Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
Biggest? Latest? Last? You'll have to excuse an increasingly jaded public for their fading interest. Back on the farm, once the service animals were consuming more than they were worth ... they were just taken out behind the shed and eliminated. Seriously, for most people, the details are something they actively do NOT want to know. Only whether a service sector is serving ... or not.
Meanwhile, since this has been going on for years - if not decades - and generations of pols & financial regulators & lobbyists (not just the many employees at the perp institutions) obviously knew about it .... it also makes you wonder, what FINALLY prompted the outing? Some initial musings.
1) They've gone on to an even better scam?
(& we're underfunding the Control Fraud Harriers)
2) Or, if we're in luck, they've collectively decided they'd gone too far, and sawn half-through the branch they're sitting on?
(Seems doubtful. Why wouldn't they just slow down & keep quiet?)
3) The greed has won, and now they're fighting - IN PUBLIC - over the last crumbs?
(Consensus of cynics.)
2) Or, if we're in luck, they've collectively decided they'd gone too far, and sawn half-through the branch they're sitting on?
(Seems doubtful. Why wouldn't they just slow down & keep quiet?)
3) The greed has won, and now they're fighting - IN PUBLIC - over the last crumbs?
(Consensus of cynics.)
What all this shows is that for all the capitalist ballyhooing of the virtues of free markets, risk and Hayekian price discovery, what capitalists actually want is controlled, established prices.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we do them all a favor then and give them what they want? If prices are going to be set by a central authority, we don't need a an army of bankster peons taking a cut of the action while pretending to be engaged in competitive markets.
That's Communist talk, Dan. :)
ReplyDeleteSo it has to all be a front? A diversion for looting, and to help them rationalize what they secretly wish they weren't guilty of doing?
Monopoly capitalism is about price setting rather than price taking. When externalities, transaction costs, and economic rent are ignored in economic models, it's GIGO. It's transparently just a ploy to dupe the rubes and separate them from their money and labor.
ReplyDelete“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
ReplyDelete