So after the surge in prices from normal market forces, they tried to keep prices up by placing high bids on eggs that they never intended to actually purchase. This briefly worked, then the market re-asserted itself and prices cratered. Now, after the fact, the justice department is investigating the bidding shenanigans. Is that a fair summary of the situation?
I guess the thing I'm confused about is how bidding above market rates for eggs didn't just result in these companies being stuck with a bunch of eggs that they grossly overpaid for? How did the scheme actually work?
It sounds like the exchange consumes bids, not just closed transactions. So these companies were basically publishing fraudulent bids that never completed.
I can’t tell from the article if they were bidding on each others eggs or bidding on other farmers eggs and then canceling.
So is the real collusion here the fact that an index like that exists? Why are prices set by a centralized index rather than just normal supply and demand? (Genuinely asking; egg markets are far outside my area of expertise.)
All kinds of commodities are sold on centralized exchanges. With those, however, you can't bid and then not settle the transaction, AFAIK. That's the part that's confusing to me, how can bids that never result in a sale affect prices, at least for very long?
"and not even for the lovingly cared-for, cage-free variety"
Which oddly did not increase in price much. I was in a discussion once on a forum and brought up that eggs around me (PNW) were still in the $6 for 18 when everyone else was complaining about $10 for a dozen. Next time I bought eggs, the ones I buy were the same price as always but the normal white eggs were in fact $10 a dozen...
My friends in the midwest always tell me egg prices have actually never been lower. They've been tracking them for a while now, and they were low during 2014-2020, then had a massive, unexpected jump, then another massive decrease starting 2025. Curious to know what the reasons are here.
I'm also in the PNW. The egg thing seemed weird to me when the local organic eggs didn't budge at all. We had bird deaths in the wild from the flu as well, so I know it was out here.
Local farms are rarely selling directly to grocery stores. They sell to a number of organic/free range/whatever companies like Vital Farms that aggregate from the smaller farmers and sell to grocery stores (or grocery store suppliers).
At least that is my understanding of the way the scale is managed.
> [Urner Barry] also collects bids that egg producers make for each other’s surplus inventory on an exchange called Egg Clearinghouse, Inc. [It] takes in those bids even before they lead to any sale, as a signal of demand.
> they had the ability to create the illusion of [consumer demand] through bids on the surplus exchange for purchases they had no intent of completing
This seems like a system tailor-made for collision. It seems like the consumer protection agency should force changes. Too bad they've been made toothless.
It seems the system was prone to manipulation. Having prices for high volumen transactions be set by low volume transaction in another market looks pretty silly. If they don't fix that there'll be worse troubles than price gouging by the big producers.
I guess during one of the last surges the question I had was: Isn't a big egg company damned if they do or don't? If I'm a massive egg farmer in an area that's untouched by bird flu, and I keep my prices low: then I'm the bad guy who's running struggling operations out of business. If I raise my prices to stay in line with those operations, now I'm colluding in some way. If we break up big companies so they don't have the kind of power over the market, we trade lower prices for more resilience since the lowest prices are going to come from the highest scale.
I dunno. It's a weird situation. And eggs are particularly weird because, as the article notes, people are definitely willing to pay more for them; the low prices have less to do with true demand and more to do with competition.
The problem isn’t setting prices in response to market conditions, it’s colluding with other companies to raise prices in unison. That’s what makes something a cartel and that’s what happened here. And I don’t mean raising prices because you saw that someone else did, this was literal phone calls and texts about when prices should go up.
I mean, given a lot of the rhetoric that happens around egg prices, it does seem like setting prices in response to market conditions is a problem to many.
You just read an article describing how egg prices were not set in response to market conditions, and were instead manipulated by egg producers. Are you saying that you think, based on the rhetoric, that in an alternate reality where egg prices were actually increased due to market pressures, that people would still complain? I mean, probably.
The purpose of my first sentence was to establish that I was I bringing in some associated thoughts into an article where some alleged collusion is happening, so it's not correct to read it as an attempted refutation of the article.
If there's actual collusion: sure, that's bad! But to be clear, this is not the total solution to the egg price puzzle; we don't know the extent to which this impacted the market.
I guess I just don't like the idea that every price spike is read as greed, because you lose the ability to tell cartel behavior from a supply shock, and actual bad behavior gets less scrutiny, not more. I'm seeing it in this thread: capitalism bad, republicans bad, khan good, etc. Perhaps I did the same thing in the opposite direction.
> On Wednesday, Hickman saw evidence that Urner Barry was taking in data that would lower prices — “pull the market down,” in the words of one executive — and goaded his erstwhile competitors to respond. “As a group,” the executive followed up, “we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often.”
So while they were actively breaking the law, colluding to screw over the free market, they soothed themselves with jokes about non-existent voter fraud.
> “The reason, in this case, not to pursue litigation is that the conduct had already been resolved, right?” [U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr.] went on, referencing the decline in egg prices.
They stopped this particular instance of it after the horse already left the barn and did nothing to dissuade future anticompetitive collusion.
Well, the "something" the Trump adminstration landed on (with an investigation started by Biden's team) I think for OP wasn't enough. A small monetary settlement without jail time of the executives involved is hardly the "something" that needs to be done in order to curtail this behavior and stop it in the first place. When the people who committed a crime still gets to keep any amount of their stolen money, that, to me, is less than "something".
So she can lose more lawsuits related to her anti-silicon valley obsession? I'd rather get someone who is actually objective and takes a holisitic look at every industry.
Her blinders kept her from focusing on truly monopolies and anti-trust behavior like cable and broadbrand providers, regional hospital systems, etc.
She was quite active, which is more than we can be said about some of her predecessors.
Also she was hated by the right people, that's always a good sign.
An economist would say profits go to zero if markets are really free. Like if there were no barriers to entry and consumers chose purely on price firms would keep entering and would always be incentivized to lower prices to get the sale.
There are barriers that are natural, like "I already have a relationship with vendor A", or "I really enjoy brand B", "I'll have to invest a lot of money to start this business and I won't do it if it seems unlikely I'll make a profit", etc. Then there are barriers like "we have a patent on this technology", "we own a copyright on this movie", "we control the distribution channels", "we pass laws to get keep out competitors."
Business is all about finding ways to beat the economic constraints and ensure you get a profit!
The best case you can make for our system, in my mind, is that there is competition so that vendors have an incentive to provide good products and services at fair prices. Sure, there has to be enough profit to attract investment, but our system works better for all of us when regulation encourages competition.
There are businesses that are highly profitable even in a commodity market. Profits go to zero on the marginal supplier in a perfect market. Any supplier who has a lower cost base than the marginal supplier is profitable.
The canonical example is oil. It costs about $3 to pull a barrel of oil from the ground and pipe it to port in the best oil fields of Saudi Arabia. OTOH, Canadian tar sands cost $50 to pull out of the ground and another $10+ to get to port. During normal times the natural price of oil is ~$60.
Adam smith was hostile towards monopolies (which your link refers to - nothing to do with price fixing although the conclusion is the same) and his critiques being very apparent throughout Wealth of Nations. This is a common opinion with proponents of free markets.
So what specifically about capitalism makes this a "natural consequence"?
Regulation is literally there to compensate for these types of issues with unregulated capitalism. I don't see how you could draw the conclusion that the thing we've tried many times and that works a lot of the time can't work.
if it's not perfect, it's useless or destructive is a pretty common perspective in left-wing groupthink. Some examples are how everyone to the right of a left winger is a republican/fascist/etc or that it's Medicare 4 All or nothing.
I get who you're talking about, and I've encountered those tiresome people. The flavor of the week is that No Kings is a Disneyfied faux protest. This of course ignores the fact that large scale protest in the US attracts police beatings and widespread use of pain compliance techniques if it isn't presented as family friendly.
Avoiding those outcomes while attracting is steadily growing number of protesters, with the most recent attracting 8 to 9 million is in itself a huge accomplishment. Way too big to ignore and within reach of overwhelming numbers.
Which is to say you could've picked a better example than M4A. Holding that up as a minimum expectation is hardly radical.
> Which is to say you could've picked a better example than M4A. Holding that up as a minimum expectation is hardly radical.
I'm not commenting on whether it's radical, just that if they had the choice between something like the ACA and nothing, many in these groups would rather have nothing. In fact, many would argue (as they would against other things they consider "incrementalism") that anything less than their demands would actually be detrimental somehow. Very much in opposition to "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". This is exemplified in the whole M4A "force the vote" nonsense.
> The flavor of the week is that No Kings is a Disneyfied faux protest.
It's strange to ignore all of the actual criticisms, such as that they are protests with absolutely no demands, and that they're arranged by Democratic Party insiders using spam farms. The reason they're called "No Kings" is because nobody knows what that's supposed to mean. It was consciously concocted as an alternative to fighting the "oligarchs" as Sanders constantly said, because Democrats support oligarchs.
> with the most recent attracting 8 to 9 million is in itself a huge accomplishment.
It's not. They're just faithful movement Democrats walking together in the street trying to figure out different ways to yell "fuck Trump." They're a mockery of protests, they're just extremely ineffective marketing.
They wouldn't be tiresome if they were easy to answer for you. Accusing people of just complaining about people and things not being "perfect" is a sign of somebody who doesn't even have a dishonest argument to make, so they're resorting to making no argument at all, and instead calling you a snob.
Every socialist I’ve ever met has conceded that capitalism is a great mechanism for wealth generation. Just not for much else humans might value in their societies.
There are two types of advocates for efficient markets: the true believers & the people who manipulate markets. The latter create and fund institutes & academic departments stocked with the former to convince and/or intimidate moderately educated people into disbelieving their lyin' eyes.
IMO price fixing is a lot more common than most people assume. The normal textbook economics say that in a pure commodity market like eggs, the average producer should make near zero profit. There are a few ways to make a profit in these industries, such as economies of scale or innovative use of byproducts, but it is very tough.
On the other hand, price fixing is relatively easy, and as long as the players don’t get too greedy and don’t leave a paper trail, they’re unlikely to be caught. The only way it usually happens is if there is a whistleblower.
The ADM lysine case years ago also threw a lot of cold water on whistleblowers when the whistleblower ended up getting more jail time than any of the other conspirators.
Anyhow, the fact you even see any successful prosecutions given how hard it is prove, and the paradoxical fact that in some commodity industries, you actually do see decent profit margins tells me that this sort of thing is actually probably very common.
Yeah that movie is almost completely unwatchable though. They took this conspiracy story and tried to make it into a zany slapstick comedy. I have no idea what Soderbergh was thinking.
Right it was in fact the embezzlement that originally got him to become a whistleblower. The FBI was investigating the embezzlement, and he told them that he could give them a bigger fish. Anyhow he wore a wire in several price fixing meetings and was generally extremely cooperative with the FBI. I think he embezzled on the order of $10 million from ADM, but the Lysine conspiracy was on the order of a $200 million overcharge to Lysine customers.
Now Whittacre was crazy and unstable, but what the DOJ did by giving him a bigger sentence for the embezzlement than the heads of ADM that he made the case against IMO sent a message that cooperating with the government on a price fixing case is not going to help you.
What the story really says IMO also is that one of the only ways for the government to actually get enough evidence to prosecute these cases is to have someone who is part of the conspiracy that has committed some other crime, and the feds can flip them. That's not going to happen too often.
Ultimately the government also proved that ADM was also part of a completely separate citric acid price fixing cartel involving different players, but the MO was exactly the same mustache twirling crazy conspiracy theorist's dream of the players sitting down together in a hotel conference room dividing up the market.
> The ADM lysine case years ago also threw a lot of cold water on whistleblowers when the whistleblower ended up getting more jail time than any of the other conspirators.
"Whitacre was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for embezzling $9.5 million from ADM at the same time he was assisting the federal price-fixing investigation."
Not that I trust Wikipedia, but I think if the common narrative is wrong it'd probably behoove you to pre-empt it because anyone who looks it up is going to come away feeling deceived by your statement as written.
For most of my life eggs were a loss leader and could always be found for under $2 a dozen. Why would they suddenly get the idea to form a cartel? Wasn't it always obvious they should do that? Did they used to be paragons of virtue, then decided to get evil for no reason?
Seems to me there must have been some new incentive structure in place.
Sometimes it all boils down to someone saying "what if" and trying something and seeing if it sticks. I guess the avian flu was a good excuse to hide the crime just like what happens in die hard 3 with the distractions of bomb in schools.
> The fear that Huffman and other anti-monopolists share is that companies will read the Justice Department’s pursuit of the defendants not as a cautionary tale but as a how-to manual.
Settlements instead of jail time will only cause this behavior to continue. Economic white collar crimes need far higher punishments it seems when the only downside is you return only some of the higher profits you made.
"Maybe" here is a rhetorical device. We were told by libertarian experts, "there is NO WAY there is collusion. It's bird flu. Duh".
Now, turns out, there was actual price manipulation occurring (Read the article. It's clear what was going on. There were text messages of their criminal conspiracy!) Now the headline is sassily saying "hey, maybe there was price collusion!" This use of "maybe" is a common expression of sarcasm.
I wish they didn't use that ambiguous word, though. The evidence seems pretty clear, most most people won't read past the headline and will think there's still doubt.
"It sure looks like there was an egg cartel after all" would give the same rhetorical effect but be much clearer.
I did read the article but as mentioned it is a word salad that weaves these three concepts together, ending up in nothing. What I'm asking is, what is the point of the article?
So after the surge in prices from normal market forces, they tried to keep prices up by placing high bids on eggs that they never intended to actually purchase. This briefly worked, then the market re-asserted itself and prices cratered. Now, after the fact, the justice department is investigating the bidding shenanigans. Is that a fair summary of the situation?
I guess the thing I'm confused about is how bidding above market rates for eggs didn't just result in these companies being stuck with a bunch of eggs that they grossly overpaid for? How did the scheme actually work?
It sounds like the exchange consumes bids, not just closed transactions. So these companies were basically publishing fraudulent bids that never completed.
I can’t tell from the article if they were bidding on each others eggs or bidding on other farmers eggs and then canceling.
They buy a relatively small number of eggs at a high price, but the price of the transaction is an input into an index that the larger market uses.
So is the real collusion here the fact that an index like that exists? Why are prices set by a centralized index rather than just normal supply and demand? (Genuinely asking; egg markets are far outside my area of expertise.)
All kinds of commodities are sold on centralized exchanges. With those, however, you can't bid and then not settle the transaction, AFAIK. That's the part that's confusing to me, how can bids that never result in a sale affect prices, at least for very long?
Yes, it was collusion.
Reported also here by Matt Stoller:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/crime-pays-the-egg-bandit...
"and not even for the lovingly cared-for, cage-free variety"
Which oddly did not increase in price much. I was in a discussion once on a forum and brought up that eggs around me (PNW) were still in the $6 for 18 when everyone else was complaining about $10 for a dozen. Next time I bought eggs, the ones I buy were the same price as always but the normal white eggs were in fact $10 a dozen...
My friends in the midwest always tell me egg prices have actually never been lower. They've been tracking them for a while now, and they were low during 2014-2020, then had a massive, unexpected jump, then another massive decrease starting 2025. Curious to know what the reasons are here.
Eggs at my Aldi never went much above $3 a dozen. The cage-free, etc hovered around $6 at the worst (normal is around $3-something)
I'm also in the PNW. The egg thing seemed weird to me when the local organic eggs didn't budge at all. We had bird deaths in the wild from the flu as well, so I know it was out here.
Which wouldn’t be that odd if the conspiracy theory was true (since your local farms presumably wouldn’t be invited to the price-fixing meetings).
Local farms are rarely selling directly to grocery stores. They sell to a number of organic/free range/whatever companies like Vital Farms that aggregate from the smaller farmers and sell to grocery stores (or grocery store suppliers).
At least that is my understanding of the way the scale is managed.
> [Urner Barry] also collects bids that egg producers make for each other’s surplus inventory on an exchange called Egg Clearinghouse, Inc. [It] takes in those bids even before they lead to any sale, as a signal of demand.
> they had the ability to create the illusion of [consumer demand] through bids on the surplus exchange for purchases they had no intent of completing
This seems like a system tailor-made for collision. It seems like the consumer protection agency should force changes. Too bad they've been made toothless.
Yes, non-binding bids that are not actual sales should not signal anything.
It seems the system was prone to manipulation. Having prices for high volumen transactions be set by low volume transaction in another market looks pretty silly. If they don't fix that there'll be worse troubles than price gouging by the big producers.
I guess during one of the last surges the question I had was: Isn't a big egg company damned if they do or don't? If I'm a massive egg farmer in an area that's untouched by bird flu, and I keep my prices low: then I'm the bad guy who's running struggling operations out of business. If I raise my prices to stay in line with those operations, now I'm colluding in some way. If we break up big companies so they don't have the kind of power over the market, we trade lower prices for more resilience since the lowest prices are going to come from the highest scale.
I dunno. It's a weird situation. And eggs are particularly weird because, as the article notes, people are definitely willing to pay more for them; the low prices have less to do with true demand and more to do with competition.
The problem isn’t setting prices in response to market conditions, it’s colluding with other companies to raise prices in unison. That’s what makes something a cartel and that’s what happened here. And I don’t mean raising prices because you saw that someone else did, this was literal phone calls and texts about when prices should go up.
I mean, given a lot of the rhetoric that happens around egg prices, it does seem like setting prices in response to market conditions is a problem to many.
You just read an article describing how egg prices were not set in response to market conditions, and were instead manipulated by egg producers. Are you saying that you think, based on the rhetoric, that in an alternate reality where egg prices were actually increased due to market pressures, that people would still complain? I mean, probably.
The purpose of my first sentence was to establish that I was I bringing in some associated thoughts into an article where some alleged collusion is happening, so it's not correct to read it as an attempted refutation of the article.
If there's actual collusion: sure, that's bad! But to be clear, this is not the total solution to the egg price puzzle; we don't know the extent to which this impacted the market.
I guess I just don't like the idea that every price spike is read as greed, because you lose the ability to tell cartel behavior from a supply shock, and actual bad behavior gets less scrutiny, not more. I'm seeing it in this thread: capitalism bad, republicans bad, khan good, etc. Perhaps I did the same thing in the opposite direction.
Consumers complain about higher prices. News at 11.
The issue is not the complaining, it’s the illegal behavior.
Yes there is and nobody does anything about it thanks republicans. Bring back Khan.
I like this part of the article.
> On Wednesday, Hickman saw evidence that Urner Barry was taking in data that would lower prices — “pull the market down,” in the words of one executive — and goaded his erstwhile competitors to respond. “As a group,” the executive followed up, “we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often.”
So while they were actively breaking the law, colluding to screw over the free market, they soothed themselves with jokes about non-existent voter fraud.
Chicago has a long and well documented history of corruption and machine politics.
The article explains that the federal and state governments did do something about it.
> “The reason, in this case, not to pursue litigation is that the conduct had already been resolved, right?” [U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr.] went on, referencing the decline in egg prices.
They stopped this particular instance of it after the horse already left the barn and did nothing to dissuade future anticompetitive collusion.
By this logic we shouldn't prosecute serial killers, just confront them with evidence to ensure they won't murder agin.
Why punish the murderer when they've already stopped?
Well, the "something" the Trump adminstration landed on (with an investigation started by Biden's team) I think for OP wasn't enough. A small monetary settlement without jail time of the executives involved is hardly the "something" that needs to be done in order to curtail this behavior and stop it in the first place. When the people who committed a crime still gets to keep any amount of their stolen money, that, to me, is less than "something".
You can buy your eggs from Costco which iirc has their own egg operation these days.
Unsure about eggs, but they definitely have their own rotisserie chicken farm and plant.
Story goes that Tyson's chickens were becoming larger and larger and thus Tyson wanted more money.
Costco wants to keep the chicken at $5, so they starter their own plant.
Yes, Tyson chickens are ridiculously large. Whether you are buying them as whole roasters or cut up, they're almost like a small turkey now.
Did they do something similar with the $1.5 hotdogs?
God bless Costco.
This isn’t really true. Their eggs are purchased from others (same as other Kirkland branding) and the chicken op for rotisserie is only a fraction.
> You can buy your eggs from Costco
If you live near a Costco, you can. The one near me is opening in a week, and I can't wait.
> Bring back Khan.
So she can lose more lawsuits related to her anti-silicon valley obsession? I'd rather get someone who is actually objective and takes a holisitic look at every industry.
Her blinders kept her from focusing on truly monopolies and anti-trust behavior like cable and broadbrand providers, regional hospital systems, etc.
Because winning against the wealthiest people in the world is easy right?
I think you have blinders on because she challenged both those groups.
If you don't occasionally fail, you're not trying hard enough.
The perfect is the enemy of the better. What we have now is sure not the better.
She was quite active, which is more than we can be said about some of her predecessors. Also she was hated by the right people, that's always a good sign.
This isn't really something that could be addressed by regulation. It's a natural consequence of capitalism. It's in every industry.
http://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/
> It's a natural consequence of capitalism. It's in every industry.
The link you posted doesn’t support this claim.
I'd put it this way.
An economist would say profits go to zero if markets are really free. Like if there were no barriers to entry and consumers chose purely on price firms would keep entering and would always be incentivized to lower prices to get the sale.
There are barriers that are natural, like "I already have a relationship with vendor A", or "I really enjoy brand B", "I'll have to invest a lot of money to start this business and I won't do it if it seems unlikely I'll make a profit", etc. Then there are barriers like "we have a patent on this technology", "we own a copyright on this movie", "we control the distribution channels", "we pass laws to get keep out competitors."
Business is all about finding ways to beat the economic constraints and ensure you get a profit!
The best case you can make for our system, in my mind, is that there is competition so that vendors have an incentive to provide good products and services at fair prices. Sure, there has to be enough profit to attract investment, but our system works better for all of us when regulation encourages competition.
There are businesses that are highly profitable even in a commodity market. Profits go to zero on the marginal supplier in a perfect market. Any supplier who has a lower cost base than the marginal supplier is profitable.
The canonical example is oil. It costs about $3 to pull a barrel of oil from the ground and pipe it to port in the best oil fields of Saudi Arabia. OTOH, Canadian tar sands cost $50 to pull out of the ground and another $10+ to get to port. During normal times the natural price of oil is ~$60.
> It's a natural consequence of capitalism
Adam smith was hostile towards monopolies (which your link refers to - nothing to do with price fixing although the conclusion is the same) and his critiques being very apparent throughout Wealth of Nations. This is a common opinion with proponents of free markets.
So what specifically about capitalism makes this a "natural consequence"?
Regulation is literally there to compensate for these types of issues with unregulated capitalism. I don't see how you could draw the conclusion that the thing we've tried many times and that works a lot of the time can't work.
if it's not perfect, it's useless or destructive is a pretty common perspective in left-wing groupthink. Some examples are how everyone to the right of a left winger is a republican/fascist/etc or that it's Medicare 4 All or nothing.
I get who you're talking about, and I've encountered those tiresome people. The flavor of the week is that No Kings is a Disneyfied faux protest. This of course ignores the fact that large scale protest in the US attracts police beatings and widespread use of pain compliance techniques if it isn't presented as family friendly.
Avoiding those outcomes while attracting is steadily growing number of protesters, with the most recent attracting 8 to 9 million is in itself a huge accomplishment. Way too big to ignore and within reach of overwhelming numbers.
Which is to say you could've picked a better example than M4A. Holding that up as a minimum expectation is hardly radical.
> Which is to say you could've picked a better example than M4A. Holding that up as a minimum expectation is hardly radical.
I'm not commenting on whether it's radical, just that if they had the choice between something like the ACA and nothing, many in these groups would rather have nothing. In fact, many would argue (as they would against other things they consider "incrementalism") that anything less than their demands would actually be detrimental somehow. Very much in opposition to "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". This is exemplified in the whole M4A "force the vote" nonsense.
> The flavor of the week is that No Kings is a Disneyfied faux protest.
It's strange to ignore all of the actual criticisms, such as that they are protests with absolutely no demands, and that they're arranged by Democratic Party insiders using spam farms. The reason they're called "No Kings" is because nobody knows what that's supposed to mean. It was consciously concocted as an alternative to fighting the "oligarchs" as Sanders constantly said, because Democrats support oligarchs.
> with the most recent attracting 8 to 9 million is in itself a huge accomplishment.
It's not. They're just faithful movement Democrats walking together in the street trying to figure out different ways to yell "fuck Trump." They're a mockery of protests, they're just extremely ineffective marketing.
They wouldn't be tiresome if they were easy to answer for you. Accusing people of just complaining about people and things not being "perfect" is a sign of somebody who doesn't even have a dishonest argument to make, so they're resorting to making no argument at all, and instead calling you a snob.
Every socialist I’ve ever met has conceded that capitalism is a great mechanism for wealth generation. Just not for much else humans might value in their societies.
wealth is pretty good at being a vehicle for other things humans value
There are two types of advocates for efficient markets: the true believers & the people who manipulate markets. The latter create and fund institutes & academic departments stocked with the former to convince and/or intimidate moderately educated people into disbelieving their lyin' eyes.
Price collusion does not support efficient markets.
So we need some sort of regulators to ensure efficient markets?
I mean, yea?
I think efficient markets and unregulated/totally-free markets are separate dimensions, no?
lightbulbs, eggs... is there something about the shape that inspires people to protect it to no end? or the fragility?
There's a 10% chance that eggs will end humanity, so let's just take a breath and slow down all of this talk about eggs.
IMO price fixing is a lot more common than most people assume. The normal textbook economics say that in a pure commodity market like eggs, the average producer should make near zero profit. There are a few ways to make a profit in these industries, such as economies of scale or innovative use of byproducts, but it is very tough.
On the other hand, price fixing is relatively easy, and as long as the players don’t get too greedy and don’t leave a paper trail, they’re unlikely to be caught. The only way it usually happens is if there is a whistleblower.
The ADM lysine case years ago also threw a lot of cold water on whistleblowers when the whistleblower ended up getting more jail time than any of the other conspirators.
Anyhow, the fact you even see any successful prosecutions given how hard it is prove, and the paradoxical fact that in some commodity industries, you actually do see decent profit margins tells me that this sort of thing is actually probably very common.
Google tells me the whistleblower in that case was jailed for massive embezzlement, not for whistleblowing. Do you have reason to think this is false?
Are we talking about Mark Whitacre? He was a piece of work. His whistleblowing was legitimate but the massive embezzlement was also legitimate.
The Soderbergh film The Informant! starring Matt Damen is about that story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-in7L8AmU4
Yeah that movie is almost completely unwatchable though. They took this conspiracy story and tried to make it into a zany slapstick comedy. I have no idea what Soderbergh was thinking.
Right it was in fact the embezzlement that originally got him to become a whistleblower. The FBI was investigating the embezzlement, and he told them that he could give them a bigger fish. Anyhow he wore a wire in several price fixing meetings and was generally extremely cooperative with the FBI. I think he embezzled on the order of $10 million from ADM, but the Lysine conspiracy was on the order of a $200 million overcharge to Lysine customers.
Now Whittacre was crazy and unstable, but what the DOJ did by giving him a bigger sentence for the embezzlement than the heads of ADM that he made the case against IMO sent a message that cooperating with the government on a price fixing case is not going to help you.
What the story really says IMO also is that one of the only ways for the government to actually get enough evidence to prosecute these cases is to have someone who is part of the conspiracy that has committed some other crime, and the feds can flip them. That's not going to happen too often.
Ultimately the government also proved that ADM was also part of a completely separate citric acid price fixing cartel involving different players, but the MO was exactly the same mustache twirling crazy conspiracy theorist's dream of the players sitting down together in a hotel conference room dividing up the market.
> The ADM lysine case years ago also threw a lot of cold water on whistleblowers when the whistleblower ended up getting more jail time than any of the other conspirators.
"Whitacre was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for embezzling $9.5 million from ADM at the same time he was assisting the federal price-fixing investigation."
Not that I trust Wikipedia, but I think if the common narrative is wrong it'd probably behoove you to pre-empt it because anyone who looks it up is going to come away feeling deceived by your statement as written.
That article was one hell of an eggsplanation.
*one shell
The entire US economy is stagnating and spiraling because cartels control most activity now.
For most of my life eggs were a loss leader and could always be found for under $2 a dozen. Why would they suddenly get the idea to form a cartel? Wasn't it always obvious they should do that? Did they used to be paragons of virtue, then decided to get evil for no reason?
Seems to me there must have been some new incentive structure in place.
Sometimes it all boils down to someone saying "what if" and trying something and seeing if it sticks. I guess the avian flu was a good excuse to hide the crime just like what happens in die hard 3 with the distractions of bomb in schools.
> The fear that Huffman and other anti-monopolists share is that companies will read the Justice Department’s pursuit of the defendants not as a cautionary tale but as a how-to manual.
Settlements instead of jail time will only cause this behavior to continue. Economic white collar crimes need far higher punishments it seems when the only downside is you return only some of the higher profits you made.
Politico likes to skip between narrative, anecdote, and data.
The title uses the word Maybe. What does this mean in legal terms exactly?
"Maybe" here is a rhetorical device. We were told by libertarian experts, "there is NO WAY there is collusion. It's bird flu. Duh".
Now, turns out, there was actual price manipulation occurring (Read the article. It's clear what was going on. There were text messages of their criminal conspiracy!) Now the headline is sassily saying "hey, maybe there was price collusion!" This use of "maybe" is a common expression of sarcasm.
I wish they didn't use that ambiguous word, though. The evidence seems pretty clear, most most people won't read past the headline and will think there's still doubt.
"It sure looks like there was an egg cartel after all" would give the same rhetorical effect but be much clearer.
>most people won't read past the headline and will think there's still doubt
Sadly, changing headlines won't solve functional illiteracy, in this case, the belief that the headline is the story.
I did read the article but as mentioned it is a word salad that weaves these three concepts together, ending up in nothing. What I'm asking is, what is the point of the article?
Strictly speaking, the point of the article is to drive clicks for ad revenue and the title was optimized to do just that.