The full report has not been made public, but a summary of it has. I am sure that most of you are aware of the gist of that summary. Because there was a shortage of space in ships coming from Asia to North America, carriers acted as they would in a free market - they auctioned off space to the highest bidder. If this were a free market, I would not have a problem with that. But this is not a free market.
Carriers have antitrust immunity to fix prices jointly.
We can have one or the other, but it is not fair to have one system when space is short and another when there is too much space. Indeed, one could make a fair argument that antitrust immunity actually leads to the chronic oversupply problems that we see in shipping. However, this episode does illustrate that carriers are perfectly capable of operating like everyone else does in a free market. During our May 5 hearing, almost everyone who supports antitrust immunity argued that we needed to wait and see how the new reforms were going to work. All of this history left me feeling skeptical, but I was willing to wait and see.