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The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing

509 points by toomuchtodo 4mo ago

toomuchtodo 4mo ago
Related: Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756256 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
pstuart 4mo ago
That'll show em! (that they should continue with the price fixing). I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
- cyanydeez 4mo ago
  win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
  - jackb4040 4mo ago
    Unfortunately, Ivy-League research suggests the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.. That is basically predetermined by lobbyists, paid for by the same corporations meant to be punished: https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bill-has-near-zero-influence-on-whether-it-will-become-law https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bil... I think we either get a collapse into techno-feudalism, an anti-capitalist revolution (doubt), or a breakthrough savior of capitalism like FDR. The idea of "just vote better / harder" does not ring true to me or millions of people who have been hearing the same for decades while all these problems have gotten worse.
    - pstuart 4mo ago
      I'm not going to discount that finding, but I'd posit that some of the hubris of elected officials comes from the assumption that people are voting their party line -- they are effectively a shoo-in for a majority of voters. Partisan politics is bad for America and we were warned by Washington. These days, many people are more loyal to their party than they are to the country.
      - jackb4040 4mo ago
        I guess my point is, FPTP / lesser-evilism / party lines are all tools corporate power uses to explain why outcomes keep diverging from desires within our nominal democracy. It's all well and good to lament partisanship, but Washington's warning doesn't really help us find a solution. It was already falling apart as he made it. I do think Bernie Sanders was an attempt by our collective society to produce a new FDR. The fact that he was stopped so easily points to collapse as the next most likely outcome.
- readthenotes1 4mo ago
  "naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. " Who was in charge during this time period?
  - jstanley 4mo ago
    2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
    - nekusar 4mo ago
      2? 2?! I can easily think of lots of corruption of the following: Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, W Bush, Clinton, H Bush, Reagan. Everybody follows neoliberal economics, and enables loads of corruption for their friends, families, and allies. All of them did that. They ALL have been corrupt. The target of who the corruption is for changes.
      - jachee 4mo ago
        Not within the given time period. Only two there.
    - pstuart 4mo ago
      I give Dems a partial pass -- in that their leadership engages in what I consider to be genteel corruption like being soft on monopolies and other less palatable but "business as usual" type of bullshit. This is versus and administration that is aggressively doing no-bid contract to family and friends, complete disregard for the emoluments clause of the constitution, etc. Note: the nature of a 2-party system, along with laissez-faire campaign finance laws, is practically designed for legislative corruption. Unfortunately the only people who can change it are the ones who profit from it.
      - jackb4040 4mo ago
        That aggression is a powerful political force. If democrats had used the same aggression to go after this type of corruption that Trump uses to go after latin americans, they would have ironclad popular support. The problem is that all their donors would withdraw. That contradiction is destroying them, they don't have an answer for it. It lost them the 2024 election, and will continue to do so until they invent another Obama. Then the problem with _that_ is, all the Obama types are now calling themselves socialists.
- onetimeusename 4mo ago
  Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d32b05892541613df3f4e4932109ee0c https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...
  - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
    It’s not only Republicans getting contributions from Big Egg.
    - throw10920 4mo ago
      xkcd (2130) continues to be unreasonably poignant, as usual.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
Taronar 4mo ago
Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.
- abeppu 4mo ago
  And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.
- plagiarist 4mo ago
  An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.
- newsclues 4mo ago
  Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health. But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
- stickfigure 4mo ago
  This was addressed by Matt Levine in today's Money Stuff. The problem was not the presence or lack of competition, it was a technical failure of the market structure. Matt: This is a familiar story and you probably know the ending. There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market. Not defending the bad actors here, but there's that whole "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing. If the market structure rewards manipulation, you get manipulation. The market structure doesn't have to be this way.
MarkusQ 4mo ago
Reminds me of the Egg Greed Graph. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpg 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.
- vikingerik 4mo ago
  Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
  - smokefoot 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        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.
josefritzishere 4mo ago
Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
declan_roberts 4mo ago
We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes. We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.
  - devilbunny 4mo ago
    The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.
    - mlsu 4mo ago
      Arguably that is worse. If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him. The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
      - devilbunny 4mo ago
        > If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him. There is certainly a case to be made here for “if it seems too good to be true…”, but realistically we are not going to impoverish the retired teachers of X state because X state chose poorly.
    - unethical_ban 4mo ago
      Yet another issue with the modern US iteration of capitalism. The intentional design of the US stock market for people to depend on it for retirement, instead of getting enough wages to save their money risk-free or with government benefits. Pushing 401k and IRA, making it so that's the only viable way (other than having a high-6-digit wage) to live comfortably in retirement, is a detriment to a healthy society.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it. 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
- ksbd-pls-finish 4mo ago
  >The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. It is prudent to wait a bit before seeing malice everywhere Now we know (or at least - have more proof) what was going on, so the justice system worked. How many conspiracy theories were invented and then turned out to be false? This is news precisely because it turned out to be actually true.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4mo ago
    > Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. To be fair, journalists also seem to miss even when there is an obvious conspiracy. They are a varied bunch.
Varelion 4mo ago
The United Monopolies of America
- pphysch 4mo ago
  The Associated Monopolies of America.
xgulfie 4mo ago
Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
mannanj 4mo ago
So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.
croes 4mo ago
Business as usual. 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?
jklinger410 4mo ago
It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability They're not. If you hire a hitman through a corporation it doesn't magically become legal.
  - khriss 4mo ago
    Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
      - b3ing 4mo ago
        But you can deny life saving treatments if you are a health insurance company
        gruez 4mo ago
        That's their job? It's not even limited to private insurance companies. Public health systems have lists of what is considered good value for money too, even if the treatments themselves are theoretically life saving. The US is the biggest market for new and rare drugs specifically because other countries consider the prices too high.
alwa 4mo ago
Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down.html 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-libor-was-also-manipulated 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.
khriss 4mo ago
We really need an FTC with teeth. Capitalism cannot easily survive monopolies as the first thing monopolies do it fight tooth and nail to shut out competitors. 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.
arjie 4mo ago
Wow, well I have egg on my face. I have frequently used this as an example of the "oh so the egg guys got greedy and then got saintly" to parody the idea that price is primarily determined by greed. Welp! Now to see if I can eke out some pride by finding out what percentage of the price fluctuations was due to coordination. > 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.
- pocksuppet 4mo ago
  A thing can have many causes. One is the direct cause: the city exploded because someone pressed the button to launch the nukes and left the coordinates set to zero. Even more direct: the city exploded because a critical mass of uranium was assembled. There can be many indirect causes: someone put an idiot in charge of the nuke-launch button, someone forgot to put a molly-guard on the nuke-launch button, someone invented nukes. Price is usually determined by producer greed because producer greed causes prices to consistently be set as high as possible. This is usually constrained by market competition, which limits how high they can be set. In rare cases, prices are set low by consumer greed. A high price has a direct cause: the person in charge of setting prices set a high price. A little less direct: that person is incentivized to set prices as high as they can. Much less direct: there are currently few competitors due to avian flu; we have one of very few chip fabs that can make the widgets; our customers are locked in; our customers signed contracts allowing us to raise prices but forbidding them from cancelling when we do. Greed is always one of the more direct causes of high prices. The fact that capitalist markets use greed as an integral part of their normal functioning does not change this fact.
  - cindyllm 4mo ago
    [dead]
- jorvi 4mo ago
  The infamous greed cycle: https://streamsofconsciousness.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image.png https://streamsofconsciousness.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation. 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.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  Never let a good crisis go to waste, or so the saying goes. The consolidation of food production in the US is a risk to us all.
  - snootypoot 4mo ago
    have you ever seen the documentary food inc?
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      This one? https://www.philo.com/player/player/vod/Vk9EOjYwODU0ODg5OTY0ODc5MDAwNA https://www.philo.com/player/player/vod/Vk9EOjYwODU0ODg5OTY0...
- kevmo 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
    I call it 3 scams in a trench coat pretending to be a real economy. Though obviously there are more than 3 going. You kinda have to be in one of the grifts in order to pay the costs of the others, like work in military contracting in order to pay for healthcare. That’s why crackdowns on fraud, collusion, and other such grifts, rackets, and anticompetitive actions in the US is doomed to fail, those who benefit from it tend to be the most reliable political donors. It’s hard to go after one and not go after the others and that would upset a lot of politically powerful people, this results in an armistice and not going after any.
xbar 4mo ago
Why is capital punishment for society-level-harming white collar crime never considered in Western countries?
yieldcrv 4mo ago
> Trump let big egg producers off the hook for what looks like a brazen multi-year conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation. I honestly hate how Presidents are attributed to market functions I hate how partisans do that pretty religiously while the state functions pretty autonomously in parallel, the investigation and multi agency actions helped crater the price of eggs very quickly But even that summary is trying so hard to appease rabid partisan’s feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
- krapp 4mo ago
  One of the more common reasons I've seen cited for people voting for Trump is that they blamed Biden for high egg prices. Giving people a scapegoat is always effective.
  - yieldcrv 4mo ago
    I’ve seen the opposite, where Trump is blamed despite not being inaugurated by the peak It is effective
    - krapp 4mo ago
      It only seems to be effective in one direction. Trump shrugs off controversies that would have ended the careers of other politicians (which unlike the price of eggs, he's often actually responsible for.) Meanwhile Biden being the reason eggs were expensive stuck so hard it became a meme.
carimura 4mo ago
Please invest in some happy backyard chickens if you are able. We did, and it's amazing.
- unbalancedevh 4mo ago
  > Please invest in some happy backyard chickens I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.
  - carimura 4mo ago
    ya that is likely correct in most cases, but I bet one could sell their surplus at a discount from store and break even. So that means "invest" the time and resources to take just a small piece of the food supply chain into your own hands.
snootypoot 4mo ago
thankfully the scamming egg companies are at least able to admit voter fraud takes place, and when attempting to emulate it get leniency from the administration who makes its biggest gripe about voter fraud
snootypoot 4mo ago
im reminded of the old documentary food inc. pretty good stuff, it points out that the centralization of the american food supply into the hands of ever fewer companies is going to harm us at some point.
WarmWash 4mo ago
Seems ripe for civil litigation at least. Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then. I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.
- foolswisdom 4mo ago
  Maybe so, but the DOJ is not releasing lots of the evidence. I wonder if there's a solid enough case without that.
BrenBarn 4mo ago
This is the perennial problem in our society with regulation. We're not willing to set the penalties high enough. The penalties need to be absolutely ruinous.
- eigenrick 4mo ago
  If we jack the financial penalties up, it will just screw over the consumers. We need to send people to prison. Bankrupting the company is an interesting strategy, but I think that'd just result in more consolidation.
  - robocat 4mo ago
    Prison is expensive for the state, and in my limited experience prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family). Perhaps can fine the wealthy to pay for their own imprisonment, maybe within a luxury hotel?
    - BrenBarn 4mo ago
      > prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family). I mean that's kind of the point.
  - BrenBarn 4mo ago
    I think both should be in play. The financial penalties should largely apply against the individuals running the company, not just the company itself. The CEO should be in danger of losing their home and being left penniless on the street. But there are other options to consider to. Like "financial penalties" could include stuff like the company being dissolved and its assets distributed to its competitors.
abeppu 4mo ago
Ok here's maybe a dumb or maybe a crazy question or maybe not: - the Fed has price stability as part of its dual mandate, and in its normal operation does this at the level of manipulating the money supply for everyone, through changing the interest rates given to large banks (IIUC, I'm def not an expert here) - the FTC has as its primary mission anti-trust enforcement and consumer protection. During the last administration, the FTC tried to be more aggressive largely through legal action with specific firms. Price stability and anti-trust enforcement are related. Would both goals be better served if a single public body with high independence could use both tools and levels of targeting? E.g. rather than being hit with a small-ish fine, should firms that collude to manipulate prices, or firms that consolidate to the point of approaching monopoly, be penalized with higher interest rates on all their financing?
- elil17 4mo ago
  I don't think this makes sense for two reasons: - The ways the Fed pursues price stability and the FTC produces antitrust may have a similar effect, but they have a completely different set of skills required by the employees and they lend themselves to different management structures. One is essentially economics research, the other is essentially law enforcement. - If the cost of doing a crime was higher interest rates, then anyone with low debt could freely commit the crime. Why not simply make the fine proportional to the price impact on consumers (e.g. if you collude to raise prices and make an extra $1 million, you pay a $3 million fine)?
metalman 4mo ago
now I understand why it's called a "fine", because it's way more than ok, it's just fine indeed.
autoexec 4mo ago
I've known about Cal-Maine's scammy practices for years. It's difficult to know which brands are associated with a group like Cal-Maine, but I did my best at one point to get a list which I still check before buying eggs. The brands I've been avoiding are: 4Grain Cage Free Egglands Best Farmhouse Eggs Land O'Lakes Fassio Egg Farms Southwest Specialty Eggs LLC Rocky Mountain Eggs Meadowcreek Foods Specialty Eggs LLC Red River Valley Egg Farm ProEgg Inc. Dixie Egg Co. American Egg Products LLC Texas Egg Products LLC Wharton County foods Benton County Foods Sunups Sunny Meadow Mahard Egg Farm Maine Egg Farms Other Cal-Maine associated brands: Ralston-Purina, Pilgram's Pride, Adams Foods, Dairy Fresh Products, Foodonics Int'l, Versova is new to me, but I'll try to avoid them too. It looks like their brands include: Center Fresh Group Centrum Valley Farms Iowa Cage FRee Hawkeye pride Ovation Farms Trillium Farms Willamette Egg Farms
- stronglikedan 4mo ago
  Pete & Gerry's seem to be legit from the research I've done. At least, I hope so!
- culi 4mo ago
  Cornucopia Egg Scorecard focuses on ethical treatment of hens but is sometimes a bit more expansive than that too. A convenient list of good eggs https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/ https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/ All the brands you listed that I could find on their list seem to have the lowest scores.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 4mo ago
    I’ll stick with Kirkland Signature which is supplied by Wilcox. I don’t really think Costco ever raised their egg prices afaik. Edit: it is a bit opaque but their main supply network allegedly includes Wilcox and Handsome Brook which are rated decently
    - Obscurity4340 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
nixosbestos 4mo ago
Thank god the comments here are so apolitical. Would hate to interrogate how this is allowed to continue, alternatives to allowing it to happen, etc.
camgunz 4mo ago
It drives me bananas when progressives defend corporations, particularly around things insurance (everyone knows insurance companies screw their customers as a matter of policy) or price fixing foods during and immediately after COVID. All the incentives are to do this, it happens all the time, and governments don't really want to put the screws to companies for doing it because that hurts the stock market. You should have to have a license to be in the c-suite of a company over 200 people, and if you do shit like this, we revoke your license. The incentive structure is built on the hope that when threatened with making merely minimum to median wage, you'll suddenly care about the cost of groceries.
mdnahas 4mo ago
Economist and former trader here. I did a quick skim and this market is badly structured. According to Claude, the method use to compute the prices for large sales is based on experts who use the activity on a small spot market, the details of some larger off market transactions that they find out about, and don’t publish their method. The wholesaler buyers using that price for their large contracts are … stupid. I’m not surprised that egg producers placed lots of non-trading bid - it is a common manipulation in markets. I’m shocked that wholesaler buyers accepted a system where it could have a large effect. I would expect a small settlement because it is hard to compute the fraud’s effect on prices. The “experts” at Urner Barry who set the price don’t publish their method. Thus, prosecutors would have to be conservative about what they could prove in court.
bigtex 4mo ago
You can get 30 dozen eggs at Costco business center for under 18 dollars. Is that price fixing? Do with that what you will.

509 points by toomuchtodo 4mo ago

Related: Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756256 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026

pstuart 4mo ago

That'll show em! (that they should continue with the price fixing). I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.

cyanydeez 4mo ago
win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
toomuchtodo 4mo ago
If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
- jackb4040 4mo ago
  Unfortunately, Ivy-League research suggests the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.. That is basically predetermined by lobbyists, paid for by the same corporations meant to be punished: https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bill-has-near-zero-influence-on-whether-it-will-become-law https://thinkbynumbers.org/democracy/voter-support-for-a-bil... I think we either get a collapse into techno-feudalism, an anti-capitalist revolution (doubt), or a breakthrough savior of capitalism like FDR. The idea of "just vote better / harder" does not ring true to me or millions of people who have been hearing the same for decades while all these problems have gotten worse.
  - pstuart 4mo ago
    I'm not going to discount that finding, but I'd posit that some of the hubris of elected officials comes from the assumption that people are voting their party line -- they are effectively a shoo-in for a majority of voters. Partisan politics is bad for America and we were warned by Washington. These days, many people are more loyal to their party than they are to the country.
    - jackb4040 4mo ago
      I guess my point is, FPTP / lesser-evilism / party lines are all tools corporate power uses to explain why outcomes keep diverging from desires within our nominal democracy. It's all well and good to lament partisanship, but Washington's warning doesn't really help us find a solution. It was already falling apart as he made it. I do think Bernie Sanders was an attempt by our collective society to produce a new FDR. The fact that he was stopped so easily points to collapse as the next most likely outcome.
readthenotes1 4mo ago
"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. " Who was in charge during this time period?
- jstanley 4mo ago
  2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
  - nekusar 4mo ago
    2? 2?! I can easily think of lots of corruption of the following: Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, W Bush, Clinton, H Bush, Reagan. Everybody follows neoliberal economics, and enables loads of corruption for their friends, families, and allies. All of them did that. They ALL have been corrupt. The target of who the corruption is for changes.
    - jachee 4mo ago
      Not within the given time period. Only two there.
  - pstuart 4mo ago
    I give Dems a partial pass -- in that their leadership engages in what I consider to be genteel corruption like being soft on monopolies and other less palatable but "business as usual" type of bullshit. This is versus and administration that is aggressively doing no-bid contract to family and friends, complete disregard for the emoluments clause of the constitution, etc. Note: the nature of a 2-party system, along with laissez-faire campaign finance laws, is practically designed for legislative corruption. Unfortunately the only people who can change it are the ones who profit from it.
    - jackb4040 4mo ago
      That aggression is a powerful political force. If democrats had used the same aggression to go after this type of corruption that Trump uses to go after latin americans, they would have ironclad popular support. The problem is that all their donors would withdraw. That contradiction is destroying them, they don't have an answer for it. It lost them the 2024 election, and will continue to do so until they invent another Obama. Then the problem with _that_ is, all the Obama types are now calling themselves socialists.
onetimeusename 4mo ago
Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d32b05892541613df3f4e4932109ee0c https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...
- TimorousBestie 4mo ago
  It’s not only Republicans getting contributions from Big Egg.
  - throw10920 4mo ago
    xkcd (2130) continues to be unreasonably poignant, as usual.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

Taronar 4mo ago

Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.

abeppu 4mo ago
And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.
plagiarist 4mo ago
An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.
newsclues 4mo ago
Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health. But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
stickfigure 4mo ago
This was addressed by Matt Levine in today's Money Stuff. The problem was not the presence or lack of competition, it was a technical failure of the market structure. Matt: This is a familiar story and you probably know the ending. There’s a big market (egg producers selling eggs to supermarkets etc.), and there’s a small market (egg producers selling extra eggs to each other on an electronic exchange). The price in the small market determines the price in the big market. Participants in the small market are also participants in the big market. You can spend a little money in the small market to move the price, which can make you a lot of money in the big market. Not defending the bad actors here, but there's that whole "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing. If the market structure rewards manipulation, you get manipulation. The market structure doesn't have to be this way.

MarkusQ 4mo ago

Reminds me of the Egg Greed Graph. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpg 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.

vikingerik 4mo ago
Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
- smokefoot 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.

josefritzishere 4mo ago

Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.

declan_roberts 4mo ago

We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes. We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.

Henchman21 4mo ago
Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.
- devilbunny 4mo ago
  The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.
  - mlsu 4mo ago
    Arguably that is worse. If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him. The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
    - devilbunny 4mo ago
      > If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him. There is certainly a case to be made here for “if it seems too good to be true…”, but realistically we are not going to impoverish the retired teachers of X state because X state chose poorly.
  - unethical_ban 4mo ago
    Yet another issue with the modern US iteration of capitalism. The intentional design of the US stock market for people to depend on it for retirement, instead of getting enough wages to save their money risk-free or with government benefits. Pushing 401k and IRA, making it so that's the only viable way (other than having a high-6-digit wage) to live comfortably in retirement, is a detriment to a healthy society.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago

> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it. 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

ksbd-pls-finish 4mo ago
>The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. It is prudent to wait a bit before seeing malice everywhere Now we know (or at least - have more proof) what was going on, so the justice system worked. How many conspiracy theories were invented and then turned out to be false? This is news precisely because it turned out to be actually true.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4mo ago
  > Because journalists see conspiracy everywhere. To be fair, journalists also seem to miss even when there is an obvious conspiracy. They are a varied bunch.

Varelion 4mo ago

The United Monopolies of America

pphysch 4mo ago
The Associated Monopolies of America.

xgulfie 4mo ago

Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...

mannanj 4mo ago

So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.

croes 4mo ago

Business as usual. 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?

jklinger410 4mo ago

It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.

gruez 4mo ago
>It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability They're not. If you hire a hitman through a corporation it doesn't magically become legal.
- khriss 4mo ago
  Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
  - gruez 4mo ago
    Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
    - b3ing 4mo ago
      But you can deny life saving treatments if you are a health insurance company
      - gruez 4mo ago
        That's their job? It's not even limited to private insurance companies. Public health systems have lists of what is considered good value for money too, even if the treatments themselves are theoretically life saving. The US is the biggest market for new and rare drugs specifically because other countries consider the prices too high.

alwa 4mo ago

Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down.html 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-libor-was-also-manipulated 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.

khriss 4mo ago

We really need an FTC with teeth. Capitalism cannot easily survive monopolies as the first thing monopolies do it fight tooth and nail to shut out competitors. 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.

arjie 4mo ago

Wow, well I have egg on my face. I have frequently used this as an example of the "oh so the egg guys got greedy and then got saintly" to parody the idea that price is primarily determined by greed. Welp! Now to see if I can eke out some pride by finding out what percentage of the price fluctuations was due to coordination. > 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.

pocksuppet 4mo ago
A thing can have many causes. One is the direct cause: the city exploded because someone pressed the button to launch the nukes and left the coordinates set to zero. Even more direct: the city exploded because a critical mass of uranium was assembled. There can be many indirect causes: someone put an idiot in charge of the nuke-launch button, someone forgot to put a molly-guard on the nuke-launch button, someone invented nukes. Price is usually determined by producer greed because producer greed causes prices to consistently be set as high as possible. This is usually constrained by market competition, which limits how high they can be set. In rare cases, prices are set low by consumer greed. A high price has a direct cause: the person in charge of setting prices set a high price. A little less direct: that person is incentivized to set prices as high as they can. Much less direct: there are currently few competitors due to avian flu; we have one of very few chip fabs that can make the widgets; our customers are locked in; our customers signed contracts allowing us to raise prices but forbidding them from cancelling when we do. Greed is always one of the more direct causes of high prices. The fact that capitalist markets use greed as an integral part of their normal functioning does not change this fact.
- cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
jorvi 4mo ago
The infamous greed cycle: https://streamsofconsciousness.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image.png https://streamsofconsciousness.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

CGMthrowaway 4mo ago

I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation. 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.

pixl97 4mo ago
Never let a good crisis go to waste, or so the saying goes. The consolidation of food production in the US is a risk to us all.
- snootypoot 4mo ago
  have you ever seen the documentary food inc?
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    This one? https://www.philo.com/player/player/vod/Vk9EOjYwODU0ODg5OTY0ODc5MDAwNA https://www.philo.com/player/player/vod/Vk9EOjYwODU0ODg5OTY0...
kevmo 4mo ago
[flagged]
- cjbgkagh 4mo ago
  I call it 3 scams in a trench coat pretending to be a real economy. Though obviously there are more than 3 going. You kinda have to be in one of the grifts in order to pay the costs of the others, like work in military contracting in order to pay for healthcare. That’s why crackdowns on fraud, collusion, and other such grifts, rackets, and anticompetitive actions in the US is doomed to fail, those who benefit from it tend to be the most reliable political donors. It’s hard to go after one and not go after the others and that would upset a lot of politically powerful people, this results in an armistice and not going after any.

xbar 4mo ago

Why is capital punishment for society-level-harming white collar crime never considered in Western countries?

yieldcrv 4mo ago

> Trump let big egg producers off the hook for what looks like a brazen multi-year conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation. I honestly hate how Presidents are attributed to market functions I hate how partisans do that pretty religiously while the state functions pretty autonomously in parallel, the investigation and multi agency actions helped crater the price of eggs very quickly But even that summary is trying so hard to appease rabid partisan’s feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause

krapp 4mo ago
One of the more common reasons I've seen cited for people voting for Trump is that they blamed Biden for high egg prices. Giving people a scapegoat is always effective.
- yieldcrv 4mo ago
  I’ve seen the opposite, where Trump is blamed despite not being inaugurated by the peak It is effective
  - krapp 4mo ago
    It only seems to be effective in one direction. Trump shrugs off controversies that would have ended the careers of other politicians (which unlike the price of eggs, he's often actually responsible for.) Meanwhile Biden being the reason eggs were expensive stuck so hard it became a meme.

carimura 4mo ago

Please invest in some happy backyard chickens if you are able. We did, and it's amazing.

unbalancedevh 4mo ago
> Please invest in some happy backyard chickens I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.
- carimura 4mo ago
  ya that is likely correct in most cases, but I bet one could sell their surplus at a discount from store and break even. So that means "invest" the time and resources to take just a small piece of the food supply chain into your own hands.

snootypoot 4mo ago

thankfully the scamming egg companies are at least able to admit voter fraud takes place, and when attempting to emulate it get leniency from the administration who makes its biggest gripe about voter fraud

snootypoot 4mo ago

im reminded of the old documentary food inc. pretty good stuff, it points out that the centralization of the american food supply into the hands of ever fewer companies is going to harm us at some point.

WarmWash 4mo ago

Seems ripe for civil litigation at least. Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then. I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.

foolswisdom 4mo ago
Maybe so, but the DOJ is not releasing lots of the evidence. I wonder if there's a solid enough case without that.

BrenBarn 4mo ago

This is the perennial problem in our society with regulation. We're not willing to set the penalties high enough. The penalties need to be absolutely ruinous.

eigenrick 4mo ago
If we jack the financial penalties up, it will just screw over the consumers. We need to send people to prison. Bankrupting the company is an interesting strategy, but I think that'd just result in more consolidation.
- robocat 4mo ago
  Prison is expensive for the state, and in my limited experience prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family). Perhaps can fine the wealthy to pay for their own imprisonment, maybe within a luxury hotel?
  - BrenBarn 4mo ago
    > prison has rather hideous personal costs (for the individual and their friends and family). I mean that's kind of the point.
- BrenBarn 4mo ago
  I think both should be in play. The financial penalties should largely apply against the individuals running the company, not just the company itself. The CEO should be in danger of losing their home and being left penniless on the street. But there are other options to consider to. Like "financial penalties" could include stuff like the company being dissolved and its assets distributed to its competitors.

abeppu 4mo ago

Ok here's maybe a dumb or maybe a crazy question or maybe not: - the Fed has price stability as part of its dual mandate, and in its normal operation does this at the level of manipulating the money supply for everyone, through changing the interest rates given to large banks (IIUC, I'm def not an expert here) - the FTC has as its primary mission anti-trust enforcement and consumer protection. During the last administration, the FTC tried to be more aggressive largely through legal action with specific firms. Price stability and anti-trust enforcement are related. Would both goals be better served if a single public body with high independence could use both tools and levels of targeting? E.g. rather than being hit with a small-ish fine, should firms that collude to manipulate prices, or firms that consolidate to the point of approaching monopoly, be penalized with higher interest rates on all their financing?

elil17 4mo ago
I don't think this makes sense for two reasons: - The ways the Fed pursues price stability and the FTC produces antitrust may have a similar effect, but they have a completely different set of skills required by the employees and they lend themselves to different management structures. One is essentially economics research, the other is essentially law enforcement. - If the cost of doing a crime was higher interest rates, then anyone with low debt could freely commit the crime. Why not simply make the fine proportional to the price impact on consumers (e.g. if you collude to raise prices and make an extra $1 million, you pay a $3 million fine)?

metalman 4mo ago

now I understand why it's called a "fine", because it's way more than ok, it's just fine indeed.

autoexec 4mo ago

I've known about Cal-Maine's scammy practices for years. It's difficult to know which brands are associated with a group like Cal-Maine, but I did my best at one point to get a list which I still check before buying eggs. The brands I've been avoiding are: 4Grain Cage Free Egglands Best Farmhouse Eggs Land O'Lakes Fassio Egg Farms Southwest Specialty Eggs LLC Rocky Mountain Eggs Meadowcreek Foods Specialty Eggs LLC Red River Valley Egg Farm ProEgg Inc. Dixie Egg Co. American Egg Products LLC Texas Egg Products LLC Wharton County foods Benton County Foods Sunups Sunny Meadow Mahard Egg Farm Maine Egg Farms Other Cal-Maine associated brands: Ralston-Purina, Pilgram's Pride, Adams Foods, Dairy Fresh Products, Foodonics Int'l, Versova is new to me, but I'll try to avoid them too. It looks like their brands include: Center Fresh Group Centrum Valley Farms Iowa Cage FRee Hawkeye pride Ovation Farms Trillium Farms Willamette Egg Farms

stronglikedan 4mo ago
Pete & Gerry's seem to be legit from the research I've done. At least, I hope so!
culi 4mo ago
Cornucopia Egg Scorecard focuses on ethical treatment of hens but is sometimes a bit more expansive than that too. A convenient list of good eggs https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/ https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/ All the brands you listed that I could find on their list seem to have the lowest scores.
- SlightlyLeftPad 4mo ago
  I’ll stick with Kirkland Signature which is supplied by Wilcox. I don’t really think Costco ever raised their egg prices afaik. Edit: it is a bit opaque but their main supply network allegedly includes Wilcox and Handsome Brook which are rated decently
  - Obscurity4340 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

nixosbestos 4mo ago

Thank god the comments here are so apolitical. Would hate to interrogate how this is allowed to continue, alternatives to allowing it to happen, etc.

camgunz 4mo ago

It drives me bananas when progressives defend corporations, particularly around things insurance (everyone knows insurance companies screw their customers as a matter of policy) or price fixing foods during and immediately after COVID. All the incentives are to do this, it happens all the time, and governments don't really want to put the screws to companies for doing it because that hurts the stock market. You should have to have a license to be in the c-suite of a company over 200 people, and if you do shit like this, we revoke your license. The incentive structure is built on the hope that when threatened with making merely minimum to median wage, you'll suddenly care about the cost of groceries.

mdnahas 4mo ago

Economist and former trader here. I did a quick skim and this market is badly structured. According to Claude, the method use to compute the prices for large sales is based on experts who use the activity on a small spot market, the details of some larger off market transactions that they find out about, and don’t publish their method. The wholesaler buyers using that price for their large contracts are … stupid. I’m not surprised that egg producers placed lots of non-trading bid - it is a common manipulation in markets. I’m shocked that wholesaler buyers accepted a system where it could have a large effect. I would expect a small settlement because it is hard to compute the fraud’s effect on prices. The “experts” at Urner Barry who set the price don’t publish their method. Thus, prosecutors would have to be conservative about what they could prove in court.

bigtex 4mo ago

You can get 30 dozen eggs at Costco business center for under 18 dollars. Is that price fixing? Do with that what you will.