[smokefoot]

I mean no. The LIBOR analogy is appropriate. Large, long-term egg supply contracts are fixed to an index and that index was manipulated. That's criminal conspiracy and price fixing, not just a liquid market.

That's notably different from say the current scrum for HBM where the demand truly came as a surprise and scarce supply gets bid up.

Micron's windfall is justified and natural as these things go. The egg windfall was manufactured and criminal.

[treis]

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.

[oersted]

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 or cartels will always try to manipulate prices in their favor if they can.

[treis]

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.

[miyoji]

Free-market libertarianism is a disease for which evidence is no cure.

[smokefoot]

Yeah but the smoking gun is that volumes didn’t really go down much. I would buy higher unit margins on a shrinking volume, but for total profits to materially increase that means prices went up without a significant impact to volume. That smells rotten.