Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
pstuart•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
toomuchtodo•Jul 2, 2026
If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
readthenotes1•Jul 2, 2026
"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. "
Who was in charge during this time period?
jstanley•Jul 2, 2026
2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
nekusar•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
Not within the given time period. Only two there.
wat10000•Jul 2, 2026
Surely the relevant question is who was in charge when the punishment was decided, not who was in charge when the misbehavior occurred.
mghackerlady•Jul 2, 2026
not the one in charge of punishing this behaviour
mrguyorama•Jul 2, 2026
People always overlook how crappy our courts are.
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
saghm•Jul 2, 2026
> That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and an oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
It’s not only Republicans getting contributions from Big Egg.
throw10920•Jul 2, 2026
xkcd (2130) continues to be unreasonably poignant, as usual.
Taronar•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health.
But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
stickfigure•Jul 2, 2026
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.
arrosenberg•Jul 2, 2026
While Matt is technically correct, it's much easier to maintain a conspiracy like this when you have a small number of participants with a high concentration of share.
If power is more diluted among a greater number of participants you are way more likely to see defectors, which would provide accurate pricing data to the market and cause the conspiracy to fail.
lazide•Jul 2, 2026
Or even better, folks actively trying to screw the market manipulators.
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•Jul 2, 2026
Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
smokefoot•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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.
miyoji•Jul 2, 2026
Free-market libertarianism is a disease for which evidence is no cure.
miyoji•Jul 2, 2026
Collusion is not a market force and is actually highly illegal and corrupting of markets, so this doesn't seem relevant at all.
SpicyLemonZest•Jul 2, 2026
As the article says, people have a hard time understanding it because it turned out not to be what's happening. I was on the other side of the debate, I thought it was absurd, but it turns out egg company executives really were sending each other messages saying "let's manipulate the price upwards so that we can make more money".
Henchman21•Jul 2, 2026
Greed isn’t “forgotten” its reined in by regulation.
oersted•Jul 2, 2026
The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.
josefritzishere•Jul 2, 2026
Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
declan_roberts•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.
mlsu•Jul 2, 2026
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.
unethical_ban•Jul 2, 2026
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.
zie•Jul 2, 2026
Sort of True-ish. There are lots of different kinds of ownership. Ownership with little to no say in how things are run to ownership with basically all the control.
If you are an owner with all the control, i.e. you are on the board or in corporate leadership(CEO/CFO/etc), then hey guess what,there is a really great cell here at the local prison just waiting for you, depending on how involved you were.
If you are an owner with little to no control, i.e. most shareholders that just vote for the board, etc. The assets would get liquidated, bond/debt holders would get paid back, and then anything left over would go to these shareholders.
This would incentivize shareholders to care more about what they are owning, this is a good thing. Even if it's pension funds and individual retirement accounts. This would get sorted pretty quickly as soon as the new normal is known and adjusted for.
SpaceX for example just went public, but if you read the docs, the control was not given to the public. Elon Musk 100% controls SpaceX still. Even if every public shareholder unanimously agrees against Elon Musk, guess what happens? Elon Musk still gets his way.
I don't know what the parent comment was thinking, but to my mind, the ones with the most control get the worst of the consequences. So Pension Funds/etc that hold little to no control would get paid out before those with more control.
john_strinlai•Jul 2, 2026
>the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?
in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?
bs7280•Jul 2, 2026
Executives will be more afraid of being sent to prison for criminal charges, than having someone else's money get spent on fines. We can do both - increase the fines and set a precedent of arresting executives when their company does criminal things.
john_strinlai•Jul 2, 2026
sure, prison time for some criminal stuff is cool too.
i am more pushing back against the call for corporal punishment like caning
jachee•Jul 2, 2026
What if I told you that prison is also corporal punishment?
john_strinlai•Jul 2, 2026
i tried to be more specific with the “like caning” part
tancop•Jul 2, 2026
we dont need new punishments, the system is just backwards. for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison. corporate fraud, cartels, pollution, big time tax evasion has to come with 20+ year sentences and fines based on your income like a traffic violation in norway. flat fines just dont work when the criminal is rich.
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
DaedalusII•Jul 2, 2026
how are prosecutors racist - they only get to prosecute people arrested for committing crimes. they dont get to pick!
wetmore•Jul 2, 2026
They get to pick the sentencing they are aiming for, and that can depend on race.
LadyCailin•Jul 2, 2026
They absolutely get to pick. They pick which cases they choose to prosecute, plea bargain, or dismiss, as well as what sentence they choose to ask for.
kevin_thibedeau•Jul 2, 2026
They have discretion to not prosecute. I was nearly killed and left with significant injuries. The police conspired to undercharge and the prosecutor DGAF.
mcmcmc•Jul 2, 2026
1) they can be selective with which arrests result in charges
2) prosecutors can tell police straight up what they will or won’t prosecute, which affects what crimes cops will investigate or make an arrest for
benregenspan•Jul 2, 2026
There is a whole area of research on this. Prosecutors have significant discretion around charging and (suggested) sentence, and this allows bias to creep in. I've heard people debate the quality of specific research on the size of the bias, but not the mere idea that bias is possible at all.
> The pervasive problems with racism in our criminal justice system has been clear. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.
> The systemic racism in the system starts before the first contact and continues through charging decisions, plea deals, conviction, sentencing recommendations, incarceration, release and beyond.
gruez•Jul 2, 2026
>for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison
What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
ksbd-pls-finish•Jul 2, 2026
>in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
Why? I mean, do you have a specific scientific research in mind, or is it something you feel is right?
I mean, it makes sense to me, mostly, but "we should" presented without any evidence irks me a bit.
forshaper•Jul 2, 2026
And rotten tomato pelting would probably helpfully lower the rate of people turning their resentments into content.
the__alchemist•Jul 2, 2026
Alternatively: (As stated in the other replies) jail execs.
geodel•Jul 2, 2026
I'll start this punishment from elementary schools onwards. Early punishment will prevent later crimes.
cucumber3732842•Jul 2, 2026
> 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•Jul 2, 2026
>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.
Varelion•Jul 2, 2026
The United Monopolies of America
pphysch•Jul 2, 2026
The Associated Monopolies of America.
xgulfie•Jul 2, 2026
Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
mannanj•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.
gruez•Jul 2, 2026
>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•Jul 2, 2026
Yeah, but the trick seems to be to can 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•Jul 2, 2026
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•Jul 2, 2026
But you can deny life saving treatments if you are a health insurance company
ginko•Jul 2, 2026
The person doing the hiring would be criminally liable and probably go to prison. The corporation itself would at best pay a fine.
alwa•Jul 2, 2026
Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”
It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here implying that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch.
> 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, and then further this year, though they are still roughly 40% above where they were in 2019. And 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.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does:
* a systemic supply shock did naturally bump prices upward—when you kill all the sick chickens, there really are physically fewer eggs to be had—and it takes physical-world time to make enough new chickens and let them grow to egg-pooping age;
* the conspiracy did push the price signal above where it would naturally have risen, and faster;
* the reason this is bad and illegal—besides the grossness of unfair play—is that it provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse;
* the price has since collapsed by 93% to pennies a dozen;
* that’s squeezing the farmers brutally;
* the investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
To my mind that’s completely consistent with “the reason market-rigging conspiracy is bad is that misleading signals lead to bad decisions, which amplify booms and busts, sometimes beyond the market’s capacity to stabilize.”
khriss•Jul 2, 2026
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.
14 Comments
Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - 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 - July 2026
I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
Who was in charge during this time period?
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.
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and an oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.
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.
If power is more diluted among a greater number of participants you are way more likely to see defectors, which would provide accurate pricing data to the market and cause the conspiracy to fail.
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.
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.
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.
We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.
The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
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.
If you are an owner with all the control, i.e. you are on the board or in corporate leadership(CEO/CFO/etc), then hey guess what,there is a really great cell here at the local prison just waiting for you, depending on how involved you were.
If you are an owner with little to no control, i.e. most shareholders that just vote for the board, etc. The assets would get liquidated, bond/debt holders would get paid back, and then anything left over would go to these shareholders.
This would incentivize shareholders to care more about what they are owning, this is a good thing. Even if it's pension funds and individual retirement accounts. This would get sorted pretty quickly as soon as the new normal is known and adjusted for.
SpaceX for example just went public, but if you read the docs, the control was not given to the public. Elon Musk 100% controls SpaceX still. Even if every public shareholder unanimously agrees against Elon Musk, guess what happens? Elon Musk still gets his way.
I don't know what the parent comment was thinking, but to my mind, the ones with the most control get the worst of the consequences. So Pension Funds/etc that hold little to no control would get paid out before those with more control.
why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?
in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?
i am more pushing back against the call for corporal punishment like caning
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
2) prosecutors can tell police straight up what they will or won’t prosecute, which affects what crimes cops will investigate or make an arrest for
> The pervasive problems with racism in our criminal justice system has been clear. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.
> The systemic racism in the system starts before the first contact and continues through charging decisions, plea deals, conviction, sentencing recommendations, incarceration, release and beyond.
What do you think the chances of being caught shoplifting is? If it's less than 50-33%, then you have the same problem as the OP where it makes sense to shoplift.
Why? I mean, do you have a specific scientific research in mind, or is it something you feel is right?
I mean, it makes sense to me, mostly, but "we should" presented without any evidence irks me a bit.
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
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.
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?
They're not. If you hire a hitman through a corporation it doesn't magically become legal.
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 implying that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch.
> 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, and then further this year, though they are still roughly 40% above where they were in 2019. And 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.
To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does:
* a systemic supply shock did naturally bump prices upward—when you kill all the sick chickens, there really are physically fewer eggs to be had—and it takes physical-world time to make enough new chickens and let them grow to egg-pooping age;
* the conspiracy did push the price signal above where it would naturally have risen, and faster;
* the reason this is bad and illegal—besides the grossness of unfair play—is that it provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse;
* the price has since collapsed by 93% to pennies a dozen;
* that’s squeezing the farmers brutally;
* the investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…
To my mind that’s completely consistent with “the reason market-rigging conspiracy is bad is that misleading signals lead to bad decisions, which amplify booms and busts, sometimes beyond the market’s capacity to stabilize.”
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.