Chillin'Competition

We will be closing the shop for a few days, but there are a few things that we would like to tell you first:

– Our personal Christmas wishlists appear in a special issue from Competition Policy International.  They´ve done a great job with editing our pictures (“thanks” to all those of you who have written to say that I need to change the one I use for these things),  and we´re grateful for having been placed in such good company. I´m also grateful for the opportunity to do some free advertising of my family´s bakery: thanks to this they will now start seeing some usefulness to my job!  Nicolas also profited from this occassion to make it (more) evident that he´s a competition law freak geek.

– Nicolas and I had some pre-holiday drinks last night together with some good friends. Not only all of us were competition lawyers, but the place we went to was also packed with competition lawyers from a well-known firm. We´ll keep the name of the firm confidential, but we can give you a hint: what do you see in the second row of the image below?  😉

– Many other lawyers in Brussels and elsewhere are also getting some last-minute Christmas gifts. Our thoughts will be with all those who, like our friend David Henry, will have to be stuck at the office with a merger filing…

– The Spanish CNC also received a Christmas gift the day before yesterday, when the names of the members of the new Spanish government were made public. The new minister for the economy is Luis de Guindos, who was the Secretary General for Competition between 1996 and 2002. The CNC is certainly poised to play an important role in the coming years as Spain makes an effor to boost competitiveness. (By the way, the CNC has joined the list of national competition authorities resorting to animated cartoons to explain their job and the benefits of competition. Check it out here).

– A reminder of some events coming up right after the holidays: Nicolas will be opening the new edition of the IEB´s Competition Law Course in Madrid on 13 January (we´ll profit from our visit to Madrid to plot a couple of interesting projects on which we´ll report right after the holidays). The BSC will also be holding a very interesting conference on “Costs in Competition Law” on 25 January.

– A light piece of Christmas reading: Freedom to Trade and the Competitive Process by A. Edlin and J. Farrell. This short article is perhaps the most insightful paper I´ve read in a long time. It´s cool to see two top-notch U.S. economists saying sensible stuff that in Europe would be received with the worst of all insults: Ordoliberal!

– Finally, we want to thank whoever had the idea of improving the search tool in the webpage of the European Court of Justice.  You made our lives easier.

– To be frank, there were more issues on which I was planning to comment, but I need to run to the airport…Merry Christmas to all and our best wishes for 2012!!

P.S. We leave you with the image of the European Union´s Christmas tree: