I've known about Cal-Maine's scammy practices for years. It's difficult to know which brands are associated with a group like Cal-Maine, but I did my best at one point to get a list which I still check before buying eggs.
The brands I've been avoiding are:
4Grain Cage Free
Egglands Best
Farmhouse Eggs
Land O'Lakes
Fassio Egg Farms
Southwest Specialty Eggs LLC
Rocky Mountain Eggs
Meadowcreek Foods
Specialty Eggs LLC
Red River Valley Egg Farm
ProEgg Inc.
Dixie Egg Co.
American Egg Products LLC
Texas Egg Products LLC
Wharton County foods
Benton County Foods
Sunups
Sunny Meadow
Mahard Egg Farm
Maine Egg Farms
I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation.
As I recall during the whole thing the news was non-stop about how it was related to broad-based inflation, chicken culling for avian flu, etc. Seems like all that was a lie, or at least merely a half-truth.
The avian flu pandemic started in early 2022. I looked up old news articles and a lot of them are dated February 2022. It really did increase egg prices.
The collusion quotes in this article start in October 2022, though it doesn't say exactly when the collusion started.
As far as I can tell, avian flu did create a supply shock, which did raise prices. When the avian flu problem started going away, the egg companies started colluding to try to keep the egg prices high.
According to one lawsuit, Cal-Maine wasn't impacted at all by the avian flu, they just jacked prices up 270% anyway while using the avian flu as an excuse.
> Meanwhile, in context and during the class period, egg producers like Cal-Maine increased egg prices by as much as 270% in 2023 despite having zero Avian Flu outbreaks in their egg laying hen layers on Cal-Maine affiliated farms (https://www.classaction.org/news/antitrust-lawsuit-says-prod...)
“As an excuse” is a weird way of saying “responding to national supply and demand”. 100% of the suppliers who didn’t have to cull all of their chickens raised their prices.
> if demand is unchanged and overall supply goes down, prices go up.
How much did supply go down considering that Cal-Maine Foods, Inc is (or at least was) the single largest supplier of eggs in the country? Ultimately their profits increased 718% (https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/business/egg-profits-cal-main...) which seems unlikely to be explained away by reduced supply. They were price gouging and fixing prices with the other large suppliers to prevent consumers from just switching to those brands while small egg producers may have had issues with avian flu keeping their fairly priced products off the shelves.
I'm agreeing with you here? All I'm saying is that one company raising prices and raking in profits by itself is not a crime. The key parts here are conspiring with other producers to make sure everybody does the same, and manipulating the index to make it look legit.
Back then I had done the math on how long it takes to turn around a commercial chicken coop after a complete full. The timeline from egg to fully producing hen was quicker than I thought, and it seemed they should have been able to keep up the replacement rates.
But also, the news isn’t privy to an actual price fixing conspiracy while it’s happening. To the extent that a news org reports on it, it’s because someone within the system grows some ethics (very hard to burn a bridge when it means no more revenue in the industry). It took even the regulators years to build a case for it.
People have long complained about the consolidation of the chicken production chain in the US. Only 2-3 major companies control most of the supply via contracts. The farms are required to follow the terms of the contract closely when raising chickens or risk getting locked out of the major distributors. Post-consolidation, the industry is ripe for abuse.
The combination of very strong contract enforcement and weak regulatory enforcement means the industry is effectively rent-seeking by design. This much was known, but without subpoena power, actual price fixing is just a suspicion.
The key factor that nearly everyone misses or perhaps, deliberately ignores, is that chicken eggs are worth their weight in gold to pharmaceutical manufacturers.
There's a significant number of pathogens, er I mean, vaccines, that are tested and/or cultured only inside of eggs, and for the seasonal flu vaccines, those pathogen factories are unfathomably gigantic in scale.
So essentially, any drain on the supply of chicken eggs for the consumer market may be attributed to the overwhelming and ever-increasing demand from the pharmaceutical industry to use up these eggs so that they can grow viruses, bacteria, and other nasties to, er, checks notes inoculate the population and keep the world safe for democracy. That's the ticket.
It was Kamala, bro. biden was replaced by a humanoid robot for his 12 last months in office. trump was one of the founders and the CEO (Chief Executed Officer) of that robot company. he's also gonna be the next Pope. just you wait ...
The major egg supplier for most of the grocery stores decided not to buy as many pullets to replace the ones they culled from Avian Flu, and then the second and third largest also followed suit. As a result there was a bug supply crunch that coincided with Avian Flu cullings. Unless Biden was there making command decisions about how many pullets to buy that year he had nothing to do with it.
It could have been investigated. Even this article states prices went down as a likely result of the investigation. Turning a blind eye bears some culpability. All we heard during those years was that it was due to avian flu shortage, and if you mentioned otherwise, you got shouted down by politically connected people.
>(I'm beginning to think some people missed the sarcasm in my earlier posts.)
Yep. Given the forum and that you've been around here at least ten years, why would you think folks wouldn't take you at your word?
Be aware of Poe's Law[0]. Especially since there are way too many folks (I can think of at least a dozen or so off the top of my head) who would say the same thing unironically.
Wow, well I have egg on my face. I have frequently used this as an example of the "oh so the egg guys got greedy and then got saintly" to parody the idea that price is primarily determined by greed. Welp! Now to see if I can eke out some pride by finding out what percentage of the price fluctuations was due to coordination.
> During the 2024 campaign, when Kamala Harris meekly suggested price gouging to tame inflation,...
Haha, she suggested going after price gouging. Though the idea of someone meekly suggesting price gouging is funny.
An important idea I’ve observed true across industries is “prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” meaning that even though price rises are usually genuinely driven, you can bet that once they’re up the involved parties are doing whatever they can to keep them up. Humans are greedy.
A thing can have many causes. One is the direct cause: the city exploded because someone pressed the button to launch the nukes and left the coordinates set to zero. Even more direct: the city exploded because a critical mass of uranium was assembled. There can be many indirect causes: someone put an idiot in charge of the nuke-launch button, someone forgot to put a molly-guard on the nuke-launch button, someone invented nukes.
Price is usually determined by producer greed because producer greed causes prices to consistently be set as high as possible. This is usually constrained by market competition, which limits how high they can be set. In rare cases, prices are set low by consumer greed.
A high price has a direct cause: the person in charge of setting prices set a high price. A little less direct: that person is incentivized to set prices as high as they can. Much less direct: there are currently few competitors due to avian flu; we have one of very few chip fabs that can make the widgets; our customers are locked in; our customers signed contracts allowing us to raise prices but forbidding them from cancelling when we do. Greed is always one of the more direct causes of high prices. The fact that capitalist markets use greed as an integral part of their normal functioning does not change this fact.
Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.
This was addressed by Matt Levine in today's Money Stuff. The problem was not the presence or lack of competition, it was a technical failure of the market structure. Matt:
This is a familiar story and you probably know the ending. There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market.
Not defending the bad actors here, but there's that whole "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing. If the market structure rewards manipulation, you get manipulation. The market structure doesn't have to be this way.
> "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing
There are supposed to be two stopgaps here.
First, the fear of going to jail for committing crimes. Secondly, the social reprisal for committing crimes that hurt people.
Like seriously these CEOs shouldn't be welcome at anyone's table or gathering in polite society as a result of their actions, bare minimum. The government should also put them in prison.
Companies bribe government and install their employees in regulatory agencies to avoid the prison sentences and other legal trouble, but I seriously wonder how any of these people are able to show their face in public without having an angry mob form.
Hiding behind a faceless corporation certainly helps with that somewhat, but in this case one of the egg companies involved isn't shy about telling us exactly who they are (https://hickmanseggs.com/about/). When there's no longer a working legal outlet for justice how long before people start leveraging the technology they have to identify the people who are hurting them and make their feelings known. We need a functioning legal system and accountability to keep things from getting out of hand, so it concerns me that corruption has been allowed to flourish and go unpunished.
While Matt is technically correct, it's much easier to maintain a conspiracy like this when you have a small number of participants with a high concentration of share.
If power is more diluted among a greater number of participants you are way more likely to see defectors, which would provide accurate pricing data to the market and cause the conspiracy to fail.
Yes. Specifically in this case, "defect" is the good case and cooperate is price fixing cartel. So with more prisoners, the chances of someone choosing defect goes up. So then everyone else choose defect, breaking up the price fixing cartel, leading to market forces working and lower prices for consumers.
That's just a cop-out. If there was no index the egg producers could easily have found other ways to collude to keep prices high. They do the same thing in Europe and there is no egg index to blame.
And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.
I'm not typically a fan of government intervention in markets but Canada's marketing boards do stop this sort of concentration, so while we have higher average prices we do not get massive swings in prices, nor the physical conditions that come directly out of production consolidation that lead to events (or justifications) like avian flu at the same scale.
OP is talking about Canada's supply management system in place in some areas (including eggs). Supply management is a government system that basically puts all large scale production of these items under both a quota system (farmers need to get/buy a license/quota), and fixed pricing to the farmer.
It is a form of farming subsidy that was specifically structured to avoid passing money through the government, and structured to control price volatility.
This is separate from the commercial market concentration in Canada, which is definitely real. To a degree, this is just the reality of being a smaller market. The depth and breathe of the American economy is definitely at play here.
If you compare Canadian super market consolidation vs Germany or UK (for example), you find a much more similar situation.
A free market with functioning anti-monopoly enforcement is a simple solution. Why trust in a government enforced Supply Management system when the same government can't manage to punish a clear criminal conspiracy to price-fix?
We were stuck in the Gilded Age for decades before Roosevelt came along and started big trust-busting efforts. I expect a similar situation to play out here. We're probably in the middle of it in retrospect.
I think at the end of the day, we're still able to produce really effective technology and products. Like the economy is still functioning. I feel like this is different from the Soviet situation where the problems were more related to product quality and shortages and black markets.
> we're still able to produce really effective technology and products
There's a pipeline for that, and that pipeline has been broken, so that'll dry up. It's gonna take some years before we see the effects of it, but it ain't gonna be pretty.
Al Franken has related the difficulty he had convincing Democrats and Bernie Sanders to sign on to fighting the Comcast Time-Warner merger until they determined it was beneficial to themselves to oppose it.
This podcast mentions a summarized version of the story at the beginning with an impersonation. I remember another, maybe later on in the interview portion, where he explicitly called out Sanders' reluctance.
An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.
I think perhaps the USA's modern decline right into the toilet is the result of changes made in the 80's, like gutting anti-trust. What we're seeing now is just the visible manifestation of corruption that has been allowed to grow and metastasize since then.
>the result of changes made in the 80's, like gutting anti-trust.
The '90s didn't help a lot either. cf. the repeal of Glass-Steagall[0] which, arguably, did much more to damage the US economy (there's a direct line from its repeal to the 2008 financial crisis) than a lack of anti-trust enforcement.
That said, dismantling anti-trust enforcement (which was pretty hit or miss anyway) didn't help either.
Most true small businesses can't exist in markets with a lot of competition. Highly competitive markets have a lot of fluctuation and businesses with little capital fold when there's a downturn.
In fact, most markets naturally go from high competition to monopoly or oligopoly. You can see this in chips, cars, airplanes, steel, ecommerce(Amazon) and beyond. Indeed, many oligopoly situations only fail to be monopolies through either antitrust activity or through nation-states supporting their competitors (chips).
Agriculture in particular tends to be geographically dispersed so it's harder to have absolute monopolies. But some "harking back" claim of "if we only had small business, all the predatory stuff wouldn't happen" really fails to understand the dynamics of markets. Scale in agricultural production is what allows the low prices you get in stores - But $10 cage-free organic eggs are available at my local coop for those who love small businesses (though I prefer the $2 cage free eggs at nearby Grocery Outlet).
False. There is no Economic Law of Consolidation such as you posit here. Haircuts are a mature market, yet plenty of small providers thrive. Counterexamples to your extraordinary claim abound.
The actual economics in highly competitive markets depend on what is known as the Minimum Efficient Scale, which in turn depends on the shape of the cost function.
QB House and its many imitators would like a word. It's a genuine mystery to me why these "fast haircut" chains are ubiquitous in Asia but unknown in the West.
It does permit something individuals don’t have: the internal investigation.
The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
>The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
That's exactly how the criminal justice system should work? If you can't prove a particular person is responsible, you don't have a case. That's exactly why they prosecuted the company as a whole instead, because easier to prove the company as a whole did something, rather than a specific person.
The issue is that an internal investigation is not an impartial source.
I agree, in this hypothetical if there's no evidence the that the CEO committed a crime he/she shouldn't go to jail. But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, they have little incentive to fully investigate.
The police certainly aren't perfect, but they at least have less of an incentive to lie about this.
> But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, and so they have little incentive to fully investigate.
Right, but no prosecutor is like "well the CEO had an internal investigation so we're not going to investigate"
I feel like that is exactly what happens for anything but the most serious crimes. Keep in mind, a lot of internal investigations are not reported to the public and we never hear about them. Part of the reason that they're "internal" is so that they stay internal; we only hear about ones that leak.
Even for very serious crimes (e.g. sexual harassment or assault) these internal investigations end up being "sufficient", and the police don't bother.
Right, but unless internal investigations are somehow deterring investigations by prosecutors, I don't see what the issue is. Would you rather than there's no internal investigations?
I'd rather things like sexual assault get directly reported to the police instead of having people directly paid by the accused LARPing as investigators, yes.
You're dodging my earlier question. Do you think internal investigations are substituting for actual criminal investigations, and if so do you have evidence for it? All you're seemingly saying so far is that you don't like internal investigations at all, even if they are done when no criminal investigations would have taken place
>I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.
And how does this work? Are prosecutors really like "oh ok, we won't do any investigating of our own then"? If so, who's more to blame, the companies doing the internal investigations, or the prosecutors for falling for it? If the police show up to a residence to investigate a domestic violence report, and then one of spouses answers the door and says everything's fine, should we blame the spouse more or the police for not following up?
I think it is much simpler than what you’re describing.
Executive at BigCo does something bad. Normally people would report this to police and/or regulatory agency. Instead the company investigates itself to pretend they’re doing their due diligence so that there is a paper record, but with no intention of actually surfacing anything to the police.
Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
That's their job? It's not even limited to private insurance companies. Public health systems have lists of what is considered good value for money too, even if the treatments themselves are theoretically life saving. The US is the biggest market for new and rare drugs specifically because other countries consider the prices too high.
Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job. Healthcare companies just keep doing that anyway because it makes them more money when their customers are too sick, stressed, exhausted, or eventually dead to fight the wrongfully denied claims.
People die because of this, but the insurance companies don't care because it makes them more money when they refuse (at least initially) to provide the services they were paid to deliver. United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
The health insurance industry is filled with serial killers who are happy to kill in exchange for money.
>Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job.
Can you provide some examples? The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra". If it's in the area where there's a plausible judgement call to be made, I don't see how it's any different than a public healthcare system denying care due to cost reasons, even if theoretically taxpayers are "entitled" to some vague standard of care, and without the care the patient might actually die.
>United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
AFAIK that claim was claimed by plaintiffs with no supporting evidence, and denied by the defendants.
IIRC the one that got Kirked was about to start, or had recently started, denying more than a fixed amount of time for anesthesia. If the operation runs longer than expected, you won't be anesthetised for all of it.
> The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra".
There are a couple examples in the legal complaint (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class...) where the insurance company denied extremely typical things like physical therapy and skilled nursing facilities (the most common form of post-acute care). Nothing special there.
Here's another one for you:
Deirdre O'Reilly's college-age son, suffering a life-threatening anaphylactic allergic reaction, was saved by epinephrine shots and steroids administered intravenously in a hospital emergency room. His mother, utterly relieved by that news, was less pleased to be informed by the family's insurer that the treatment was "not medically necessary." (https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/denials-of-health-...)
Now, I don't have all the details of this case, but neither epinephrine shots or steroids are a special procedure/drug. That would be considered the standard treatment for life-threatening allergic reactions depending on the circumstances and how long ago this occurred.
I can't think of any reason why they'd ever deny epinephrine, and although steroids have fallen out of favor in recent years as standard treatment in every case, they are still called for in common situations like when epinephrine alone isn't doing the job, or when the reaction has triggered an asthma attack.
Evaluating these can be challenging. Even though many people are sharing their stories of how they've been screwed over online (and publicly exposing their private medical matters in the process), there's often a lack of hard details. Both government regulations intended to protect patients and insurance industry policy intended to protect the corporations can make independent verification of these complaints difficult.
The best source for examples will be lawsuits against insurance companies which can surface instances collected through the discovery process and used as evidence at trial, but that can take many years and may never come to light if those lawsuits get settled first with the victims and their surviving loved ones paid off and silenced.
If you think that denying a specific treatment (justified or otherwise) is comparable murder for hire, then I don't think there's anything worth discussing between the two of us.
Yeah, in my opinion an unjustified and profit motivated refusal to save a life is the same as intentionally taking that life. It's just the trolley problem and you're arguing that there is some innate nobility in refusing to touch the switch.
> The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opioid epidemic was huge
No, the Sacklers didn't get prosecuted or even hindered, but aided at every turn, therefore the opioid epidemic got huge. Eventually it became so expensive for society as a whole that it couldn't be allowed to continue, and then the Sacklers were stopped.
They weren't "prosecuted," though. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands dead, no criminal charges, and they're all still impossibly wealthy. I was once prosecuted for sitting on a sidewalk, and spent the night in jail. No Sackler has spent the night in jail, or missed a massage appointment. Why? Because they passed some "magical" threshold that makes it "magically" fine.
If you go pick up the heroin that you and a friend later do together, and the friend overdoses, you will likely be thrown into prison for murder or manslaughter if you take them to the hospital. The Sacklers still get to own pharmaceutical companies, as long as they don't sell opioids.
They literally had to be taken to the Supreme Court to lose civil immunity (barely, 5-4) granted by lower court bankruptcy judges. The criminal immunity is not official, it's simply because of their class as owners. The law is written in an intentionally childish way so that to prosecute them criminally means you have to prove that they had murderous intentions, rather than it being enough that they were top-level opioid dealers who ignored and buried anything that would lose them money.
As long as they just wanted to make money, it's A-OK. They can only be charged if their goal was to murder people, regardless of money. This logic somehow does not apply to lower-level drug dealers who have failed to become "magical," to your best friend who gave you half their heroin for free and rushed you to the hospital when you started looking bad, or to Matthew Perry's dealers.
We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
we dont need new punishments, the system is just backwards. for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison. corporate fraud, cartels, pollution, big time tax evasion has to come with 20+ year sentences and fines based on your income like a traffic violation in norway. flat fines just dont work when the criminal is rich.
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
>for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison
What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
> What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
Don't we already? Police and DAs at least here in California are not serious about punishing shoplifters AFAICT. I hear people say this is specifically because of the 2014 Proposition 47 (raising the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950). Not sure that's true (misdemeanor theft can still be punished by up to six months of jail time and/or up to a $1,000 fine, and California's current thresholds are similar to other states) but there was a federal mandate to address prison overcrowding, and California chose to do that by not having as many prisoners instead of building a ton more prisons. Prop 47, and perhaps some policy changes made with far less fanfare, were intended to achieve that.
There's still more deterrent for misdemeanor shoplifting than for nationwide egg price-fixing though!
Police don't go for small crimes because they don't have the standing for them and courts to extort and abuse people over them and that is how they get bonuses and abusive actions ignored. It is a perverse incentive to extort the most vulnerable on the harshest charges possible while ignoring any more difficult to prove crimes and petty crimes.
Well, I qualified with "here in California", and I don't know if that's where tancop lives.
I think the current situation is not great, but I'd want to fix it by investigating why we're seemingly unable/unwilling to impose the punishment currently on the books. I think it would be plenty if we did—to me, more than six months jail time for stealing <$950 would be excessive. We could increase the fines and decrease / take away the jail option, but does it matter? It's not happening anyway.
>in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
Why? I mean, do you have a specific scientific research in mind, or is it something you feel is right?
I mean, it makes sense to me, mostly, but "we should" presented without any evidence irks me a bit.
Executives will be more afraid of being sent to prison for criminal charges, than having someone else's money get spent on fines. We can do both - increase the fines and set a precedent of arresting executives when their company does criminal things.
In a large enough organization with many layers to it, it very well may be that executives were neither involved nor aware of criminal wrongdoing, and even when they are, you'll never find sufficient evidence to charge them. That's largely the point behind performing criminal acts as a business and why there's so much white-collar crime.
At least if you set fines to a level that such crimes are rarely if ever profitable, you can both remove the incentive for the organization to commit them as well as introduce a passive internal mechanism to prevent them in the first place.
I have no moral objection, but it would just change the composition of CEOs as a group. Instead of just selecting for sociopaths, we'd start selecting for sociopaths with high pain tolerance.
yeah, I'm in agreement with you. other crimes the ill gotten gains are taken back and additional penalties are levied against the perpetrator. just saying why should these crimes be treated any different?
Corporal punishment is laughable outright, but that's masking the issue. Punishing corporations does not discourage the participants directly. The behavior will not change.
Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.
> If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.
There is certainly a case to be made here for “if it seems too good to be true…”, but realistically we are not going to impoverish the retired teachers of X state because X state chose poorly.
Sort of True-ish. There are lots of different kinds of ownership. Ownership with little to no say in how things are run to ownership with basically all the control.
If you are an owner with all the control, i.e. you are on the board or in corporate leadership(CEO/CFO/etc), then hey guess what,there is a really great cell here at the local prison just waiting for you, depending on how involved you were.
If you are an owner with little to no control, i.e. most shareholders that just vote for the board, etc. The assets would get liquidated, bond/debt holders would get paid back, and then anything left over would go to these shareholders.
This would incentivize shareholders to care more about what they are owning, this is a good thing. Even if it's pension funds and individual retirement accounts. This would get sorted pretty quickly as soon as the new normal is known and adjusted for.
SpaceX for example just went public, but if you read the docs, the control was not given to the public. Elon Musk 100% controls SpaceX still. Even if every public shareholder unanimously agrees against Elon Musk, guess what happens? Elon Musk still gets his way.
I don't know what the parent comment was thinking, but to my mind, the ones with the most control get the worst of the consequences. So Pension Funds/etc that hold little to no control would get paid out before those with more control.
Yet another issue with the modern US iteration of capitalism. The intentional design of the US stock market for people to depend on it for retirement, instead of getting enough wages to save their money risk-free or with government benefits.
Pushing 401k and IRA, making it so that's the only viable way (other than having a high-6-digit wage) to live comfortably in retirement, is a detriment to a healthy society.
What version of capitalism wouldn't have the problem of risky investments paying out more than safe ones?
The people with better ROI are just going to outbid the ones with a worse ROI for their retirement spending so if you just invest it into T-Bills you'll do worse than inflation.
I'd say a better version is one where the average citizen does not have to *rely* on a boom-bust, unregulated financial system to secure their ability to survive in retirement. Through tax, fiscal and monetary policy it would be better if people could rely on government services and normal wages to get through their elder years.
Yeah, before capitalism you just worked until you died, or your children took care of you. That’s still an option, but you must have kids and they must like you.
I didn't check, but I don't think the corporate charter for this companies allows for fraud.
Not sure what the penalty for doing things you weren't incorporated for but seems reasonable for me that the liability doesn't rest with the corporation.
Only effective way to protect victims from bullies is to imprison the bullies. No excuses. In todays 24/7 surveillance sufficient evidence should be reachable.
It drives me bananas when progressives defend corporations, particularly around things insurance (everyone knows insurance companies screw their customers as a matter of policy) or price fixing foods during and immediately after COVID. All the incentives are to do this, it happens all the time, and governments don't really want to put the screws to companies for doing it because that hurts the stock market.
You should have to have a license to be in the c-suite of a company over 200 people, and if you do shit like this, we revoke your license. The incentive structure is built on the hope that when threatened with making merely minimum to median wage, you'll suddenly care about the cost of groceries.
Ok here's maybe a dumb or maybe a crazy question or maybe not:
- the Fed has price stability as part of its dual mandate, and in its normal operation does this at the level of manipulating the money supply for everyone, through changing the interest rates given to large banks (IIUC, I'm def not an expert here)
- the FTC has as its primary mission anti-trust enforcement and consumer protection. During the last administration, the FTC tried to be more aggressive largely through legal action with specific firms.
Price stability and anti-trust enforcement are related. Would both goals be better served if a single public body with high independence could use both tools and levels of targeting? E.g. rather than being hit with a small-ish fine, should firms that collude to manipulate prices, or firms that consolidate to the point of approaching monopoly, be penalized with higher interest rates on all their financing?
- The ways the Fed pursues price stability and the FTC produces antitrust may have a similar effect, but they have a completely different set of skills required by the employees and they lend themselves to different management structures. One is essentially economics research, the other is essentially law enforcement.
- If the cost of doing a crime was higher interest rates, then anyone with low debt could freely commit the crime. Why not simply make the fine proportional to the price impact on consumers (e.g. if you collude to raise prices and make an extra $1 million, you pay a $3 million fine)?
We really need an FTC with teeth. Capitalism cannot easily survive monopolies as the first thing monopolies do it fight tooth and nail to shut out competitors.
Sadly, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. First with the appointment of industry aligned FTC chairs (with the notable exception of Lina Khan) and now with the supreme court judgement that the president can fire heads of agencies at will. It makes it much easier for moneyed interests to buy the outcomes they want as there are no real job protections for the FTC commissioners.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.
Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then.
I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.
Unfortunately, Ivy-League research suggests the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.. That is basically predetermined by lobbyists, paid for by the same corporations meant to be punished:
I think we either get a collapse into techno-feudalism, an anti-capitalist revolution (doubt), or a breakthrough savior of capitalism like FDR. The idea of "just vote better / harder" does not ring true to me or millions of people who have been hearing the same for decades while all these problems have gotten worse.
I'm not going to discount that finding, but I'd posit that some of the hubris of elected officials comes from the assumption that people are voting their party line -- they are effectively a shoo-in for a majority of voters.
Partisan politics is bad for America and we were warned by Washington. These days, many people are more loyal to their party than they are to the country.
I guess my point is, FPTP / lesser-evilism / party lines are all tools corporate power uses to explain why outcomes keep diverging from desires within our nominal democracy. It's all well and good to lament partisanship, but Washington's warning doesn't really help us find a solution. It was already falling apart as he made it.
I do think Bernie Sanders was an attempt by our collective society to produce a new FDR. The fact that he was stopped so easily points to collapse as the next most likely outcome.
I give Dems a partial pass -- in that their leadership engages in what I consider to be genteel corruption like being soft on monopolies and other less palatable but "business as usual" type of bullshit.
This is versus and administration that is aggressively doing no-bid contract to family and friends, complete disregard for the emoluments clause of the constitution, etc.
Note: the nature of a 2-party system, along with laissez-faire campaign finance laws, is practically designed for legislative corruption. Unfortunately the only people who can change it are the ones who profit from it.
That aggression is a powerful political force. If democrats had used the same aggression to go after this type of corruption that Trump uses to go after latin americans, they would have ironclad popular support.
The problem is that all their donors would withdraw. That contradiction is destroying them, they don't have an answer for it. It lost them the 2024 election, and will continue to do so until they invent another Obama.
Then the problem with _that_ is, all the Obama types are now calling themselves socialists.
The news recently said that numerous Democratic Socialist candidates have been successful -- I think that's the necessary future of the party as a whole. The DNC is corrupt as fuck and gives substance to the "both sides are the same" complaint (in regards to craven subjugation to their corporate overlords).
The real enemy of change is campaign financing, which the current SCOTUS has continued to erode any possible protections. FFS, "money is speech and therefore protected" -- that it was accepted without being subjected to pitchforks and torches is mind-blowing.
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
> That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and an oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it.
Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.
>While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hens
The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
>The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. It is prudent to wait a bit before seeing malice everywhere
Now we know (or at least - have more proof) what was going on, so the justice system worked. How many conspiracy theories were invented and then turned out to be false? This is news precisely because it turned out to be actually true.
im reminded of the old documentary food inc. pretty good stuff, it points out that the centralization of the american food supply into the hands of ever fewer companies is going to harm us at some point.
thankfully the scamming egg companies are at least able to admit voter fraud takes place, and when attempting to emulate it get leniency from the administration who makes its biggest gripe about voter fraud
This is the perennial problem in our society with regulation. We're not willing to set the penalties high enough. The penalties need to be absolutely ruinous.
If we jack the financial penalties up, it will just screw over the consumers. We need to send people to prison. Bankrupting the company is an interesting strategy, but I think that'd just result in more consolidation.
Prison is expensive for the state, and in my limited experience prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family).
Perhaps can fine the wealthy to pay for their own imprisonment, maybe within a luxury hotel?
I think both should be in play. The financial penalties should largely apply against the individuals running the company, not just the company itself. The CEO should be in danger of losing their home and being left penniless on the street.
But there are other options to consider to. Like "financial penalties" could include stuff like the company being dissolved and its assets distributed to its competitors.
So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.
It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here insinuating that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch, and everything’s just moustache-twirling tycoon conspiracies:
> While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists.
> In 2025, egg prices dropped dramatically […] these price declines suggested that supply and demand were doing their magical work. Populists were mocked as ignoring natural market forces. […but…] It turns out, when [these conspirators] felt threatened by legal action, the alleged price-fixing stopped. Suddenly, the avian flu epidemic was no longer pushing up prices.
I mean… it can very much be both. Slaughtering all the chickens really can reduce the number of eggs in the world, people really can be willing to pay more for the few that are left, you really will get more eggs again when you make enough new chickens and wait til they grow to egg-pooping age. Even as it was also true that some greedy people’s unfair play magnified the dynamics that were already happening.
But like—even at the higher prices, eggs weren’t going unsold at the end of the day.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does: the reason we treat collusion like this as bad and illegal in the first place—besides the casual sense of grossness and unfair play—is that the misleading signal provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse.
The price did indeed go on to collapse by 93% to pennies a dozen; that’s squeezing farmers brutally.
The investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
I feel like the error is similar to what bothers me listening to day-trader types: conflating raw synthetic-price-index movements with the underlying physical reality they represent.
> Trump let big egg producers off the hook for what looks like a brazen multi-year conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation.
I honestly hate how Presidents are attributed to market functions
I hate how partisans do that pretty religiously
while the state functions pretty autonomously in parallel, the investigation and multi agency actions helped crater the price of eggs very quickly
But even that summary is trying so hard to appease rabid partisan’s feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
One of the more common reasons I've seen cited for people voting for Trump is that they blamed Biden for high egg prices. Giving people a scapegoat is always effective.
It only seems to be effective in one direction. Trump shrugs off controversies that would have ended the careers of other politicians (which unlike the price of eggs, he's often actually responsible for.) Meanwhile Biden being the reason eggs were expensive stuck so hard it became a meme.
Why is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.
Having now read the actual complaint / emails, I'd like to revise my position (if anyone cares).
Prices go up in response to shortages in a properly functioning market, but these clowns were clearly over the line and trying to manipulate the prices in addition to that.
I mean no. The LIBOR analogy is appropriate. Large, long-term egg supply contracts are fixed to an index and that index was manipulated. That's criminal conspiracy and price fixing, not just a liquid market.
That's notably different from say the current scrum for HBM where the demand truly came as a surprise and scarce supply gets bid up.
Micron's windfall is justified and natural as these things go. The egg windfall was manufactured and criminal.
LIBOR didn't triple the rate. I don't doubt that they screwed around at the margins but the extreme volatility in egg prices were predominantly caused by the underlying economic factors.
What do you mean? Did you read the article? There’s so much evidence showing that it was the opposite.
Their profits shot up 3x in 2023 and 5x in 2024. They had 70%-140% profit margins. They publicly said that the end of the flu was a risk for their profits. There’s plenty of messaging recording explicit price collusion.
How is that a natural supply shortage?
The underlying economic factor is simply that monopolies or cartels will always try to manipulate prices in their favor if they can.
The indictment has them talking about 2 cent price swings. Like I said, this is goosing the margins. It's not an industry wide thing that tripled prices.
Yeah but the smoking gun is that volumes didn’t really go down much. I would buy higher unit margins on a shrinking volume, but for total profits to materially increase that means prices went up without a significant impact to volume. That smells rotten.
As the article says, people have a hard time understanding it because it turned out not to be what's happening. I was on the other side of the debate, I thought it was absurd, but it turns out egg company executives really were sending each other messages saying "let's manipulate the price upwards so that we can make more money".
The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.
I've known about Cal-Maine's scammy practices for years. It's difficult to know which brands are associated with a group like Cal-Maine, but I did my best at one point to get a list which I still check before buying eggs.
The brands I've been avoiding are:
Other Cal-Maine associated brands: Ralston-Purina, Pilgram's Pride, Adams Foods, Dairy Fresh Products, Foodonics Int'l,Versova is new to me, but I'll try to avoid them too. It looks like their brands include:
Cornucopia Egg Scorecard focuses on ethical treatment of hens but is sometimes a bit more expansive than that too. A convenient list of good eggs
https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/
All the brands you listed that I could find on their list seem to have the lowest scores.
I’ll stick with Kirkland Signature which is supplied by Wilcox. I don’t really think Costco ever raised their egg prices afaik.
Edit: it is a bit opaque but their main supply network allegedly includes Wilcox and Handsome Brook which are rated decently
Has Costco ever commented on its suppliers/sustainabillity or ethicality in this context?
Ethical treatment of hens doesn't exist in the egg industry.
For example, Eight Mile Creek based in NY:
- uses flocks of 60 in mobile houses that allow the chickens to feed on grass and bugs outdoors without over stressing a particular plot of land.
- Hens have ample indoor and outdoor space.
- Chicks are allowed outdoors as early as 2 weeks old.
- Hens are provided enrichment and toys.
- Beak trimming is not practiced.
- Death rates are less than 2% and hens reach their natural lifespans.
- They are also allowed to molt naturally.
Its disgusting that, under Capitalism, all these parameters are seen as optional or luxury when they are the normal.
Dpending on where you live, it light be easier to just get your eggs from a local farmer instead.
Pete & Gerry's seem to be legit from the research I've done. At least, I hope so!
That’s a lot of brands. You might have to buy a chicken.
I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation.
As I recall during the whole thing the news was non-stop about how it was related to broad-based inflation, chicken culling for avian flu, etc. Seems like all that was a lie, or at least merely a half-truth.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, or so the saying goes.
The consolidation of food production in the US is a risk to us all.
have you ever seen the documentary food inc?
This one? https://www.philo.com/player/player/vod/Vk9EOjYwODU0ODg5OTY0...
The avian flu pandemic started in early 2022. I looked up old news articles and a lot of them are dated February 2022. It really did increase egg prices.
The collusion quotes in this article start in October 2022, though it doesn't say exactly when the collusion started.
As far as I can tell, avian flu did create a supply shock, which did raise prices. When the avian flu problem started going away, the egg companies started colluding to try to keep the egg prices high.
According to one lawsuit, Cal-Maine wasn't impacted at all by the avian flu, they just jacked prices up 270% anyway while using the avian flu as an excuse.
> Meanwhile, in context and during the class period, egg producers like Cal-Maine increased egg prices by as much as 270% in 2023 despite having zero Avian Flu outbreaks in their egg laying hen layers on Cal-Maine affiliated farms (https://www.classaction.org/news/antitrust-lawsuit-says-prod...)
“As an excuse” is a weird way of saying “responding to national supply and demand”. 100% of the suppliers who didn’t have to cull all of their chickens raised their prices.
Adam Smith is upset!
On its face, this is a normal market response: if demand is unchanged and overall supply goes down, prices go up.
The criminal conspiracy part here was manipulating the index prices in tandem so that everybody raised prices in lockstep.
> if demand is unchanged and overall supply goes down, prices go up.
How much did supply go down considering that Cal-Maine Foods, Inc is (or at least was) the single largest supplier of eggs in the country? Ultimately their profits increased 718% (https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/business/egg-profits-cal-main...) which seems unlikely to be explained away by reduced supply. They were price gouging and fixing prices with the other large suppliers to prevent consumers from just switching to those brands while small egg producers may have had issues with avian flu keeping their fairly priced products off the shelves.
I'm agreeing with you here? All I'm saying is that one company raising prices and raking in profits by itself is not a crime. The key parts here are conspiring with other producers to make sure everybody does the same, and manipulating the index to make it look legit.
Back then I had done the math on how long it takes to turn around a commercial chicken coop after a complete full. The timeline from egg to fully producing hen was quicker than I thought, and it seemed they should have been able to keep up the replacement rates.
Factor in the labour and who's doing it (or not)
By the DOJ? Yes - although it's a settlement (5 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081
Those contributed.
But also, the news isn’t privy to an actual price fixing conspiracy while it’s happening. To the extent that a news org reports on it, it’s because someone within the system grows some ethics (very hard to burn a bridge when it means no more revenue in the industry). It took even the regulators years to build a case for it.
People have long complained about the consolidation of the chicken production chain in the US. Only 2-3 major companies control most of the supply via contracts. The farms are required to follow the terms of the contract closely when raising chickens or risk getting locked out of the major distributors. Post-consolidation, the industry is ripe for abuse.
The combination of very strong contract enforcement and weak regulatory enforcement means the industry is effectively rent-seeking by design. This much was known, but without subpoena power, actual price fixing is just a suspicion.
Please check out the investigation in 3 parts (linked from OP's link) where they explain all of it. Fascinating reading in my opinion.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-b...
The key factor that nearly everyone misses or perhaps, deliberately ignores, is that chicken eggs are worth their weight in gold to pharmaceutical manufacturers.
There's a significant number of pathogens, er I mean, vaccines, that are tested and/or cultured only inside of eggs, and for the seasonal flu vaccines, those pathogen factories are unfathomably gigantic in scale.
So essentially, any drain on the supply of chicken eggs for the consumer market may be attributed to the overwhelming and ever-increasing demand from the pharmaceutical industry to use up these eggs so that they can grow viruses, bacteria, and other nasties to, er, checks notes inoculate the population and keep the world safe for democracy. That's the ticket.
It was 100% due to Biden.
(Or so I was told. Might even be the reason we have Trump 2.0?)
Yeah, he's definitely the cause of all our past and current problems.
Darn Biden for attacking Iran and causing these high gas prices!
It was Kamala, bro. biden was replaced by a humanoid robot for his 12 last months in office. trump was one of the founders and the CEO (Chief Executed Officer) of that robot company. he's also gonna be the next Pope. just you wait ...
Don't forget the future problems he will be responsible for. /s
The major egg supplier for most of the grocery stores decided not to buy as many pullets to replace the ones they culled from Avian Flu, and then the second and third largest also followed suit. As a result there was a bug supply crunch that coincided with Avian Flu cullings. Unless Biden was there making command decisions about how many pullets to buy that year he had nothing to do with it.
Not disagreeing, but all I heard was Biden-flation (or whatever they called it) was why we needed a new President.
It could have been investigated. Even this article states prices went down as a likely result of the investigation. Turning a blind eye bears some culpability. All we heard during those years was that it was due to avian flu shortage, and if you mentioned otherwise, you got shouted down by politically connected people.
> It could have been investigated.
The investigation started during Biden’s term as president.
Not sure where you’re getting this information, it began early 2025:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/07/doj-investigation-e...
If all you needed was a new president you could have chosen the other option.
>all I heard was Biden-flation (or whatever they called it) was why we needed a new President.
From whom did you only hear that? Newsmax? The Drudge Report?
Apparently vox populi. A majority of the U.S. must frequent those sites.
(I'm beginning to think some people missed the sarcasm in my earlier posts.)
>(I'm beginning to think some people missed the sarcasm in my earlier posts.)
Yep. Given the forum and that you've been around here at least ten years, why would you think folks wouldn't take you at your word?
Be aware of Poe's Law[0]. Especially since there are way too many folks (I can think of at least a dozen or so off the top of my head) who would say the same thing unironically.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
All good deadpan deserves a downvote?
I think you're right. I should celebrate the downvotes. ;-)
Perhaps people were lying to you in order to make you want that new president...
> all I heard was Biden-flation
Listen to different sources then. It's weird to complain that when you listened to overt pathological liars, all you heard were lies.
Ha ha, I'm just voicing what the right-wing pundits were (apparently successfully) pushing.
(I've recognized them as liars since Day 1, but I only get my one vote. Apparently my sarcasm in previous comments was unrecognizable.)
Wow, well I have egg on my face. I have frequently used this as an example of the "oh so the egg guys got greedy and then got saintly" to parody the idea that price is primarily determined by greed. Welp! Now to see if I can eke out some pride by finding out what percentage of the price fluctuations was due to coordination.
> During the 2024 campaign, when Kamala Harris meekly suggested price gouging to tame inflation,...
Haha, she suggested going after price gouging. Though the idea of someone meekly suggesting price gouging is funny.
The infamous greed cycle: https://streamsofconsciousness.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
An important idea I’ve observed true across industries is “prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” meaning that even though price rises are usually genuinely driven, you can bet that once they’re up the involved parties are doing whatever they can to keep them up. Humans are greedy.
More formal reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_price_transmission
A thing can have many causes. One is the direct cause: the city exploded because someone pressed the button to launch the nukes and left the coordinates set to zero. Even more direct: the city exploded because a critical mass of uranium was assembled. There can be many indirect causes: someone put an idiot in charge of the nuke-launch button, someone forgot to put a molly-guard on the nuke-launch button, someone invented nukes.
Price is usually determined by producer greed because producer greed causes prices to consistently be set as high as possible. This is usually constrained by market competition, which limits how high they can be set. In rare cases, prices are set low by consumer greed.
A high price has a direct cause: the person in charge of setting prices set a high price. A little less direct: that person is incentivized to set prices as high as they can. Much less direct: there are currently few competitors due to avian flu; we have one of very few chip fabs that can make the widgets; our customers are locked in; our customers signed contracts allowing us to raise prices but forbidding them from cancelling when we do. Greed is always one of the more direct causes of high prices. The fact that capitalist markets use greed as an integral part of their normal functioning does not change this fact.
Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.
This was addressed by Matt Levine in today's Money Stuff. The problem was not the presence or lack of competition, it was a technical failure of the market structure. Matt:
This is a familiar story and you probably know the ending. There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market.
Not defending the bad actors here, but there's that whole "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing. If the market structure rewards manipulation, you get manipulation. The market structure doesn't have to be this way.
> "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing
There are supposed to be two stopgaps here.
First, the fear of going to jail for committing crimes. Secondly, the social reprisal for committing crimes that hurt people.
Like seriously these CEOs shouldn't be welcome at anyone's table or gathering in polite society as a result of their actions, bare minimum. The government should also put them in prison.
Companies bribe government and install their employees in regulatory agencies to avoid the prison sentences and other legal trouble, but I seriously wonder how any of these people are able to show their face in public without having an angry mob form.
Hiding behind a faceless corporation certainly helps with that somewhat, but in this case one of the egg companies involved isn't shy about telling us exactly who they are (https://hickmanseggs.com/about/). When there's no longer a working legal outlet for justice how long before people start leveraging the technology they have to identify the people who are hurting them and make their feelings known. We need a functioning legal system and accountability to keep things from getting out of hand, so it concerns me that corruption has been allowed to flourish and go unpunished.
While Matt is technically correct, it's much easier to maintain a conspiracy like this when you have a small number of participants with a high concentration of share.
If power is more diluted among a greater number of participants you are way more likely to see defectors, which would provide accurate pricing data to the market and cause the conspiracy to fail.
Can that be reduced to Prisoners Dilemma game theory?
Yes. Specifically in this case, "defect" is the good case and cooperate is price fixing cartel. So with more prisoners, the chances of someone choosing defect goes up. So then everyone else choose defect, breaking up the price fixing cartel, leading to market forces working and lower prices for consumers.
Or even better, folks actively trying to screw the market manipulators.
What’s weird is the big market is pegged to the small market?
What is the point of signing a direct supply contract if you are just gonna be paying spot prices anyways? I suppose guaranteed supply priority?
If there is (or you think there is) a generally fair and stable price that represents some base, then it’s natural to contract based on that.
It’s near universal for variable interest rate loans.
That's just a cop-out. If there was no index the egg producers could easily have found other ways to collude to keep prices high. They do the same thing in Europe and there is no egg index to blame.
And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.
I'm not typically a fan of government intervention in markets but Canada's marketing boards do stop this sort of concentration, so while we have higher average prices we do not get massive swings in prices, nor the physical conditions that come directly out of production consolidation that lead to events (or justifications) like avian flu at the same scale.
It's exactly the opposite as you say though, no? Canada has much more market concentration than the US, probably a major cause of the higher prices: https://alphabridge.co/economy/canadas-oligopoly-one-big-cou...
OP is talking about Canada's supply management system in place in some areas (including eggs). Supply management is a government system that basically puts all large scale production of these items under both a quota system (farmers need to get/buy a license/quota), and fixed pricing to the farmer.
It is a form of farming subsidy that was specifically structured to avoid passing money through the government, and structured to control price volatility.
This is separate from the commercial market concentration in Canada, which is definitely real. To a degree, this is just the reality of being a smaller market. The depth and breathe of the American economy is definitely at play here.
If you compare Canadian super market consolidation vs Germany or UK (for example), you find a much more similar situation.
A free market with functioning anti-monopoly enforcement is a simple solution. Why trust in a government enforced Supply Management system when the same government can't manage to punish a clear criminal conspiracy to price-fix?
We were stuck in the Gilded Age for decades before Roosevelt came along and started big trust-busting efforts. I expect a similar situation to play out here. We're probably in the middle of it in retrospect.
Maybe - or is this closer to the naked theft we saw out of the collapse of the Soviet Union? That's still playing out...
I think at the end of the day, we're still able to produce really effective technology and products. Like the economy is still functioning. I feel like this is different from the Soviet situation where the problems were more related to product quality and shortages and black markets.
> we're still able to produce really effective technology and products
There's a pipeline for that, and that pipeline has been broken, so that'll dry up. It's gonna take some years before we see the effects of it, but it ain't gonna be pretty.
Al Franken has related the difficulty he had convincing Democrats and Bernie Sanders to sign on to fighting the Comcast Time-Warner merger until they determined it was beneficial to themselves to oppose it.
Do you have a source for that? I'm curious to learn more about how hard it was to convince Sanders that the merger was a bad idea.
This podcast mentions a summarized version of the story at the beginning with an impersonation. I remember another, maybe later on in the interview portion, where he explicitly called out Sanders' reluctance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pywbCckzH2o
An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.
Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health.
But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
I think perhaps the USA's modern decline right into the toilet is the result of changes made in the 80's, like gutting anti-trust. What we're seeing now is just the visible manifestation of corruption that has been allowed to grow and metastasize since then.
>the result of changes made in the 80's, like gutting anti-trust.
The '90s didn't help a lot either. cf. the repeal of Glass-Steagall[0] which, arguably, did much more to damage the US economy (there's a direct line from its repeal to the 2008 financial crisis) than a lack of anti-trust enforcement.
That said, dismantling anti-trust enforcement (which was pretty hit or miss anyway) didn't help either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla...
Most true small businesses can't exist in markets with a lot of competition. Highly competitive markets have a lot of fluctuation and businesses with little capital fold when there's a downturn.
In fact, most markets naturally go from high competition to monopoly or oligopoly. You can see this in chips, cars, airplanes, steel, ecommerce(Amazon) and beyond. Indeed, many oligopoly situations only fail to be monopolies through either antitrust activity or through nation-states supporting their competitors (chips).
Agriculture in particular tends to be geographically dispersed so it's harder to have absolute monopolies. But some "harking back" claim of "if we only had small business, all the predatory stuff wouldn't happen" really fails to understand the dynamics of markets. Scale in agricultural production is what allows the low prices you get in stores - But $10 cage-free organic eggs are available at my local coop for those who love small businesses (though I prefer the $2 cage free eggs at nearby Grocery Outlet).
False. There is no Economic Law of Consolidation such as you posit here. Haircuts are a mature market, yet plenty of small providers thrive. Counterexamples to your extraordinary claim abound.
The actual economics in highly competitive markets depend on what is known as the Minimum Efficient Scale, which in turn depends on the shape of the cost function.
Haircutting doesn't scale. It is labor intensive and there is no way to increase productivity.
QB House and its many imitators would like a word. It's a genuine mystery to me why these "fast haircut" chains are ubiquitous in Asia but unknown in the West.
https://medium.com/@justin.tan/qb-house-back-to-basics-busin...
It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.
>It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability
They're not. If you hire a hitman through a corporation it doesn't magically become legal.
It does permit something individuals don’t have: the internal investigation.
The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
>The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
That's exactly how the criminal justice system should work? If you can't prove a particular person is responsible, you don't have a case. That's exactly why they prosecuted the company as a whole instead, because easier to prove the company as a whole did something, rather than a specific person.
The issue is that an internal investigation is not an impartial source.
I agree, in this hypothetical if there's no evidence the that the CEO committed a crime he/she shouldn't go to jail. But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, they have little incentive to fully investigate.
The police certainly aren't perfect, but they at least have less of an incentive to lie about this.
> But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, and so they have little incentive to fully investigate.
Right, but no prosecutor is like "well the CEO had an internal investigation so we're not going to investigate"
I feel like that is exactly what happens for anything but the most serious crimes. Keep in mind, a lot of internal investigations are not reported to the public and we never hear about them. Part of the reason that they're "internal" is so that they stay internal; we only hear about ones that leak.
Even for very serious crimes (e.g. sexual harassment or assault) these internal investigations end up being "sufficient", and the police don't bother.
Right, but unless internal investigations are somehow deterring investigations by prosecutors, I don't see what the issue is. Would you rather than there's no internal investigations?
I'd rather things like sexual assault get directly reported to the police instead of having people directly paid by the accused LARPing as investigators, yes.
You're dodging my earlier question. Do you think internal investigations are substituting for actual criminal investigations, and if so do you have evidence for it? All you're seemingly saying so far is that you don't like internal investigations at all, even if they are done when no criminal investigations would have taken place
I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.
By definition if the investigations weren't made public I can't know about them, but you can look at someone like Andy Rubin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin#Sexual_harassment_a...
As far as I'm aware there was never any investigation from real police for him.
>I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.
And how does this work? Are prosecutors really like "oh ok, we won't do any investigating of our own then"? If so, who's more to blame, the companies doing the internal investigations, or the prosecutors for falling for it? If the police show up to a residence to investigate a domestic violence report, and then one of spouses answers the door and says everything's fine, should we blame the spouse more or the police for not following up?
I think it is much simpler than what you’re describing.
Executive at BigCo does something bad. Normally people would report this to police and/or regulatory agency. Instead the company investigates itself to pretend they’re doing their due diligence so that there is a paper record, but with no intention of actually surfacing anything to the police.
No one can prove the CEO did anything, but whatever it was it was worth 500x as much as the average employee.
Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
> The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge
Sure, but which one of them is in prison? Now compare the prison time an avg person would get for theft.
>Now compare the prison time an avg person would get for theft.
Probably 0 if it's the first offense.
But you can deny life saving treatments if you are a health insurance company
That's their job? It's not even limited to private insurance companies. Public health systems have lists of what is considered good value for money too, even if the treatments themselves are theoretically life saving. The US is the biggest market for new and rare drugs specifically because other countries consider the prices too high.
> That's their job?
Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job. Healthcare companies just keep doing that anyway because it makes them more money when their customers are too sick, stressed, exhausted, or eventually dead to fight the wrongfully denied claims.
People die because of this, but the insurance companies don't care because it makes them more money when they refuse (at least initially) to provide the services they were paid to deliver. United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
The health insurance industry is filled with serial killers who are happy to kill in exchange for money.
>Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job.
Can you provide some examples? The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra". If it's in the area where there's a plausible judgement call to be made, I don't see how it's any different than a public healthcare system denying care due to cost reasons, even if theoretically taxpayers are "entitled" to some vague standard of care, and without the care the patient might actually die.
>United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
AFAIK that claim was claimed by plaintiffs with no supporting evidence, and denied by the defendants.
IIRC the one that got Kirked was about to start, or had recently started, denying more than a fixed amount of time for anesthesia. If the operation runs longer than expected, you won't be anesthetised for all of it.
> The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra".
There are a couple examples in the legal complaint (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class...) where the insurance company denied extremely typical things like physical therapy and skilled nursing facilities (the most common form of post-acute care). Nothing special there.
Here's another one for you:
Deirdre O'Reilly's college-age son, suffering a life-threatening anaphylactic allergic reaction, was saved by epinephrine shots and steroids administered intravenously in a hospital emergency room. His mother, utterly relieved by that news, was less pleased to be informed by the family's insurer that the treatment was "not medically necessary." (https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/denials-of-health-...)
Now, I don't have all the details of this case, but neither epinephrine shots or steroids are a special procedure/drug. That would be considered the standard treatment for life-threatening allergic reactions depending on the circumstances and how long ago this occurred.
I can't think of any reason why they'd ever deny epinephrine, and although steroids have fallen out of favor in recent years as standard treatment in every case, they are still called for in common situations like when epinephrine alone isn't doing the job, or when the reaction has triggered an asthma attack.
The article that came from links to https://www.npr.org/series/651784144/bill-of-the-month which is filled with all kinds of examples including one where the insurer eventually relented after phone calls, appeals were filed, a complaint was made to state agency, and letters were sent to elected officials ( https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/25/1226552...)
Social media is full of outrageous examples (https://www.buzzfeed.com/morgansloss1/stories-of-healthcare-...) but you're probably going to get the best examples from news segments like that Bill Of The Month series.
Evaluating these can be challenging. Even though many people are sharing their stories of how they've been screwed over online (and publicly exposing their private medical matters in the process), there's often a lack of hard details. Both government regulations intended to protect patients and insurance industry policy intended to protect the corporations can make independent verification of these complaints difficult.
The best source for examples will be lawsuits against insurance companies which can surface instances collected through the discovery process and used as evidence at trial, but that can take many years and may never come to light if those lawsuits get settled first with the victims and their surviving loved ones paid off and silenced.
>That's their job?
I mean you're the one who brought up hitmen. What's their job?
If you think that denying a specific treatment (justified or otherwise) is comparable murder for hire, then I don't think there's anything worth discussing between the two of us.
Yeah, in my opinion an unjustified and profit motivated refusal to save a life is the same as intentionally taking that life. It's just the trolley problem and you're arguing that there is some innate nobility in refusing to touch the switch.
100% agree. this greed and shareholder supremacy can be traced back the the precedent set in the case of dodge brothers vs ford motor company
Says a lot about your morals that you think they are so far apart.
Morals? On Hacker news? But seriously, happy to see some pushback against such inane takes as that which you replied to.
> The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opioid epidemic was huge
No, the Sacklers didn't get prosecuted or even hindered, but aided at every turn, therefore the opioid epidemic got huge. Eventually it became so expensive for society as a whole that it couldn't be allowed to continue, and then the Sacklers were stopped.
They weren't "prosecuted," though. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands dead, no criminal charges, and they're all still impossibly wealthy. I was once prosecuted for sitting on a sidewalk, and spent the night in jail. No Sackler has spent the night in jail, or missed a massage appointment. Why? Because they passed some "magical" threshold that makes it "magically" fine.
If you go pick up the heroin that you and a friend later do together, and the friend overdoses, you will likely be thrown into prison for murder or manslaughter if you take them to the hospital. The Sacklers still get to own pharmaceutical companies, as long as they don't sell opioids.
https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2025/01/the-sackler-family-le...
They literally had to be taken to the Supreme Court to lose civil immunity (barely, 5-4) granted by lower court bankruptcy judges. The criminal immunity is not official, it's simply because of their class as owners. The law is written in an intentionally childish way so that to prosecute them criminally means you have to prove that they had murderous intentions, rather than it being enough that they were top-level opioid dealers who ignored and buried anything that would lose them money.
As long as they just wanted to make money, it's A-OK. They can only be charged if their goal was to murder people, regardless of money. This logic somehow does not apply to lower-level drug dealers who have failed to become "magical," to your best friend who gave you half their heroin for free and rushed you to the hospital when you started looking bad, or to Matthew Perry's dealers.
They are protected from individual liability in a limited fashion. Not blanket
The person doing the hiring would be criminally liable and probably go to prison. The corporation itself would at best pay a fine.
We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.
we dont need new punishments, the system is just backwards. for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison. corporate fraud, cartels, pollution, big time tax evasion has to come with 20+ year sentences and fines based on your income like a traffic violation in norway. flat fines just dont work when the criminal is rich.
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
>for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison
What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
> What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
Don't we already? Police and DAs at least here in California are not serious about punishing shoplifters AFAICT. I hear people say this is specifically because of the 2014 Proposition 47 (raising the threshold for felony theft from $400 to $950). Not sure that's true (misdemeanor theft can still be punished by up to six months of jail time and/or up to a $1,000 fine, and California's current thresholds are similar to other states) but there was a federal mandate to address prison overcrowding, and California chose to do that by not having as many prisoners instead of building a ton more prisons. Prop 47, and perhaps some policy changes made with far less fanfare, were intended to achieve that.
There's still more deterrent for misdemeanor shoplifting than for nationwide egg price-fixing though!
Police don't go for small crimes because they don't have the standing for them and courts to extort and abuse people over them and that is how they get bonuses and abusive actions ignored. It is a perverse incentive to extort the most vulnerable on the harshest charges possible while ignoring any more difficult to prove crimes and petty crimes.
>Don't we already?
So clearly we should... make it even more lenient? That's what OP was implying.
Well, I qualified with "here in California", and I don't know if that's where tancop lives.
I think the current situation is not great, but I'd want to fix it by investigating why we're seemingly unable/unwilling to impose the punishment currently on the books. I think it would be plenty if we did—to me, more than six months jail time for stealing <$950 would be excessive. We could increase the fines and decrease / take away the jail option, but does it matter? It's not happening anyway.
And do you think the situation in California is a good situation?
The general public isn’t that relentlessly amoral.
>in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
Why? I mean, do you have a specific scientific research in mind, or is it something you feel is right?
I mean, it makes sense to me, mostly, but "we should" presented without any evidence irks me a bit.
To start with, the war on drugs was initiated by Nixon as a way to target political enemies (hippies and non-whites).
Imagine if small movie theaters could just show films at their own whim.
You could have small theaters springing up everywhere. I'm sure there's a boot ready and waiting to smash down this from happening.
>the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?
in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?
Executives will be more afraid of being sent to prison for criminal charges, than having someone else's money get spent on fines. We can do both - increase the fines and set a precedent of arresting executives when their company does criminal things.
In a large enough organization with many layers to it, it very well may be that executives were neither involved nor aware of criminal wrongdoing, and even when they are, you'll never find sufficient evidence to charge them. That's largely the point behind performing criminal acts as a business and why there's so much white-collar crime.
At least if you set fines to a level that such crimes are rarely if ever profitable, you can both remove the incentive for the organization to commit them as well as introduce a passive internal mechanism to prevent them in the first place.
In this case they have literal correspondence between the CEOs.
sure, prison time for some criminal stuff is cool too.
i am more pushing back against the call for corporal punishment like caning
What if I told you that prison is also corporal punishment?
i tried to be more specific with the “like caning” part
I have no moral objection, but it would just change the composition of CEOs as a group. Instead of just selecting for sociopaths, we'd start selecting for sociopaths with high pain tolerance.
In any other crime you get caught doing you do not get the benefits of the ill gotten gains. why should this be any different?
i am saying the fine should exceed the ill gotten gains. so, they would not get the benefits
yeah, I'm in agreement with you. other crimes the ill gotten gains are taken back and additional penalties are levied against the perpetrator. just saying why should these crimes be treated any different?
i think i read your comment in defense mode, and interpreted it incorrectly!
In theory there will be some class action lawsuits that will come about from this now that this report is public. Those can get very expensive.
> the problem would be solved, right?
Corporal punishment is laughable outright, but that's masking the issue. Punishing corporations does not discourage the participants directly. The behavior will not change.
And rotten tomato pelting would probably helpfully lower the rate of people turning their resentments into content.
Alternatively: (As stated in the other replies) jail execs.
Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.
The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.
Arguably that is worse. If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.
The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
> If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.
There is certainly a case to be made here for “if it seems too good to be true…”, but realistically we are not going to impoverish the retired teachers of X state because X state chose poorly.
Sort of True-ish. There are lots of different kinds of ownership. Ownership with little to no say in how things are run to ownership with basically all the control.
If you are an owner with all the control, i.e. you are on the board or in corporate leadership(CEO/CFO/etc), then hey guess what,there is a really great cell here at the local prison just waiting for you, depending on how involved you were.
If you are an owner with little to no control, i.e. most shareholders that just vote for the board, etc. The assets would get liquidated, bond/debt holders would get paid back, and then anything left over would go to these shareholders.
This would incentivize shareholders to care more about what they are owning, this is a good thing. Even if it's pension funds and individual retirement accounts. This would get sorted pretty quickly as soon as the new normal is known and adjusted for.
SpaceX for example just went public, but if you read the docs, the control was not given to the public. Elon Musk 100% controls SpaceX still. Even if every public shareholder unanimously agrees against Elon Musk, guess what happens? Elon Musk still gets his way.
I don't know what the parent comment was thinking, but to my mind, the ones with the most control get the worst of the consequences. So Pension Funds/etc that hold little to no control would get paid out before those with more control.
This whole thread is a fascinating exercise. I'm watching HN derive Lenin's "What is to be Done?" from first principles.
I think to state it succinctly, the thing I was thinking was: "the people that make the bad decisions should bear the consequences".
That generally turns out to be the same thing as me, just said more succinctly. I agree with your thinking.
Good. It's purely positive if they take losses from investing in companies engaging in fraud, as it'll encourage them not to do that.
Yet another issue with the modern US iteration of capitalism. The intentional design of the US stock market for people to depend on it for retirement, instead of getting enough wages to save their money risk-free or with government benefits.
Pushing 401k and IRA, making it so that's the only viable way (other than having a high-6-digit wage) to live comfortably in retirement, is a detriment to a healthy society.
What version of capitalism wouldn't have the problem of risky investments paying out more than safe ones?
The people with better ROI are just going to outbid the ones with a worse ROI for their retirement spending so if you just invest it into T-Bills you'll do worse than inflation.
I'd say a better version is one where the average citizen does not have to *rely* on a boom-bust, unregulated financial system to secure their ability to survive in retirement. Through tax, fiscal and monetary policy it would be better if people could rely on government services and normal wages to get through their elder years.
Yeah, before capitalism you just worked until you died, or your children took care of you. That’s still an option, but you must have kids and they must like you.
We have Social Security though and that doesn't seem to be working much better.
I didn't check, but I don't think the corporate charter for this companies allows for fraud.
Not sure what the penalty for doing things you weren't incorporated for but seems reasonable for me that the liability doesn't rest with the corporation.
except that was never used against the powerful and wealthy, just the same poor who pay the price today.
I'll start this punishment from elementary schools onwards. Early punishment will prevent later crimes.
Only effective way to protect victims from bullies is to imprison the bullies. No excuses. In todays 24/7 surveillance sufficient evidence should be reachable.
It drives me bananas when progressives defend corporations, particularly around things insurance (everyone knows insurance companies screw their customers as a matter of policy) or price fixing foods during and immediately after COVID. All the incentives are to do this, it happens all the time, and governments don't really want to put the screws to companies for doing it because that hurts the stock market.
You should have to have a license to be in the c-suite of a company over 200 people, and if you do shit like this, we revoke your license. The incentive structure is built on the hope that when threatened with making merely minimum to median wage, you'll suddenly care about the cost of groceries.
Ok here's maybe a dumb or maybe a crazy question or maybe not:
- the Fed has price stability as part of its dual mandate, and in its normal operation does this at the level of manipulating the money supply for everyone, through changing the interest rates given to large banks (IIUC, I'm def not an expert here)
- the FTC has as its primary mission anti-trust enforcement and consumer protection. During the last administration, the FTC tried to be more aggressive largely through legal action with specific firms.
Price stability and anti-trust enforcement are related. Would both goals be better served if a single public body with high independence could use both tools and levels of targeting? E.g. rather than being hit with a small-ish fine, should firms that collude to manipulate prices, or firms that consolidate to the point of approaching monopoly, be penalized with higher interest rates on all their financing?
I don't think this makes sense for two reasons:
- The ways the Fed pursues price stability and the FTC produces antitrust may have a similar effect, but they have a completely different set of skills required by the employees and they lend themselves to different management structures. One is essentially economics research, the other is essentially law enforcement.
- If the cost of doing a crime was higher interest rates, then anyone with low debt could freely commit the crime. Why not simply make the fine proportional to the price impact on consumers (e.g. if you collude to raise prices and make an extra $1 million, you pay a $3 million fine)?
We really need an FTC with teeth. Capitalism cannot easily survive monopolies as the first thing monopolies do it fight tooth and nail to shut out competitors.
Sadly, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. First with the appointment of industry aligned FTC chairs (with the notable exception of Lina Khan) and now with the supreme court judgement that the president can fire heads of agencies at will. It makes it much easier for moneyed interests to buy the outcomes they want as there are no real job protections for the FTC commissioners.
The United Monopolies of America
The Associated Monopolies of America.
Please invest in some happy backyard chickens if you are able. We did, and it's amazing.
> Please invest in some happy backyard chickens
I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.
ya that is likely correct in most cases, but I bet one could sell their surplus at a discount from store and break even.
So that means "invest" the time and resources to take just a small piece of the food supply chain into your own hands.
Related:
Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756256 - July 2026
Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
Seems ripe for civil litigation at least.
Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then.
I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.
Maybe so, but the DOJ is not releasing lots of the evidence. I wonder if there's a solid enough case without that.
Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
That'll show em! (that they should continue with the price fixing).
I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
Unfortunately, Ivy-League research suggests the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.. That is basically predetermined by lobbyists, paid for by the same corporations meant to be punished:
https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bil...
I think we either get a collapse into techno-feudalism, an anti-capitalist revolution (doubt), or a breakthrough savior of capitalism like FDR. The idea of "just vote better / harder" does not ring true to me or millions of people who have been hearing the same for decades while all these problems have gotten worse.
I'm not going to discount that finding, but I'd posit that some of the hubris of elected officials comes from the assumption that people are voting their party line -- they are effectively a shoo-in for a majority of voters.
Partisan politics is bad for America and we were warned by Washington. These days, many people are more loyal to their party than they are to the country.
I guess my point is, FPTP / lesser-evilism / party lines are all tools corporate power uses to explain why outcomes keep diverging from desires within our nominal democracy. It's all well and good to lament partisanship, but Washington's warning doesn't really help us find a solution. It was already falling apart as he made it.
I do think Bernie Sanders was an attempt by our collective society to produce a new FDR. The fact that he was stopped so easily points to collapse as the next most likely outcome.
"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. "
Who was in charge during this time period?
2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
I give Dems a partial pass -- in that their leadership engages in what I consider to be genteel corruption like being soft on monopolies and other less palatable but "business as usual" type of bullshit.
This is versus and administration that is aggressively doing no-bid contract to family and friends, complete disregard for the emoluments clause of the constitution, etc.
Note: the nature of a 2-party system, along with laissez-faire campaign finance laws, is practically designed for legislative corruption. Unfortunately the only people who can change it are the ones who profit from it.
That aggression is a powerful political force. If democrats had used the same aggression to go after this type of corruption that Trump uses to go after latin americans, they would have ironclad popular support.
The problem is that all their donors would withdraw. That contradiction is destroying them, they don't have an answer for it. It lost them the 2024 election, and will continue to do so until they invent another Obama.
Then the problem with _that_ is, all the Obama types are now calling themselves socialists.
The news recently said that numerous Democratic Socialist candidates have been successful -- I think that's the necessary future of the party as a whole. The DNC is corrupt as fuck and gives substance to the "both sides are the same" complaint (in regards to craven subjugation to their corporate overlords).
The real enemy of change is campaign financing, which the current SCOTUS has continued to erode any possible protections. FFS, "money is speech and therefore protected" -- that it was accepted without being subjected to pitchforks and torches is mind-blowing.
2?
2?!
I can easily think of lots of corruption of the following: Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, W Bush, Clinton, H Bush, Reagan.
Everybody follows neoliberal economics, and enables loads of corruption for their friends, families, and allies. All of them did that.
They ALL have been corrupt. The target of who the corruption is for changes.
Not within the given time period. Only two there.
not the one in charge of punishing this behaviour
Surely the relevant question is who was in charge when the punishment was decided, not who was in charge when the misbehavior occurred.
People always overlook how crappy our courts are.
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
> That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and an oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...
It’s not only Republicans getting contributions from Big Egg.
xkcd (2130) continues to be unreasonably poignant, as usual.
Thank god the comments here are so apolitical. Would hate to interrogate how this is allowed to continue, alternatives to allowing it to happen, etc.
> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it.
Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.
>While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hens
The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
>The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. It is prudent to wait a bit before seeing malice everywhere
Now we know (or at least - have more proof) what was going on, so the justice system worked. How many conspiracy theories were invented and then turned out to be false? This is news precisely because it turned out to be actually true.
> Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere.
To be fair, journalists also seem to miss even when there is an obvious conspiracy. They are a varied bunch.
Business as usual.
BP, Shell etc. make more profit from ignoring safety and environmental standards than they have to pay in fines for oil spills.
Same is true for FB & Co.
How about the possibility of a death penalty for companies like for people because companies are people, aren’t they?
im reminded of the old documentary food inc. pretty good stuff, it points out that the centralization of the american food supply into the hands of ever fewer companies is going to harm us at some point.
thankfully the scamming egg companies are at least able to admit voter fraud takes place, and when attempting to emulate it get leniency from the administration who makes its biggest gripe about voter fraud
This is the perennial problem in our society with regulation. We're not willing to set the penalties high enough. The penalties need to be absolutely ruinous.
If we jack the financial penalties up, it will just screw over the consumers. We need to send people to prison. Bankrupting the company is an interesting strategy, but I think that'd just result in more consolidation.
Prison is expensive for the state, and in my limited experience prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family).
Perhaps can fine the wealthy to pay for their own imprisonment, maybe within a luxury hotel?
> prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family).
I mean that's kind of the point.
I think both should be in play. The financial penalties should largely apply against the individuals running the company, not just the company itself. The CEO should be in danger of losing their home and being left penniless on the street.
But there are other options to consider to. Like "financial penalties" could include stuff like the company being dissolved and its assets distributed to its competitors.
So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.
Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down....
And Levine’s column, which Stoller links to (with rather less color commentary):
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-07-01/egg...
It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here insinuating that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch, and everything’s just moustache-twirling tycoon conspiracies:
> While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists.
> In 2025, egg prices dropped dramatically […] these price declines suggested that supply and demand were doing their magical work. Populists were mocked as ignoring natural market forces. […but…] It turns out, when [these conspirators] felt threatened by legal action, the alleged price-fixing stopped. Suddenly, the avian flu epidemic was no longer pushing up prices.
I mean… it can very much be both. Slaughtering all the chickens really can reduce the number of eggs in the world, people really can be willing to pay more for the few that are left, you really will get more eggs again when you make enough new chickens and wait til they grow to egg-pooping age. Even as it was also true that some greedy people’s unfair play magnified the dynamics that were already happening.
But like—even at the higher prices, eggs weren’t going unsold at the end of the day.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does: the reason we treat collusion like this as bad and illegal in the first place—besides the casual sense of grossness and unfair play—is that the misleading signal provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse.
The price did indeed go on to collapse by 93% to pennies a dozen; that’s squeezing farmers brutally.
The investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
I feel like the error is similar to what bothers me listening to day-trader types: conflating raw synthetic-price-index movements with the underlying physical reality they represent.
now I understand why it's called a "fine", because it's way more than ok, it's just fine indeed.
> Trump let big egg producers off the hook for what looks like a brazen multi-year conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation.
I honestly hate how Presidents are attributed to market functions
I hate how partisans do that pretty religiously
while the state functions pretty autonomously in parallel, the investigation and multi agency actions helped crater the price of eggs very quickly
But even that summary is trying so hard to appease rabid partisan’s feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
One of the more common reasons I've seen cited for people voting for Trump is that they blamed Biden for high egg prices. Giving people a scapegoat is always effective.
I’ve seen the opposite, where Trump is blamed despite not being inaugurated by the peak
It is effective
It only seems to be effective in one direction. Trump shrugs off controversies that would have ended the careers of other politicians (which unlike the price of eggs, he's often actually responsible for.) Meanwhile Biden being the reason eggs were expensive stuck so hard it became a meme.
Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
Why is capital punishment for society-level-harming white collar crime never considered in Western countries?
Reminds me of the Egg Greed Graph.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpg
Why is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.
Collusion is not a market force and is actually highly illegal and corrupting of markets, so this doesn't seem relevant at all.
Having now read the actual complaint / emails, I'd like to revise my position (if anyone cares).
Prices go up in response to shortages in a properly functioning market, but these clowns were clearly over the line and trying to manipulate the prices in addition to that.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1450281/dl
Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
I mean no. The LIBOR analogy is appropriate. Large, long-term egg supply contracts are fixed to an index and that index was manipulated. That's criminal conspiracy and price fixing, not just a liquid market.
That's notably different from say the current scrum for HBM where the demand truly came as a surprise and scarce supply gets bid up.
Micron's windfall is justified and natural as these things go. The egg windfall was manufactured and criminal.
LIBOR didn't triple the rate. I don't doubt that they screwed around at the margins but the extreme volatility in egg prices were predominantly caused by the underlying economic factors.
What do you mean? Did you read the article? There’s so much evidence showing that it was the opposite.
Their profits shot up 3x in 2023 and 5x in 2024. They had 70%-140% profit margins. They publicly said that the end of the flu was a risk for their profits. There’s plenty of messaging recording explicit price collusion.
How is that a natural supply shortage?
The underlying economic factor is simply that monopolies or cartels will always try to manipulate prices in their favor if they can.
The indictment has them talking about 2 cent price swings. Like I said, this is goosing the margins. It's not an industry wide thing that tripled prices.
Free-market libertarianism is a disease for which evidence is no cure.
Yeah but the smoking gun is that volumes didn’t really go down much. I would buy higher unit margins on a shrinking volume, but for total profits to materially increase that means prices went up without a significant impact to volume. That smells rotten.
Greed isn’t “forgotten” its reined in by regulation.
As the article says, people have a hard time understanding it because it turned out not to be what's happening. I was on the other side of the debate, I thought it was absurd, but it turns out egg company executives really were sending each other messages saying "let's manipulate the price upwards so that we can make more money".
The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.