FTC Watch Quotes Professor Cotter on the FTC's Authority to Regulate Prices

Professor Tom Cotter was quoted in the newsletter FTC Watch in an artcle titled "In tackling high drug prices, FTC shows partisan split." The article discusses a recent Federal Trade Commission report in which the three Republican commissioners and the two Democratic commissioners disagreed on the Commission's authority to invoke section 5 of the FTC Act to combat excessive drug prices.  Cotter states that he would have been  “surprised to see the FTC start using its Section 5 authority to regulate drug prices " Cotter also said that, while "section 5 arguably does reach some practices that otherwise would not violate the Sherman or Clayton Acts, as the report states, for quite some time that reach has been interpreted pretty narrowly. Further, the conventional wisdom has long been that U.S. antitrust law doesn't regulate prices.” Nevertheless, “the fact that two commissioners are open to the idea, at least with regard to drug prices, is interesting.”