen how far these actions will go (and how much Congress and the courts will allow).
