2024

[old salt]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

[Seacoaster(1)]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

[cradleandshoot]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

And what if anything does your post have to do with the thread topic? The thread topic is the 2024 campaign just to remind you.

[old salt]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

You probably find the WSJ Editorial section a bore too. Those whiners published several editorials & op-eds supporting ILMN's position & none defending the FTC's & EC's actions.

What remedies did the FTC & EC propose (& when) which ILMN declined ?

ILMN offered remedies which would allow competition & make the technology available to competitors, which the FTC ALJ found sufficient.
The FTC & EC declined ILMN's offered remedies. ILMN would likely have accepted further remedies to salvage the merger.
Biden/Khan's FTC & the EC were dead set against the merger, despite any potential remedies.
It became obvious that the 5th Circuit's remand for reconsideration was futile -- the 5th Circuit still agreed with the FTC decision, just disagreed with the grounds.* Meanwhile, the EC ruled against ILMN & levied a massive fine. The protracted litigation was causing a proxy fight which severely devalued the company & would have only further delayed an unfavorable resolution. ILMN finally had to give up the fight. The FTC & EC should have negotiated mutually acceptable remedies, without having to be ordered by the 5th District Court. The FTC has deeper pockets for protracted litigation than even Illunina has. The FTC can drag out litigation forever, they don't have stockholders to answer to.

* https://content.next.westlaw.com/practi ... c.Default)

* https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/cli ... 20concerns.
it is the first time in decades that either federal antitrust enforcer has succeeded in blocking or forcing the abandonment of a vertical merger after litigating to a decision....The court found that the FTC adequately defined a relevant product market for the “research, development, and commercialization” of MCED tests, based largely on factors set out in Brown Shoe, a 1962 Supreme Court case that has played an increasingly prominent role in merger enforcement by the Biden antitrust agencies.

* https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/lit ... s?id=49610

[OCanada]

Are you looking for a “bail out” or a more active federal presence?

WSJ editorials? FT is much the better publication

[old salt]

Are you looking for a “bail out” or a more active federal presence?

WSJ editorials? FT is much the better publication

Too late for either. I just hope that the prolonged litigation has not permanently damaged ILMN to the point that it cannot recover in value.

I don't know if the recent Supreme Court decision offers any hope for an ILMN suit vs the FTC, & if a Trump appointed FTC might consider a settlement which compensated ILMN for damages. Meanwhile, if Grail attains FDA approval for it's MCED test & it takes off, as a 14.5% shareholder in GRAL, ILMN may recoup some losses there. I just hope that some better politically connected big company does not gobble up GRAL & do a buyout which forces me to sell them my GRAL stock. I still have hopes for their MCED test.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Are you looking for a “bail out” or a more active federal presence?

WSJ editorials? FT is much the better publication

Too late for either. I just hope that the prolonged litigation has not permanently damaged ILMN to the point that it cannot recover in value.

I don't know if the recent Supreme Court decision offers any hope for an ILMN suit vs the FTC, & if a Trump appointed FTC might consider a settlement which compensated ILMN for damages. Meanwhile, if Grail attains FDA approval for it's MCED test & it takes off, as a 14.5% shareholder in GRAL, ILMN may recoup some losses there. I just hope that some better politically connected big company does not gobble up GRAL & do a buyout which forces me to sell them my GRAL stock. I still have hopes for their MCED test.

You sound stupid.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/reasons- ... 15106.html

Guess who was left holding the bag…

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/do-y ... n-1265537/

Trump will replace Jihad Jane when he takes office. All the DEI hires better take cover.

[Typical Lax Dad]

[Seacoaster(1)]

Are you looking for a “bail out” or a more active federal presence?

WSJ editorials? FT is much the better publication

Too late for either. I just hope that the prolonged litigation has not permanently damaged ILMN to the point that it cannot recover in value.

I don't know if the recent Supreme Court decision offers any hope for an ILMN suit vs the FTC, & if a Trump appointed FTC might consider a settlement which compensated ILMN for damages. Meanwhile, if Grail attains FDA approval for it's MCED test & it takes off, as a 14.5% shareholder in GRAL, ILMN may recoup some losses there. I just hope that some better politically connected big company does not gobble up GRAL & do a buyout which forces me to sell them my GRAL stock. I still have hopes for their MCED test.

Oh, you mean government intervention to help the company of your choice?

[Seacoaster(1)]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

And what if anything does your post have to do with the thread topic? The thread topic is the 2024 campaign just to remind you.

Just responding to the Idiot Dog Walker, who has coopted this thread with his racism and whining about the costs of compliance with the nation's antitrust laws. Try, try, try to keep up.

[Seacoaster(1)]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

You probably find the WSJ Editorial section a bore too. Those whiners published several editorials & op-eds supporting ILMN's position & none defending the FTC's & EC's actions.

What remedies did the FTC & EC propose (& when) which ILMN declined ?

ILMN offered remedies which would allow competition & make the technology available to competitors, which the FTC ALJ found sufficient.
The FTC & EC declined ILMN's offered remedies. ILMN would likely have accepted further remedies to salvage the merger.
Biden/Khan's FTC & the EC were dead set against the merger, despite any potential remedies.
It became obvious that the 5th Circuit's remand for reconsideration was futile -- the 5th Circuit still agreed with the FTC decision, just disagreed with the grounds.* Meanwhile, the EC ruled against ILMN & levied a massive fine. The protracted litigation was causing a proxy fight which severely devalued the company & would have only further delayed an unfavorable resolution. ILMN finally had to give up the fight. The FTC & EC should have negotiated mutually acceptable remedies, without having to be ordered by the 5th District Court. The FTC has deeper pockets for protracted litigation than even Illunina has. The FTC can drag out litigation forever, they don't have stockholders to answer to.

* https://content.next.westlaw.com/practi ... c.Default)

* https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/cli ... 20concerns.
it is the first time in decades that either federal antitrust enforcer has succeeded in blocking or forcing the abandonment of a vertical merger after litigating to a decision....The court found that the FTC adequately defined a relevant product market for the “research, development, and commercialization” of MCED tests, based largely on factors set out in Brown Shoe, a 1962 Supreme Court case that has played an increasingly prominent role in merger enforcement by the Biden antitrust agencies.

* https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/lit ... s?id=49610

If you reflected on this a bit, you might consider the reality that Illumina management made a series of poor decisions, which resulted in the FTC action, the litigation, and the eventual divestiture of Grail. The "DEI hire" really played the role for which she was appointed: evaluating the antitrust aspects of the potential combination, and giving the view of the law adopted by the agency. The Fifth Circuit, as you concede, largely agreed that Illumina had run afoul of the law -- repeat, the law. So, at this point, I think any rational reader will understand that your "unqualified" and "DEI hire" drivel is simply the tirade of an old racist looking for someone to blame for his personal misfortune, joining you as a junior member of the sh*tty white guy grievance club, of which such luminaries as Trump and Hitler are members. If only we could get a a good aryan in the driver's seat at the FTC. Just. S.T.F.U.

[OCanada]

The Federal Budget Process in underway.

The GOP is pushing austerity for ordinary Americans, Republicans have proposed steep cuts to education, environmental protection, Social Security, election administration, national parks, nutrition assistance, antitrust enforcement, global health, and more—all while wanting increased tax cuts ( upward wealth transfer) for the most well off.

Part of their strategy is to cut appropriations and if they cannot get that cut taxes fow wealthy to deny the funds in the first place.

[ggait]

Ignore Salty. He is a poorly informed MAGA drunkard who is obviously and easily triggered by young, smart, brown, women.

Lina Khan is a fascinating legal scholar and regulator. At the vanguard of the “New Brandeis” school of antitrust thought. Which is actually classical old school antitrust ploicy. Meaning powerful monopolies are bad and the purposes of antitrust law is to fight against monopolies. New Brandeis antitrust is a response to the Chicago/Robert Bork school of antitrust law which has reigned since the 1980s.

Bork's seminal work ("The Antitrust Paradox") argues that the goal of antitrust is efficiency and consumer welfare (usually viewed as lower prices). And that many antitrust enforcements, therefore, break up efficient winners who serve customers well. The counter to that argument is that monopolies often charge low prices -- U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, and Amazon. It is interesting and important intellectual argument.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend her influential note in the Yale Law Journal about Amazon. Amazing it was published while she was still a law student. The title..."Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" shows where she's coming from and who she is taking on. FYI, Khan has a lot of ardent adherents from the GOP right who oppose Big Tech passionately.

FYI, Khan's pre-government academic resume and background (Columbia Law School professor) closely parallels that of Bork himself (Yale Law School professor). Salty just dislikes her for partisan, gender and ethnic reasons.

And here's the most interesting thing about Khan's young career. Just a few years removed from her student note's publication, she has actually filed the actual case against Amazon in real life. Who knows how that one will turn out, but it is an Ahab/Moby Dick kind of story.


https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.71 ... vfyyeh.pdf

[old salt]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

You probably find the WSJ Editorial section a bore too. Those whiners published several editorials & op-eds supporting ILMN's position & none defending the FTC's & EC's actions.

What remedies did the FTC & EC propose (& when) which ILMN declined ?

ILMN offered remedies which would allow competition & make the technology available to competitors, which the FTC ALJ found sufficient.
The FTC & EC declined ILMN's offered remedies. ILMN would likely have accepted further remedies to salvage the merger.
Biden/Khan's FTC & the EC were dead set against the merger, despite any potential remedies.
It became obvious that the 5th Circuit's remand for reconsideration was futile -- the 5th Circuit still agreed with the FTC decision, just disagreed with the grounds.* Meanwhile, the EC ruled against ILMN & levied a massive fine. The protracted litigation was causing a proxy fight which severely devalued the company & would have only further delayed an unfavorable resolution. ILMN finally had to give up the fight. The FTC & EC should have negotiated mutually acceptable remedies, without having to be ordered by the 5th District Court. The FTC has deeper pockets for protracted litigation than even Illunina has. The FTC can drag out litigation forever, they don't have stockholders to answer to.

* https://content.next.westlaw.com/practi ... c.Default)

* https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/cli ... 20concerns.
it is the first time in decades that either federal antitrust enforcer has succeeded in blocking or forcing the abandonment of a vertical merger after litigating to a decision....The court found that the FTC adequately defined a relevant product market for the “research, development, and commercialization” of MCED tests, based largely on factors set out in Brown Shoe, a 1962 Supreme Court case that has played an increasingly prominent role in merger enforcement by the Biden antitrust agencies.

* https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/lit ... s?id=49610

If you reflected on this a bit, you might consider the reality that Illumina management made a series of poor decisions, which resulted in the FTC action, the litigation, and the eventual divestiture of Grail. The "DEI hire" really played the role for which she was appointed: evaluating the antitrust aspects of the potential combination, and giving the view of the law adopted by the agency. The Fifth Circuit, as you concede, largely agreed that Illumina had run afoul of the law -- repeat, the law. So, at this point, I think any rational reader will understand that your "unqualified" and "DEI hire" drivel is simply the tirade of an old racist looking for someone to blame for his personal misfortune, joining you as a junior member of the sh*tty white guy grievance club, of which such luminaries as Trump and Hitler are members. If only we could get a a good aryan in the driver's seat at the FTC. Just. S.T.F.U.

I've reflected on this quite a lot. Madame Khan did something that none of her predecessors had done in decades -- blocked a large vertical merger. She had to reach all the way back to 1962 to find a precedent to get a Win after failing against the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google& Meta, the true monopolies that reach beyond one narrow niche market sector. She was an academic activist & regulator, with no business experience. Let's see how long she lasts in the job, & what the FTC's follow on decisions look like if Trump wins. I am far from alone in my critique of Madame Khan.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12 ... ssion.html

Lina Khan’s Rough Year When a liberal star took over the FTC, she was expected to break up big business. Instead, critics say, she’s broken the agency.

By Ankush Khardori, a contributing editor who covers legal affairs.

There was palpable excitement on the left when President Biden appointed Lina Khan, just 32 at the time, to lead the Federal Trade Commission in 2021. She had risen to prominence after writing a 2017 law-review note arguing that Amazon was an illegal monopoly and became a celebrity in the burgeoning progressive antitrust-reform movement, which wants to radically change federal antitrust policy. With the appointment of Khan and others in the Biden administration, the movement seemed to assume all of the key levers of power in Washington that it would need to implement its agenda.

Things have not gone as planned for the movement or the once-rising star, who has suffered a series of conspicuous setbacks at the helm of the FTC this year. A proposed rule banning noncompete agreements has drawn skepticism from well-regarded observers. A legally dubious effort to rewrite the agency’s merger-review policy has drawn widespread criticism, including from former Obama administration officials and former chief economists at the agency. Worst of all, two high-profile lawsuits against tech giants — one against Meta, the other against Microsoft — flopped in the courts.

Khan has become an object of over-the-top derision on the right, but the discontent with her tenure inside the FTC is broader and far less ideologically motivated than her defenders would have us believe — something that became clearer to me after a series of interviews with a number of officials who left the agency after Khan took over and a group of agency alumni who are now in academia. I surveyed them to try to get a better sense of what is actually happening within the agency and how Khan might conceivably improve the situation. The returns were decidedly mixed with concerns about Khan’s leadership ranging from the personal to the political.

To my modest surprise, the most common area of concern was Khan’s temperament and management style — a subject that has generally eluded serious media scrutiny but that has vexed career officials since her arrival. In their telling, Khan’s failings in this area explain a lot about what has happened at the FTC this year, including why the agency has been bringing cases with shaky legal underpinnings, why it’s losing those cases, why experienced officials have been leaving, and why the rest of us should care. (The FTC declined a request to interview Khan.)

The stakes extend far beyond Khan’s professional ambitions or even the FTC’s current portfolio of investigations and active litigation. Khan’s failure could ultimately prove fatal to a once-in-a-generation movement to dramatically transform government antitrust policy, for better or worse, so that government regulators and the courts block far more mergers and acquisitions throughout the economy. She is not alone in the effort — she has a political and ideological ally at the helm of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division — but things are going just as suboptimally, if not demonstrably worse, over at the DOJ.

More to the point, Khan had been positioned as a defining intellectual and political leader in the movement. If her tenure at the head of the FTC turns out to be a failure, it could deal an existential blow to the movement that she has devoted her career to.

hen Khan stepped into the role, she had already become the face of the new antitrust school. (It is sometimes called the “New Brandeis school” or, more derisively, “hipster antitrust.”)

...A bleaker scenario posited by others is that Khan’s tenure at the agency could end up playing into the hands of a skeptical Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has made clear that it will push back on what it believes — fairly or not — to constitute overreach on the part of the executive branch. Kovacic praised Khan for “energizing a new generation of scholars and students” but noted that “the federal courts seem to be edging in the direction of rethinking the scope of the FTC’s power — its decision-making framework, the very constitutionality of how it operates.”
The concern is hardly misplaced. The past few years have generated several Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed the powers of federal regulators — including the FTC itself — and made them more vulnerable to legal challenges. The justices recently heard oral argument on a legal challenge to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s system of in-house courts that could also make matters worse for the FTC, which has a similar system.

“I don’t know how much the commission is thinking at the moment about the impact of trying to build a more expansive program in the face of this gathering judicial storm,” Kovacic wondered. “Do you realize you could come out of this with a much-diminished agency?” he asked. “And Congress is not coming to the rescue for you. You could come out of this with an agency that is much weaker than the one that you went in with — permanently weaker.”
“I think a lot of the staff at the agency — and a lot of observers, anybody close to the FTC — are asking a good question,” one former official told me. “‘What is her long game in this?’ And is the long game aligned with the interests of the FTC?”
That person pointed to the eventual divergence between Khan’s career path and the long-term fate of the agency that she currently leads. “It’s one thing to be very aggressive now, starting a lot of things and going to court a lot,” the person said. But Khan will eventually move on, and it will fall to the agency’s rank and file to endure any harm to the agency’s power and standing that results on her watch.
“The question is, Where will she be five to ten years from now?”

FTC Chair Lina Khan fails upward.
Aug 17 2023
For Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission, dysfunction is no bar to ambition.
...In other, still-pending cases, the FTC has the tiger by the tail. A federal court of appeals will probably reverse the agency’s effort to separate Illumina, with its platforms for genetic-sequencing tests, and Grail, with its innovative tests for various cancers. (Not only is the agency attacking vertical integration in this one; it’s attacking it when it could save countless lives.)
...her staunchest defenders are all too happy to ascribe criticism of Khan to—what else?—sexism and racism.

[Seacoaster(1)]

Great. Any chance you could stop whining about this, blow your nose, and take your lamentations to a thread devoted to your whiny racism. “Old Salt’s 1954, Now”? “Randy’s White Men Only Times”? Enough with your bullsh@t.

[Typical Lax Dad]

ILMN is still a big gain for me & not worth paying the cap gains now because it still holds 80% market share & it holds 14.5% of GRAL.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/C ... 872990.pdf

ILMN is still solid. Now that the GRAL issue is resolved, it will recover.
Even Ichan held on, didn't sell, & is not mounting another proxy fight. He said he's looking forward to their recovery under the new CEO...& he bought in much later, at a much higher price than I did.
Most rating services still rate ILMN as a "hold".

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-03-12/
Illumina has said that it will jettison Grail by divesting it or spinning it off as a separate publicly listed company. The deal has taken a heavy toll on Illumina, whose business is otherwise lucrative thanks to its ubiquitous DNA sequencing machines.

So stop whining

I will...when ILMN is back up to $516/sh.

Jesus, you are such a bore, and a really inveterate whiner.

The FTC made its decision and proposed a series of remedies. The case was then appealed by the company into the courts, where the company had the benefit of one of the most conservative and presumably antitrust hostile circuits in the country. The case finally goes to the Fifth Circuit, arguably the most conservative circuit in the nation. A three judge panel held that the FTC had shown substantial evidence demonstrating that the purchase and integration of Grail would reduce competition as companies seek to bring to market a blood test to detect many kinds of cancer. But the Court of Appeals also held that the FTC failed to properly consider Illumina's pledge to continue selling its DNA sequencing services to other firms. Illumina has offered to sign contracts to supply any of Grail's rivals and to not raise prices. The case was to be remanded for that reconsideration.

Despite having directed the FTC and lower court to reconsider certain aspects of the remedial scheme adopted by the FTC, Illumina them made the voluntary decision to divest itself of Grail.

So the most conservative court in the nation fundamentally agrees with the FTC, actually saying its ruling is sound and within binding Supreme Court precedent. Nothing about "DEI hires" from the Court -- only a straight concession that the FTC is not acting beyond settled law in the basic antitrust case, and that it had garnered substantial evidence of anti-competitive effects from the proposed merger. Then Illumina itself packs its bags and goes home, and releases Grail back into the market, probably with whatever contractual arrangements it can legally reach with Grail for co-development and the like.

In spite of all this, you whine about "DEI hires" and the lack of qualification of the head of the FTC. Both of these points are complete bullsh*t: she was and is a leading antitrust lawyer and academic, with her background in the antitrust effects of technology companies and platforms. She went to Williams, then worked in a think tank focused on antitrust and competition issues, was a visiting student at Oxford, and was then offered a reporting job by the WSJ, which she declined in order to go Yale Law School (probably a DEI admission, right?). She starred there, and wrote an article on Amazon's position in the markets and how current antitrust orthodoxy didn't reach the anticompetitive effects of such a platform. She then worked for the Open Markets Institute and was invited onto the faculty at Columbia Law School. She then worked at the FTC as a legal fellow in the office of Trump's FTC Chair. In 2021, she was appointed to the chair of the FTC herself. This is your unqualified "DEI hire." You should consider an alternative: that you are a racist asshat.

The company made an aggressive purchase of a company in their own vertical. It foundered on established Supreme Court precedent, not some revolutionary new, left-wing theory of the law. When it won a little but lost a lot at the Fifth Circuit, it put a parachute on Grail and rolled it out of the Illumina aircraft. Those are the facts. Now how about a nice cup of STFU?

You probably find the WSJ Editorial section a bore too. Those whiners published several editorials & op-eds supporting ILMN's position & none defending the FTC's & EC's actions.

What remedies did the FTC & EC propose (& when) which ILMN declined ?

ILMN offered remedies which would allow competition & make the technology available to competitors, which the FTC ALJ found sufficient.
The FTC & EC declined ILMN's offered remedies. ILMN would likely have accepted further remedies to salvage the merger.
Biden/Khan's FTC & the EC were dead set against the merger, despite any potential remedies.
It became obvious that the 5th Circuit's remand for reconsideration was futile -- the 5th Circuit still agreed with the FTC decision, just disagreed with the grounds.* Meanwhile, the EC ruled against ILMN & levied a massive fine. The protracted litigation was causing a proxy fight which severely devalued the company & would have only further delayed an unfavorable resolution. ILMN finally had to give up the fight. The FTC & EC should have negotiated mutually acceptable remedies, without having to be ordered by the 5th District Court. The FTC has deeper pockets for protracted litigation than even Illunina has. The FTC can drag out litigation forever, they don't have stockholders to answer to.

* https://content.next.westlaw.com/practi ... c.Default)

* https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/cli ... 20concerns.
it is the first time in decades that either federal antitrust enforcer has succeeded in blocking or forcing the abandonment of a vertical merger after litigating to a decision....The court found that the FTC adequately defined a relevant product market for the “research, development, and commercialization” of MCED tests, based largely on factors set out in Brown Shoe, a 1962 Supreme Court case that has played an increasingly prominent role in merger enforcement by the Biden antitrust agencies.

* https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/lit ... s?id=49610

If you reflected on this a bit, you might consider the reality that Illumina management made a series of poor decisions, which resulted in the FTC action, the litigation, and the eventual divestiture of Grail. The "DEI hire" really played the role for which she was appointed: evaluating the antitrust aspects of the potential combination, and giving the view of the law adopted by the agency. The Fifth Circuit, as you concede, largely agreed that Illumina had run afoul of the law -- repeat, the law. So, at this point, I think any rational reader will understand that your "unqualified" and "DEI hire" drivel is simply the tirade of an old racist looking for someone to blame for his personal misfortune, joining you as a junior member of the sh*tty white guy grievance club, of which such luminaries as Trump and Hitler are members. If only we could get a a good aryan in the driver's seat at the FTC. Just. S.T.F.U.

I've reflected on this quite a lot. Madame Khan did something that none of her predecessors had done in decades -- blocked a large vertical merger. She had to reach all the way back to 1962 to find a precedent to get a Win after failing against the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google& Meta, the true monopolies that reach beyond one narrow niche market sector. She was an academic activist & regulator, with no business experience. Let's see how long she lasts in the job, & what the FTC's follow on decisions look like if Trump wins. I am far from alone in my critique of Madame Khan.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12 ... ssion.html

Lina Khan’s Rough Year When a liberal star took over the FTC, she was expected to break up big business. Instead, critics say, she’s broken the agency.

By Ankush Khardori, a contributing editor who covers legal affairs.

There was palpable excitement on the left when President Biden appointed Lina Khan, just 32 at the time, to lead the Federal Trade Commission in 2021. She had risen to prominence after writing a 2017 law-review note arguing that Amazon was an illegal monopoly and became a celebrity in the burgeoning progressive antitrust-reform movement, which wants to radically change federal antitrust policy. With the appointment of Khan and others in the Biden administration, the movement seemed to assume all of the key levers of power in Washington that it would need to implement its agenda.

Things have not gone as planned for the movement or the once-rising star, who has suffered a series of conspicuous setbacks at the helm of the FTC this year. A proposed rule banning noncompete agreements has drawn skepticism from well-regarded observers. A legally dubious effort to rewrite the agency’s merger-review policy has drawn widespread criticism, including from former Obama administration officials and former chief economists at the agency. Worst of all, two high-profile lawsuits against tech giants — one against Meta, the other against Microsoft — flopped in the courts.

Khan has become an object of over-the-top derision on the right, but the discontent with her tenure inside the FTC is broader and far less ideologically motivated than her defenders would have us believe — something that became clearer to me after a series of interviews with a number of officials who left the agency after Khan took over and a group of agency alumni who are now in academia. I surveyed them to try to get a better sense of what is actually happening within the agency and how Khan might conceivably improve the situation. The returns were decidedly mixed with concerns about Khan’s leadership ranging from the personal to the political.

To my modest surprise, the most common area of concern was Khan’s temperament and management style — a subject that has generally eluded serious media scrutiny but that has vexed career officials since her arrival. In their telling, Khan’s failings in this area explain a lot about what has happened at the FTC this year, including why the agency has been bringing cases with shaky legal underpinnings, why it’s losing those cases, why experienced officials have been leaving, and why the rest of us should care. (The FTC declined a request to interview Khan.)

The stakes extend far beyond Khan’s professional ambitions or even the FTC’s current portfolio of investigations and active litigation. Khan’s failure could ultimately prove fatal to a once-in-a-generation movement to dramatically transform government antitrust policy, for better or worse, so that government regulators and the courts block far more mergers and acquisitions throughout the economy. She is not alone in the effort — she has a political and ideological ally at the helm of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division — but things are going just as suboptimally, if not demonstrably worse, over at the DOJ.

More to the point, Khan had been positioned as a defining intellectual and political leader in the movement. If her tenure at the head of the FTC turns out to be a failure, it could deal an existential blow to the movement that she has devoted her career to.

hen Khan stepped into the role, she had already become the face of the new antitrust school. (It is sometimes called the “New Brandeis school” or, more derisively, “hipster antitrust.”)

...A bleaker scenario posited by others is that Khan’s tenure at the agency could end up playing into the hands of a skeptical Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has made clear that it will push back on what it believes — fairly or not — to constitute overreach on the part of the executive branch. Kovacic praised Khan for “energizing a new generation of scholars and students” but noted that “the federal courts seem to be edging in the direction of rethinking the scope of the FTC’s power — its decision-making framework, the very constitutionality of how it operates.”
The concern is hardly misplaced. The past few years have generated several Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed the powers of federal regulators — including the FTC itself — and made them more vulnerable to legal challenges. The justices recently heard oral argument on a legal challenge to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s system of in-house courts that could also make matters worse for the FTC, which has a similar system.

“I don’t know how much the commission is thinking at the moment about the impact of trying to build a more expansive program in the face of this gathering judicial storm,” Kovacic wondered. “Do you realize you could come out of this with a much-diminished agency?” he asked. “And Congress is not coming to the rescue for you. You could come out of this with an agency that is much weaker than the one that you went in with — permanently weaker.”
“I think a lot of the staff at the agency — and a lot of observers, anybody close to the FTC — are asking a good question,” one former official told me. “‘What is her long game in this?’ And is the long game aligned with the interests of the FTC?”
That person pointed to the eventual divergence between Khan’s career path and the long-term fate of the agency that she currently leads. “It’s one thing to be very aggressive now, starting a lot of things and going to court a lot,” the person said. But Khan will eventually move on, and it will fall to the agency’s rank and file to endure any harm to the agency’s power and standing that results on her watch.
“The question is, Where will she be five to ten years from now?”

FTC Chair Lina Khan fails upward.
Aug 17 2023
For Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission, dysfunction is no bar to ambition.
...In other, still-pending cases, the FTC has the tiger by the tail. A federal court of appeals will probably reverse the agency’s effort to separate Illumina, with its platforms for genetic-sequencing tests, and Grail, with its innovative tests for various cancers. (Not only is the agency attacking vertical integration in this one; it’s attacking it when it could save countless lives.)
...her staunchest defenders are all too happy to ascribe criticism of Khan to—what else?—sexism and racism.

Personal responsibility. Nobody told you to ride the stock
Down from its peak of $500 down to $100. A lot of “investors” sold. You hung on. You haven’t lost any money. You just didn’t realize the paper gains. You still have lost any money, given your basis. Stop whining. ‘Nad up.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whose-fa ... =share_via

[Typical Lax Dad]

Petey’s greatest hits:

1. Meatball Ron is the leader of the free world.

2. Load up the truck with Gilead stock in April 2020 at $85 because of remdesivir. $66.65 today - 4 years later.

fitting