The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by zie » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

devilbunny wrote: post #31

Henchman21 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#72

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

DaedalusII wrote: post #47

tancop wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

American Bar: Prosecutors confront ugly repercussions of bias - https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2... - February 3rd, 2023

> 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.

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

#73

Post by lazide » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #60

stickfigure wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Or even better, folks actively trying to screw the market manipulators.

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

#74

Post by geodel » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

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.

I'll start this punishment from elementary schools onwards. Early punishment will prevent later crimes.

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

#75

Post by ginko » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

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.

The person doing the hiring would be criminally liable and probably go to prison. The corporation itself would at best pay a fine.

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

#76

Post by Henchman21 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

zie wrote: post #71

devilbunny wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.

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…

I think to state it succinctly, the thing I was thinking was: "the people that make the bad decisions should bear the consequences".

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

#77

Post by scottlamb » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #56

tancop wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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!

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

#78

Post by gopher_space » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #56

tancop wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

The general public isn’t that relentlessly amoral.

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

#79

Post by treis » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:35 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…

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.

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

#80

Post by uejfiweun » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:36 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.

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.