[lmm]

> Yes, because companies need labor.

Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.

> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.

> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.

That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.