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.
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.
I call it 3 scams in a trench coat pretending to be a real economy. Though obviously there are more than 3 going. You kinda have to be in one of the grifts in order to pay the costs of the others, like work in military contracting in order to pay for healthcare. That’s why crackdowns on fraud, collusion, and other such grifts, rackets, and anticompetitive actions in the US is doomed to fail, those who benefit from it tend to be the most reliable political donors. It’s hard to go after one and not go after the others and that would upset a lot of politically powerful people, this results in an armistice and not going after any.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was really John Ehrlichman who revealed the truth. Listening to the Nixon tapes, he (Nixon) spent the entirety of his days scheming against political enemies and people he simply didn't like.
"“Prosecutorial discretion” is the authority of an agency charged with enforcing a law to decide whether to enforce, or not to enforce, the law against someone. USCIS, like other law enforcement agencies, has prosecutorial discretion and exercises it every day. In the immigration context, the term applies not only to the decision to issue a Notice to Appear (NTA), but also to a broad range of other discretionary immigration enforcement decisions."
There is a whole area of research on this. Prosecutors have significant discretion around charging and (suggested) sentence, and this allows bias to creep in. I've heard people debate the quality of specific research on the size of the bias, but not the mere idea that bias is possible at all.
They absolutely get to pick. They pick which cases they choose to prosecute, plea bargain, or dismiss, as well as what sentence they choose to ask for.
They have discretion to not prosecute. I was nearly killed and left with significant injuries. The police conspired to undercharge and the prosecutor DGAF.
> The pervasive problems with racism in our criminal justice system has been clear. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.
> The systemic racism in the system starts before the first contact and continues through charging decisions, plea deals, conviction, sentencing recommendations, incarceration, release and beyond.
How do you respond when others use that information to instead assert "well of course they're incarcerated at a higher rate; they commit more, and worse crimes than -we- do!"
I’ve given up trying to convince people about any of this. You will be accused of some -isms at best. So I just quietly use demographic information to pick where to live and where to send my kids to school. And try to be sympathetic when my friends complain about being impacted by crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 rapid partisans feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
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.
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.
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 consolidation of food production in the US is a risk to us all.
(Or so I was told. Might even be the reason we have Trump 2.0?)
The investigation started during Biden’s term as president.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
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).
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.
They're not. If you hire a hitman through a corporation it doesn't magically become legal.
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.
I mean you're the one who brought up hitmen. What's their job?
We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.
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.
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!
So clearly we should... make it even more lenient? That's what OP was implying.
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.
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
You really shouldn't need a citation for something so easily verifiable.
They absolutely get to pick!
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-1-part-i-chapter-...
"“Prosecutorial discretion” is the authority of an agency charged with enforcing a law to decide whether to enforce, or not to enforce, the law against someone. USCIS, like other law enforcement agencies, has prosecutorial discretion and exercises it every day. In the immigration context, the term applies not only to the decision to issue a Notice to Appear (NTA), but also to a broad range of other discretionary immigration enforcement decisions."
2) prosecutors can tell police straight up what they will or won’t prosecute, which affects what crimes cops will investigate or make an arrest for
> The pervasive problems with racism in our criminal justice system has been clear. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.
> The systemic racism in the system starts before the first contact and continues through charging decisions, plea deals, conviction, sentencing recommendations, incarceration, release and beyond.
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?
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 am more pushing back against the call for corporal punishment like caning
Corporal punishment is laughable outright, but that's masking the issue. Punishing corporations does not discourage the participants directly. The behavior will not change.
The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So that means "invest" the time and resources to take just a small piece of the food supply chain into your own hands.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
To be fair, journalists also seem to miss even when there is an obvious conspiracy. They are a varied bunch.
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.
I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
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.
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 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.
Who was in charge during this time period?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 rapid partisans feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
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.
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
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.
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.