Joe Weisenthal on macro: why the Trump merger wave never came, and the FTC's surprisingly tough antitrust stance

Summary

The expected Trump-era merger boom hasn't materialized, and the FTC under new chair Andrew Ferguson may be the reason why — or at least part of it.

Ferguson, whom Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal interviewed at a live show in Washington D.C. last week, is keeping Lena Khan's merger guidelines in place. He frames it as a matter of definition rather than departure: consumer welfare, in his reading, extends beyond price to include harms from anti-competitive behavior that slows innovation, and harm to workers. His public and private message, according to Weisenthal, is explicit — the FTC under his watch is not a Bush-era rubber stamp, and companies expecting a green light on consolidation should recalibrate.

The second reason the merger wave never came is simpler: markets turned volatile almost immediately after the new administration took office. Tariff uncertainty and broader macro choppiness have suppressed deal appetite. Weisenthal points to the Capital One–Discover spread as a clean illustration — it has done a complete round trip since the post-election euphoria of November–December 2024, tracking the market's reassessment of how business-friendly this administration actually is.

Until a sustained market rally produces a fresh wave of announced deals that the FTC then has to approve or block, the true firmness of Ferguson's antitrust stance remains untested. Weisenthal is direct that the picture won't be clear until that happens.

What to watch

For investors trying to read the macro environment, Weisenthal puts the monthly jobs report at the top of the stack — first Friday of every month, the best single measure of whether businesses are confident enough to take on new payrolls. Below that, he flags the regional Federal Reserve manufacturing surveys, particularly questions on capital expenditure plans. The reindustrialization thesis the administration is banking on depends on businesses actually committing to investment, and right now the sentiment data suggests too much chaos for major capital decisions. Tariff arrangements remain unresolved, and no one knows what the final configuration looks like.

Delta's early signal that ticket sales are softening adds to the picture, though Weisenthal notes the aviation data is hard to read cleanly given the recent run of travel incidents in the news.

He is cautious about reading too much into soft sentiment data. In 2022, consumer sentiment was historically terrible while consumers kept spending and going on cruises in record numbers. Whether today's business anxiety translates into hard economic deterioration is, in his words, the billion-dollar question — and he doesn't have the answer yet.

Prediction markets

Weisenthal is broadly supportive of prediction markets, on the grounds that forcing a price onto a forecast is more intellectually honest than confident tweets with no skin in the game. His more pointed observation is structural: the U.S. Treasury market is already a prediction market, pricing the ensemble view of what the Fed's twelve voting members will do over any given term. That the Treasury market sits at the core of global finance validates the concept. The practical gap is liquidity and duration — nobody wants capital locked into a 2032 contract.