Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU Law School
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Event description
Over recent decades, and especially since the global financial crisis, asset managers like BlackRock and Blackstone have accumulated immense economic and political power. Based on my forthcoming book, Antitrust and the Age of Asset Management, the seminar will explore how asset managers use their power to consolidate markets and reap the profits that flow from market dominance. Specifically, it will explore two ways in which they drive consolidation: private equity houses’ practice of serially acquiring companies in a single industry (“roll-up acquisitions”) and a subtler form of consolidation created by asset managers holding shares in multiple companies active across the same market (“horizontal shareholding”). The seminar will consider these issues in the Australian context and discuss proposals for tackling finance-led consolidation.
Speakers
Dr Andrew McLean
Dr Andrew McLean is Lecturer of Law & Political Economy at the University of Edinburgh. Andrew holds a PhD in Law from University College London, an LLM in Law and Economics from Queen Mary University of London, and an undergraduate degree in Economics from Edinburgh. His research primarily focuses on antitrust and competition policy through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates law, economics and political economy. Andrew’s first book, Antitrust and the Age of Asset Management, is being published by Harvard University Press in November 2026. As a Visiting Fellow at ANU, he will be developing a new project on the relationship between competition law, labour and inequality.