FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson’s Big Plans for Big Tech 3/13/25

0:00Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Here's what's coming up today on Squawk Pod. A big interview in Washington on antitrust policy. So you're not backing off of Amazon? Unequivocally, no. Our own Eamon Javer sits down with the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission to talk big plans for big tech. I'm a law enforcer. My job is to make sure that everyone is complying with the antitrust laws, and if they aren't, we go to court. And healthcare industry veteran Mark Bertolini is attempting to improve the messy, frustrating insurance system. And there's a lot to improve.

0:39Last year, Americans borrowed$74 billion to pay for their health debts, even though they had coverage. And one in five people under 39 had problems with their medical coverage and had to borrow money. Those big conversations, plus two astronauts still in space. Jamie Dimon has a word of caution on consumer spending. And keeping the government open and funded, the GOP-led House might have agreed on a continuing resolution, but in the Senate, there's a group of dissenters. They're saying it's not clean. I don't know. It's Thursday, March 13, 2025. Very special day for some people. Squawk Pod begins right now.

1:18Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue it, please. Do you need a calculator? Yeah, probably. Becky's trying to figure out how long she's been married. I don't know. Andrew knows. How long Becky's been. No, how long you've been. One year before her. One year before her. So he doesn't know either. All right, well, we will. I know, it's been a while. We're all ancient, and we've been together longer than many marriages. We have. When we go to break, I'm going to do big balloons, everything. Oh, that's so nice. Pictures. Okay. Is that all right? We'll get ready for all of it. We'll let the rest of you in on this secret when we get back in a little bit.

1:57Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And here we go this morning. Yesterday, things evened out a little bit, at least for the S &P and the NASDAQ. Dow was down for the third day in a row. And for the week, the Dow is now on pace to be down by 3.4%. You did see a little bit of a gain for both the S &P 500 and the NASDAQ. Not massive gains by any stretch. Did I win or is that sort of a draw? It was mixed. I thought it would close higher, but the S &P was up almost 30, and the NASDAQ was up over 100.

2:31Yeah, it was up 27 points for the S &P. The S &P, 27 is not— Kissing your sister. That's not so bad. It was up half of a percent. But when you're down 9.6 percent and you go up 27— Yeah, it kept you from going into correction territory. So you can take that on it. Thank you. The NASDAQ was up by 212 points. The NASDAQ was up by 212 points for a gain of 1.2 percent. But for the week today, both of the S &P 500 and the Nasdaq are still down by about 3%. This morning you see some green arrows.

3:03Who wants to pick the fighter to shut the government down? You're hoping that other Democrats will join along with you and not shut down the government, correct? I'm saying that that's the choice. And you can either vote for the CR and you don't have to. That means you don't agree with all of it. It's just that we agree that you don't want to shut the government down. The Democratic leader. Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.

3:47Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that. I hope, I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying the Democrats in the upper chamber plan to reject a government funding bill that Republicans passed in the House. Now, without a funding solution by tomorrow night. The government will run out of money and shut down. Schumer calling on Congress to pass a one-month temporary spending bill to keep the lights on in D.C.

4:30However, last night, Senate Majority Leader John Thune took the first procedural step towards senators considering the House passed bill. That's likely to happen midday tomorrow. I haven't heard from Rand Paul. He was making it so that an additional Democrat would have to support it. Well, Fetterman basically takes his spot. Fetterman, the Democrat, has said that he would vote for it. Like everything in Washington, normally a clean bill would be something that the Democrats always want, a clean CR or whatever it is. They're saying it's not clean. I don't know. I think the difference is it's a year-long CR.

5:13You haven't had that since 2013, but it's not completely unheard of to have a year-long CR. There are there's something in it that would allow the Trump administration, I think, to have more say over the money, be able to cut more and have Congress come back and have to rectify that later instead of thinking that it starts with Congress. And some of the Democrats have a problem with that. A big issue is that the House has left town. So if they don't take what the House has offered up, there's going to be complications. And it gets so tiresome as both sides constantly are hoping that they get something like this so they can say it's the other side's fault.

5:47Right. The truth is, it's both of their faults. As their approval was 6%, they're trying to, you know, gain a little advantage on something stupid like this. No one, I don't think people, people at home just want to... Well, there's been a lot of consternation. Yesterday, there was a meeting among the Democrats that, according to Politico, at least, devolved into some F-bombs being dropped, some yelling behind closed doors. I think we should legalize the F-word. I mean, after the Democrats, like last week, every one of them used it. Like these really, they look like schoolteachers, a couple of them that were talking.

6:22They look so, you know, concerned and they just let loose. So can we legalize it? You know what? F no. I'm going to take the initiative right now. No, do not. Don't do it? No. Will you help me? You're on your own. You're not even going to think. Walk the plank on your own. You should have said F no. That's what you should have said. That would have been funny. Would have been. That would have been funny. That's what I said 12 seconds ago. Oh. And you ignored me. But he said it. He said it. So crazy. He said it this way. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon sounding a note of caution on the U.S. consumer.

6:59Dimon spoke at BlackRock's Retirement Summit in Washington. Obviously, if you look at the economy today, you see a weakening. You know, consumers are still spending money. Jobs are still plentiful. Wages are still going up. CPI is kind of leveled off a little bit. But you do see a weakening of sentiment, certain spend, certain type of spend that people consider more discretionary. And, you know, what changes that is hard to tell. You know, I don't think the average American consumer who wakes up in the morning and goes to work, which are like 175 million of them, changes what they're going to do because they're reading about tariffs.

7:34So I just question that a little bit. Diamond said in his view, geopolitical concerns are much more important than economic ones in the next six months to a year. But you could argue that some of those economic concerns could become geopolitical ones because the cold wars of tariffs and things could turn into other scumishes. It is kind of an interesting point Jamie Diamond makes. But when the tariffs do go in and you go in and things cost more, it might hurt consumer sentiment. But just the specter of that eventually. If I was in the market for a car, I would buy it immediately. You might buy it now.

8:09I would buy it now. Well, no, but I think there's two issues. It's that. And if you're Ford, even though Ford hasn't, it may not feel like it's hitting the consumer yet, it will. Because they're hoarding parts. They're having to bring supplies over at a huge cost to them. And prices might go up even before it hits the bottom line. So the point is, you can put tariffs on. the prospect of tariffs unto themselves for certain types of industries actually do have a cost. But we're talking consumers, and I just don't think consumers decide. I don't think consumers sort of fall off. No, I agree. Consumers are not sitting there making that comment.

8:42That's what Jamie said, right? The business leaders are, and the business leaders are not only doing that, they're also then sitting on their hands because they don't want to make their own investments, which also means that they're not employing people. I mean, yes, the consumer is not feeling it right this second yet, but by default you would later. Well, it's not if there are concerns at your company, right? If there's word being put out that that project we were going to go ahead with, we're going to hold off and wait and see. That makes consumers nervous if you're seeing that at your job.

9:09Fair point that this is not the first thing 175 million Americans think about every morning. They're not watching this and looking at every single push along the way. But they may notice that their 401k is down over time. What he said at the beginning, though, is that you are seeing weakness, generalized consumer weakness. That could be from the storms. That could be from them spending a lot of money over the holidays and saying they were going to take a little bit of a pause from it. It could be from fires. You know, there's a lot of things that have happened. And between now and April 2nd, how many machinations do you think we'll have?

9:40How about between now and 4.30? Yeah, between now and 4 o 'clock. Two astronauts stuck in space for months will have to wait at least a little bit longer now before they make their way home. SpaceX scrubbing what was a planned launch for four astronauts heading into the International Space Station today, blaming the delay on a launch pad issue. The company sent in a post on exit. It's targeting now another launch that they say will happen no earlier than tomorrow. Plans call for relieving the astronauts currently on the space station and sending Americans Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams home.

10:16They've been stuck up there on that station now for nine months after a trip there on Boeing's faulty Starliner spacecraft last year. That mission originally scheduled to last eight days and a lot of hope to get those astronauts back on the ground. It's just a reminder that that is not a normal job. Can you imagine you were going to Washington or Omaha for two or three days and oh, by the way, nine months later, you're still not back. I wonder how long really the muscle tone and things like that. They had Mark Kelly up there for like a year or something, right? And it did have an impact. He's a twin, and when he came back, there were differences to his body mass.

10:54Because when you come back and all of a sudden gravity hits you full force. No gravity. The freeze-dried food. You can't shower up there, right? You can't shower or anything up there. Well, they've got the toilet that goes whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. It's a crap shoot. Literally. Literally, where would be your first visit when you got home? Home? Yeah, I know, but then where? Sal's Pizza? Taco Bell? I mean, what do you think? I don't think there's anything I'd miss that much. All that food? No, I know. I wouldn't leave my house again. There's going to be a reunion. I wouldn't leave my house again.

11:32Italian, go hard on carbs. Hard on carbs. After eating that stuff? What is that stuff they're eating up there? Oh, my God. It is amazing, though. Washing everything down with tang. The idea of success is coming home. All that tang, I'd never drink tang. We alluded to this a little bit, and it's an anniversary for me, and it's 27 years. You and Penelope, 27 years. It's 27 years, and I would contend, that is Huala Lai, was where that was. We played golf, actually, that day. Friday the 13th, it wasn't just the 13th, it was Friday the 13th, and a lunar eclipse. So we wanted to stack, you know, stack everything together and deal.

12:11I think anniversaries are more important than birthdays. I mean, birthdays, if you don't die, you will have a birthday, right? You don't have to do anything except just make it to your birthday. Anniversary are achievements, and from all good things, I think, come. This is true. This is true. Finding the best, finding great partners of all the games. What else is there? So happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary to me. And to Penelope. Mainly to Penelope. Who, you know, me putting up with it is not that big a deal. But she deserves accolades. Love you. We'll be right back. Cheese will be next.

12:55To see a picture of those two crazy kids, Joe and Penelope, on their wedding day, check out Joe Kernan's feed on X. His handle is at Joe Squawk. Happy anniversary. Coming up next, the new head of the Federal Trade Commission has a markedly different approach from his predecessor, Lena Kahn, Andrew Ferguson, in his first CNBC interview on his role as a law enforcer. If we've got a merger or conduct that violates the antitrust laws and I think I can prove it in court, I'm going to take you to court. And if we don't, I'm going to get the hell out of the way. More Squawk Pod is just ahead.

13:36Welcome back to Squawk Pod. It's March. We're still getting to know President Trump's picks for leadership across his new administration. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent we have heard from in several media interviews. Same with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and even Education Secretary Linda McMahon. And interviews with all three of those can also be found in recent days in your Squawk Pod feed. Please check it out. Today, we're talking to the president's pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson. He replaced the often vilified Lena Kahn. Fun fact, guess where you can find Lena Kahn's exit interview from the FTC?

14:13Yep, on your SquawkPod feed. Just search. Andrew Ferguson is a vocal critic of big tech and other corporate concerns. His first act as chair was closing the commission's DEI office. On X, Ferguson has even gone so far as to refer to the, quote, tyranny of big tech. And as the new cop on the beat, so to speak, he's picking up a legacy of litigation. In 2023, the FTC sued Amazon for deceptive practices to amass Amazon Prime memberships. And in an awkward couple of hours, just the other day, the FTC requested a delay to proceedings, citing resource constraints, but then later reversed course. There are, in fact, enough resources.

14:54A bit of a swing there. Another tech giant in the FTC sites, Meta. The two are going head-to-head in an antitrust trial set to begin next month. zeroing in on the Facebook parents' acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.

15:11The FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, sat down in Washington with our own reporter, Eamon Javers, within 48 hours of some comments he made to CEOs at a private meeting leaking to the press. The gist of those comments? Ferguson said he wants the FTC out of the way of legal dealmaking. He makes his case now. Eamon Javers kicks things off. I'm sitting here with the new FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson. Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Fascinating time to talk to you because so many headlines involving your agency right now. And we had this dramatic moment earlier in the week where you were at a CEO event, the Yale CEO Conference, which was supposed to be off the record.

15:50I was in the room. You were talking to some of the biggest CEOs in the world, including Jamie Dimon and others. And then somebody recorded it and leaked some of the comments about your overall worldview on the FTC. I want to go to your overall worldview on the FTC. But before we do that, I want to do a quick whip around of some of the big tech cases that you guys are facing, because so much of what you're doing impacts the stock price of so many of these companies. Starting with Amazon. Yesterday, there was this fascinating moment where you guys filed in court and said, we need to delay our Amazon case because we don't have the resources.

16:24And then like a couple of hours later, you filed another filing saying, no, actually, we were wrong. We're sorry. We do have the resources. Can you explain what happened there? Sure. And thanks for having me. Didn't file anything saying we didn't have the resources. Lawyer was talking during a hearing. The lawyer was wrong. The lawyer said he was wrong in the filing. I've said since day one, big tech is one of the main priorities of the Trump Vance FTC. It's one of the reasons the president appointed me to this position. I've said since day one, every resource necessary to litigate these cases is available, will be made available.

16:57That remains true. That's why the lawyer filed what he did after he said what he did. He was wrong. We've got the resources. We've had them since day one. We're going to litigate these cases. So you're not backing off of Amazon? Unequivocally, no. Microsoft. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that you've opened an investigation into Microsoft. Can you tell us where that investigation stands right now? Well, we're a law enforcement agency, so, you know, I'm not allowed to talk about stuff going on within the agency. But I can say, President Trump appointed me to protect Americans in the marketplace, And that includes from big tech.

17:25And I've said since day one, big tech is one of our main priorities. And that remains true. And the other big question is Facebook. You've got a case scheduled to go to trial in April, I believe, involving Facebook. And yesterday we saw Mark Zuckerberg at the White House. We don't know exactly what Mark Zuckerberg was talking to people at the White House about. But he is a fascinating figure because he's done this interesting political pitch toward MAGA. And he has become friends with Elon Musk. He's become friendly with the president and the administration. If the administration came to you and said, hey, wait a second, you know, we kind of like Zuckerberg now.

17:58Dial it back on Facebook. Would you do that? President Trump launched this suit against Meta in 2020. It's been litigated out for the last five years. I'm a law enforcer. My job is to make sure that everyone is complying with the antitrust laws. And if they aren't, we go to court. So the politics of all this sort of above my pay grade. I see my job as pressing litigation where we have it, enforcing the antitrust laws across all the markets. taking big tech very seriously, and that's what we're going to do. So you don't see Facebook is off the hook here either. We've got a trial coming up. The team's getting ready.

18:29We're pressing toward that. Let me ask you about, we had this sort of only in Washington drama about the secret recording at the CEO event earlier this week. You know, leaving the recording aside, I'm fascinated by your comments because I was in the room for that. And you sort of laid out your approach to the FTC and to antitrust and sort of big corporate power in that room. And I want to see if you can do that for our audience on live television, because I think it's different than what a lot of folks on Wall Street have expected from a Trump FTC. After the election, there was a lot of talk that the Trump FTC would be, you know, open season for M &A, for big companies to do what they want.

19:06You don't see it quite that way. And I wonder if you could explain what the difference is between what Wall Street expected and what you're doing. Sure. This is a free market administration, but one of the most important ways we keep our markets free in this country is vigorously enforcing the antitrust laws. If we've got markets infected with monopolies, with collusion, with foreclosure, the markets aren't free. They don't work for ordinary Americans. President Trump won this election because ordinary Americans were fed up with the way that the country was working. And I see it as my job at the FTC to vigorously enforce the antitrust laws to protect ordinary Americans.

19:40But I've talked with a lot of people in the business community, and one of the biggest objections they had with the previous administration's antitrust regime was they never quite understood what was going on. There was a lot of unclarity. There was a lot of uncertainty. I see it as one of my jobs to provide regulatory certainty, regulatory clarity. And here's what I want to say about that. If we've got a merger or conduct that violates the antitrust laws, and I think I can prove it in court, I'm going to take you to court. And if we don't, I'm going to get the hell out of the way. The FTC is not going to try to use sort of sub-regulatory means to hold up mergers without actually taking people to court and hope that they die on the vine.

20:17That's over. If we think it violates the laws, we're going to litigate. And if it doesn't, we're going to get out of the way and we're going to let markets do their thing. We want the economy to grow. We want it to be vibrant. We want it to be dynamic. We want it to be innovative. That's how we're going to get out of this debt crisis. The FTC can play a role in that by enforcing the antitrust laws, make sure they work for everyone. But if you're not violating the law, the FTC is going to get out of the way. Andrew Ross Sorkin back in the studio has got a question for you. So let's let him jump in.

20:42Hey, Chair Ferguson, I just want to understand, and maybe you can speak to it in terms of just the way the public's supposed to think about it. I think there's some folks in the business community who look at some of the decisions or things that are going on and look at them as political. I know it's not your jurisdiction. I think it's the FCC that's looking at the Paramount transaction, for example, and this 60 minutes piece and whether there should be a settlement or not. But how should people think about sort of these political elements, which historically I don't think were necessarily, though maybe you'd argue they were, considered in the overall, you know, decision to pursue these transactions or not?

21:21Yeah. President Trump appointed me to enforce the laws and to enforce them without fear or favor. My own view is the politics are all beside the point. My job is to protect Americans from monopoly and to protect Americans from fraud. And I don't care about the politics of the companies involved. I care about protecting ordinary Americans as consumers and as workers from fraud and from monopoly. And so that's what I'm going to do. Politics all aside, that's my job, is enforce the law, enforce them fairly and without regard to politics. Is that a lean economy or an actual monopoly? That said, monopoly is the antitrust laws, understand it.

21:59Look, I have no ideological predisposition against merger and acquisition activity. It's part of how the economy grows. But I do have a strong ideological preference for vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws. I don't want to fall asleep at the wheel and allow monopolies to raise everyone's prices, deprive us of innovation, to make our economy less dynamic. But look, I see it as my job to enforce the laws and win in court. And if I can't win in court, the FTC needs to get out of the way and let business innovate for all Americans. And what you said in that room of CEOs earlier this week was so fascinating to me, because if I'm understanding it correctly, you see consolidation of large corporate power as potentially threatening to sort of Americans' liberty in a sense of, you know, big corporations can have a social agenda that you don't agree with on, whether that's vaccines or masks or Black Lives Matter issues.

22:53that's something that you see as potentially threatening to Americans. Can you explain that? Yeah. Look, go back to 2020. You know, if you had a view on masks that was inconsistent with how big tech felt about masks, you weren't allowed to talk about it. If you had a view on vaccines, couldn't talk about it. If you thought that changing election laws in the middle of an election was unfair, you weren't allowed to talk about it. But it wasn't just big tech censorship. That was a huge problem. Consumers couldn't go into a store without having political messages pushed in their face. And I'm sitting in 2020 working in the Senate going, gosh, if companies feel like they can alienate half of their consumer base without suffering any real competitive consequences, we probably have a competition problem.

23:36But that's what I care about is competition. It's not the political messaging itself. That's not my job. My job is to protect Americans from the abuse of market power. And if market power makes it possible for companies to censor or to push a social agenda that is really alienating to Americans. I care about the market power, not the message. That's my job as an antitrust enforcer is protect Americans from the abuse of market power. Becky wants to jump in here too. Chair Ferguson, thank you for being with us. I think that clarifies things in a way that I hadn't heard before. And I think that may be where people are coming down on it.