ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the troubling years of 1973 and 1974, when Americans, so accustomed to dominating events, began to experience the sour taste of events working on them. Antitrust explodes to prominence as a panacea for the ailing economy, the energy shortage, and public malaise. At the same time consumerists continued their determination to augment Federal Trade Commission (FTC) authority by means fair or foul so as to increase their own power. The Stigler Report stressed the necessity for greater anticompetitive coordination between the FTC and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and was highly critical of FTC efforts in regard to price discrimination, merger, and consumer protection. The Green study asserted that the giant corporations were neither efficient nor desirable in any way. It cited the enforcement failures of the FTC and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division as contributing to the lack of competition and growth of concentration.
