Peter Freeman, Competition Commission chairman, has poured cold water on the idea - hope? - that takeover rules would be loosened up to aid industries most battered by the recession.
 
Freeman says he will be “sensitive” to the predicament of troubled businesses, but that this will be trumped in a regulatory sense by any merger or oligopolistic arrangement that might cause long-term anti-competitive economic damange.
 
This is surely right, if unpalatable to the industries concerned. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater as far as the regulatory framework is concerned.
 
It’s there for a good reason. To protect consumers and the long-term health of the economy.
 
Yes, you might argue, but that means there is one rule for some industries and one for others.
 
The government’s ditching of the market share rules to allow Lloyds TSB to take over HBOS, for example, and gain massive market shares in areas like customer accounts and home loans.
 
What was that if not a recognition that the base rules of the competition game had changed in extraordinary circumstances?
 
But Freeman is right to have no truck with this. Critics critics may be theoretically correct in pointing out the disparities in regulatory treatment of different sectors.
 
But Freeman says with brutal candour that the bending of the rules (I paraphrase) in financial services is justified by its integral importance to wider economic stability.
 
However, by stark contrast, he says you can get along without a motor industry.
 
It is the difference between theoretical fairness and the relentless verities of real life.
 
Billionaire stock market guru and philanthropist George Soros summed up a similar situation of tough yet seemingly unfair realities during the controversy over ‘moral hazard’ in 2007 and 2008.
 
It was unfair that central banks had to actually bail out profligate financial organisations when irresponsible and greedy risk-taking had got them into problems in the first place.
 
But Soros said in the extraordinary Great Depression-type climate we were flirting with the greater importance of the stability of the whole financial system trumped moral hazard.
 
Unpalatable, yes, but true nonetheless.
 
The CC chairman is equally right to say that what has happened in the banking bailout is the exception that proves the rule.
 
The regulators must look beyond the recession to the greater long-term good of consumers. And if that means ruling out rescue takeovers that will address a short-term problem but cause as much problems as they solve in the long-term, that is preferable.
 
We should not be panicked into ‘rescues’ that come with feet of clay.