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

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

#61

Post by ksbd-pls-finish »

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…

>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.

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

#62

Post by alwa »

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.

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

#63

Post by jachee »

john_strinlai wrote: post #49
bs7280 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#64

Post by khriss »

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.

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

#65

Post by ksbd-pls-finish »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #23

> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of 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 ex…

>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.

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

#66

Post by khriss »

gruez wrote: post #58
jklinger410 wrote: post #40

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.

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.

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

#67

Post by jachee »

nekusar wrote: post #44
jstanley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 within the given time period. Only two there.

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

#68

Post by gruez »

khriss wrote: post #66
gruez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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

#69

Post by john_strinlai »

jachee wrote: post #63
john_strinlai wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#70

Post by b3ing »

gruez wrote: post #68
khriss wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you can deny life saving treatments if you are a health insurance company
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