Josh Wright opines:

We now have a new event to use to evaluate the market’s reaction: AT&T and T-Mobile abandoning the merger.   It appears that, once again,Sprint’s stock price surged in reaction to the news (and now up about 8% in the last 24 hours).  Again, Verizon doesn’t move much at all

Stock market reactions and event studies — and I’m not claiming I’ve done a full blown event study here,  just a simple comparison of stock price reactions to the market trends — produce valuable information.  They are obviously not dispositive.  The market can be wrong.  But so can regulators.  And as my colleague Bruce Kobayashi said in an interview (which I cannot find online) in Fortune Magazine evaluating the market reaction to the Staples-Office Depot merger in light of the FTC’s challenge: “It boils down to whether you trust the agencies or the stock market. I’ll take the stock market any day.”

Markets provide information.  The information provided here gives no reason to celebrate the withdraw on the behalf of consumers, or even the ever-present “public interest.”