Comment by alwa

Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”

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...

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.