alt Hacker NewsMaybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All
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"and not even for the lovingly cared-for, cage-free variety"
Which oddly did not increase in price much. I was in a discussion once on a forum and brought up that eggs around me (PNW) were still in the $6 for 18 when everyone else was complaining about $10 for a dozen. Next time I bought eggs, the ones I buy were the same price as always but the normal white eggs were in fact $10 a dozen...
> [Urner Barry] also collects bids that egg producers make for each other’s surplus inventory on an exchange called Egg Clearinghouse, Inc. [It] takes in those bids even before they lead to any sale, as a signal of demand.
> they had the ability to create the illusion of [consumer demand] through bids on the surplus exchange for purchases they had no intent of completing
This seems like a system tailor-made for collision. It seems like the consumer protection agency should force changes. Too bad they've been made toothless.
It seems the system was prone to manipulation. Having prices for high volumen transactions be set by low volume transaction in another market looks pretty silly. If they don't fix that there'll be worse troubles than price gouging by the big producers.
Yes, it was collusion.
Reported also here by Matt Stoller:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/crime-pays-the-egg-bandit...
Matt Levine wrote about this in July
> 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.
“Egg LIBOR was also manipulated” (Paywalled) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-07-01/egg...
Yes there is and nobody does anything about it thanks republicans. Bring back Khan.
I guess during one of the last surges the question I had was: Isn't a big egg company damned if they do or don't? If I'm a massive egg farmer in an area that's untouched by bird flu, and I keep my prices low: then I'm the bad guy who's running struggling operations out of business. If I raise my prices to stay in line with those operations, now I'm colluding in some way. If we break up big companies so they don't have the kind of power over the market, we trade lower prices for more resilience since the lowest prices are going to come from the highest scale.
I dunno. It's a weird situation. And eggs are particularly weird because, as the article notes, people are definitely willing to pay more for them; the low prices have less to do with true demand and more to do with competition.
> The fear that Huffman and other anti-monopolists share is that companies will read the Justice Department’s pursuit of the defendants not as a cautionary tale but as a how-to manual.
Settlements instead of jail time will only cause this behavior to continue. Economic white collar crimes need far higher punishments it seems when the only downside is you return only some of the higher profits you made.
There are two types of advocates for efficient markets: the true believers & the people who manipulate markets. The latter create and fund institutes & academic departments stocked with the former to convince and/or intimidate moderately educated people into disbelieving their lyin' eyes.
It's likely the cartel was only <1% of the egg price increase. It's good to go after, but it wasn't the main cause of price increases.
Some background for the <1% estimate:
- The fine was for 3M vs a 13B egg market
- The only quotation I could find covering how much the cartel raised prices was "placed bids at a price that was two cents greater" from Matt Levine's piece: https://emailshot.io/p/LKaQi73kHN4uv5sVMUbfSXNQdm3ELgy9j. That's ~1% of the Northwest Large White benchmark price of $5.43
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Adam Smith - "The Wealth of Nations"
At this point, "conspiracy theories" (the ones that check out logistically. not the actually crazy ones) are just factual news that made it far too early into the news cycle.
Of course there's an Egg Cartel.
There's lime, avocado, milk, oil and corn cartels. Why not eggs?
IMO price fixing is a lot more common than most people assume. The normal textbook economics say that in a pure commodity market like eggs, the average producer should make near zero profit. There are a few ways to make a profit in these industries, such as economies of scale or innovative use of byproducts, but it is very tough.
On the other hand, price fixing is relatively easy, and as long as the players don’t get too greedy and don’t leave a paper trail, they’re unlikely to be caught. The only way it usually happens is if there is a whistleblower.
The ADM lysine case years ago also threw a lot of cold water on whistleblowers when the whistleblower ended up getting more jail time than any of the other conspirators.
Anyhow, the fact you even see any successful prosecutions given how hard it is prove, and the paradoxical fact that in some commodity industries, you actually do see decent profit margins tells me that this sort of thing is actually probably very common.
lightbulbs, eggs... is there something about the shape that inspires people to protect it to no end? or the fragility?
Politico likes to skip between narrative, anecdote, and data.
The title uses the word Maybe. What does this mean in legal terms exactly?
It is so bizarre to publish a story like this months after the egg cartel has been prosecuted over years, totally exposed, seen its day in court, settled for a big fine.
There are a certain group of people who don't know anything unless it is publicized in certain approved outlets, and they are a problem.
edit: and to be less laconic, if these outlets, which are all owned by plutocrats, all collude to simply not report on a story, you can't convince these people of anything.
The entire US economy is stagnating and spiraling because cartels control most activity now.
For most of my life eggs were a loss leader and could always be found for under $2 a dozen. Why would they suddenly get the idea to form a cartel? Wasn't it always obvious they should do that? Did they used to be paragons of virtue, then decided to get evil for no reason?
Seems to me there must have been some new incentive structure in place.
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So after the surge in prices from normal market forces, they tried to keep prices up by placing high bids on eggs that they never intended to actually purchase. This briefly worked, then the market re-asserted itself and prices cratered. Now, after the fact, the justice department is investigating the bidding shenanigans. Is that a fair summary of the situation?
I guess the thing I'm confused about is how bidding above market rates for eggs didn't just result in these companies being stuck with a bunch of eggs that they grossly overpaid for? How did the scheme actually work?