>the costs of manufacturer's switching over production is going to wind up much higher then any profit they can make once they're tooled up This is not necessa

>the costs of manufacturer's switching over production is going to wind up much higher then any profit they can make once they're tooled up This is not necessarily true, especially if we consider that the pandemic may continue for a few months, and people will be using orders of magnitude more hand sanitizer and masks than before. > the guy with 11,000 bottles of hand sanitizer has no use for them, outside of the extremely limited window of people panicking due to uncertainty. He distributes supply over time. Instead of everyone panicking and buying up all the supply at time T, the scalper buys up some, and then gradually sells it at times T+1, T+2, T+3... Scalping is arbitrage between current demand and future demand, and ensures more supply is available when people need it in future. >But really, whether anyone believes this can be viewed through a very different lens: multiple times in the past week, US exchanges have ceased trading due to automatic circuit breakers from 7% drops in the market. This is comparing apples to oranges. A circuit breaker is not a price floor except in a very limited sense; the price is free to fall further the next day. I don't think many people would object to a rule like "the price of masks can only rise 10% per day".