> 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.

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.

We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.

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

I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.

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.

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.