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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here implying that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch.
> 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.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does:
* a systemic supply shock did naturally bump prices upward—when you kill all the sick chickens, there really are physically fewer eggs to be had—and it takes physical-world time to make enough new chickens and let them grow;
* the conspiracy did push the price signal above where it would naturally have risen;
* the reason this is bad and illegal—besides the grossness of unfair play—is that it provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse;
* the price has since collapsed by 93% to pennies a dozen;
* that’s squeezing the farmers brutally;
* the department charged with investigating the discrepancy investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
To my mind that’s completely consistent with “the classical-economical reason the conspiracy is bad is that misleading signals lead to bad decisions, which amplify booms and busts, sometimes beyond the market’s capacity to stabilize.”
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.
>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.
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 have discretion to not prosecute. I was nearly killed and left with significant injuries. The police conspired to undercharge and the prosecutor DGAF.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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 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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health.
But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
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.
Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down....
It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here implying that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch.
> 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.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does:
* a systemic supply shock did naturally bump prices upward—when you kill all the sick chickens, there really are physically fewer eggs to be had—and it takes physical-world time to make enough new chickens and let them grow;
* the conspiracy did push the price signal above where it would naturally have risen;
* the reason this is bad and illegal—besides the grossness of unfair play—is that it provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse;
* the price has since collapsed by 93% to pennies a dozen;
* that’s squeezing the farmers brutally;
* the department charged with investigating the discrepancy investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
To my mind that’s completely consistent with “the classical-economical reason the conspiracy is bad is that misleading signals lead to bad decisions, which amplify booms and busts, sometimes beyond the market’s capacity to stabilize.”
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.
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.
>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.
how are prosecutors racist - they only get to prosecute people arrested for committing crimes. they dont get to pick!
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.
1) they can be selective with which arrests result in charges
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
They get to pick the sentencing they are aiming for, and that can depend on race.
They have discretion to not prosecute. I was nearly killed and left with significant injuries. The police conspired to undercharge and the prosecutor DGAF.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
The United Monopolies of America
The Associated Monopolies of America.
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
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?
Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
> 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
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.
If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. "
Who was in charge during this time period?
2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
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 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.
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.
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.
Greed isn’t “forgotten” its reined in by regulation.
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.
Free-market libertarianism is a disease for which evidence is no cure.
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 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".