The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing

Post by oersted » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #10

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 t…

Post by newsclues » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

Taronar wrote: post #8

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.

Post by miyoji » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

oersted wrote: post #42

treis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Post by DaedalusII » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #39

declan_roberts wrote: post #21

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 sexua…

Post by john_strinlai » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

bs7280 wrote: post #48

john_strinlai wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.