; (10) since 2008, firms in the United States have engaged in over $10,000,000,000,000 in mergers and acquisitions; (11) between 2010 and 2015, there was a 50-percent increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice; (12) the antitrust laws, particularly section 7 of the Clayton Act ( 15 U.S.C. 18 ), are the first line of defense against anticompetitive mergers; and (13) in recent years, some court decisions and enforcement policies have limited the vitality of the Clayton Act to prevent harmful consolidation by— (A) discounting previously accepted presumptions that certain acquisitions are anticompetitive; (B) focusing inordinately on the impact on price of an acquisition in the short term; (C) underestimating the dangers that horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate mergers will lower quality, reduce choice, impede innovation, exclude competitors, increase entry barriers, or create monopsony power; and (D) requiring the government to prove harmful effects of a merger to a near certainty. (b) Purposes The purposes of this Act are to promote competition and prevent harmful consolidation by restoring the original intent of the Clayton Act to address the full range of anticompetitive harms, including— (1) eliminating the requirement that a merger substantially lessens competition to clarify that the Clayton Act prohibits mergers that, as a result of consolidation, may materially lower quality, reduce choice, reduce innovation, exclude competitors, increase entry barriers, or increase price; (2) inserting the phrase materially to establish that the plaintiff need not show an acquisition may cause a substantial amount of harm to competition, but rather show that an acquisition may cause more than a de minimis amount of harm to competition; (3) amending the Clayton Act to include the term monopsony to clarify that an acquisition that tends to create a monopsony violates the Clayton Act