[nerdponx]

If you ran a cartel, what would your biggest fear be? If it were me, my biggest fear would be getting regulated out of existence, or maybe even being criminally prosecuted. So you want to keep a low public profile for your cartel activity.

If you start ratcheting up prices without an excuse, eventually people would notice, and at some point "people" would start to include state and federal legislators, who will start asking uncomfortable questions and whom you might not be able to buy off forever.

So instead what you do is set a comfortable minimum price industry wide and use your cartel power instead to aggressively cut costs, so that you have a credible threat of crushing any competition in a price war. This keeps potential competitors in check, thereby tacitly maintaining your preferred price floor.

When an external event does happen that actually raises supply costs, you are best equipped to eat those cost increases while your competitors struggle. Eventually, you sadly announce that you must raise your prices. This price becomes the new price floor for a while, until inflation catches up.

I'm not saying that's what they're doing, but to me that seems like a nice balance between maintaining industry dominance and not being portrayed in the media as Dr. Evil.