This paper assesses the European Commission’s draft Merger Guidelines against the treatment of efficiencies, the failing firm defence, and the counterfactual in the 2004 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2008 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines. My central claim is that the draft guidelines represent a welcome but incomplete correction. They rightly recognise that merger control can no longer be organised solely around static price effects, structural presumptions, and a narrow conception of consumer harm. They expand the role of efficiencies, introduce the...