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jury slaps the egg cartel.
turns out egg producers.colluded to artificially restrict supply
high egg prices are greedflation.
Instead of having a face to face cartel, landlords have outsourced pricing to an algorithm that functionally does the same thing.
The guy who designed it also designed software that ripped off airplane passengers for a cool billion dollars from 1988-1992.
https://www.propublica.org/article/y...-realpage-rentCamden’s turnover rates increased about 15 percentage points in 2006 after it implemented YieldStar, Campo, the company’s CEO, told a trade publication a few years later. But that wasn’t a problem for the firm: Despite having to replace more renters, its revenue grew by 7.4%.
“The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo said. “I think that shows keeping the heads in the beds above all else is not always the best strategy.”
jury slaps the egg cartel.
turns out egg producers.colluded to artificially restrict supply
high egg prices are greedflation.
That's American Democracy.
https://www.propublica.org/article/d...al-estate-techThe U.S. Department of Justice late Wednesday stepped into a massive an rust lawsuit filed by dozens of tenants who are accusing a tech company’s apartment software of helping landlords collude to inflate rents.
The DOJ action comes after a ProPublica investigation last year found that Texas-based software provider RealPage used algorithms to recommend rents to landlords across the country to maximize profits — a practice that experts said may violate an rust laws.
“Put simply, RealPage allegedly replaces independent compe ive decisionmaking on prices, which often leads to lower prices for tenants, with a price-fixing combination that violates” federal an rust law, prosecutors wrote.
Not every use of an algorithm to set price violates federal law, they noted, but it is “unlawful when, as alleged here, compe ors knowingly combine their sensitive, nonpublic pricing and supply information in an algorithm that they rely upon in making pricing decisions, with the knowledge and expectation that other compe ors will do the same.”
GlaxoSmithKline bends the knee on asthma inhalers. When the FTC deigns to get out of its chair to enforce the law, monopolies shiver, markets get more compe ive and people benefit.
Monopoly Round-Up: How FTC Chair Lina Khan Cut Inhaler Costs to $35 (thebignewsletter.com)GlaxoSmithKline’s line of inhalers is the most prescribed in the United States, and this corporation’s cut to patient costs follows two other giant corporations - AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim - who recently did the same thing.
Despite being a very old type of product that is sold inexpensively abroad, inhalers are a big business in America, generating $178 billion in revenue between 2000 and 2021. Three firms - AstraZeneca, GSK, and Teva - had revenue of $25 billion in the past five years from this line of business. The high revenue is a result of high cost, with the list price of inhalers as somewhere between $200 to $600. A cut, therefore, is a big deal, especially for people with high deductible health care plans.
Why are inhalers so profitable? And why have three giant firms decided to forego this money? The short story is that pharmaceutical companies have been committing an extremely boring form of fraud that enabled them to maintain illegal monopoly protection for their products, and no one in government bothered to stop it. Last year, Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission stepped up with some clever lawyering and removed their monopoly protection. And so these firms are preemptively choosing to cut what patients have to pay.
& you know what she'll do now, Winester? Go after some unfortunate schmuck and drive that er right into the ter.
Let us proceed...
Live Nation uses kickbacks and creative accounting to hide its profits, and also to screw artists, promoters, venues and customers.
Explosive New Do ents Unearthed On Live Nation/Ticketmaster (thebignewsletter.com)Earlier this month, an rust attorney Dan Wall wrote a blog post on behalf of his client, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, trying to rebut the scrutiny on his firm. And the tack he took was a bit surprising. “Concert promotion,” he wrote, “is not a highly profitable business, even for Live Nation.” Sure, Live Nation charges charges consumers a lot of money, and doesn’t pay much to artists. But they don’t, he wrote, set the ticket price. And even worse, for Live Nation shareholders at least, it’s just not a very good business, with the middleman giant affecting at most 2% of the price of a ticket for its trouble. “The narrative that Ticketmaster fees are responsible for high ticket prices makes no sense,” he added. “There is no way that’s true.”
It was a weird statement, considering Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino made $139 million in 2022. And according to new do ents released by Congressman Bill Pascrell today from litigation in 2019, it’s flatly untrue. The allegations in the do ents are “based upon Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s own financial data, do entation, and correspondence provided by Live Nation/Ticketmaster as part of discovery in a lawsuit that has been ongoing for well over a decade.” Live Nation, according to a lawyer facing the firm, “ins uted a scheme which essentially defrauds everyone involved, from the artists to the ticket purchasers.”
It's a in' cartoon, for Christ-sakes.Live Nation uses kickbacks and creative accounting to hide its profits, and also to screw artists, promoters, venues and customers.
Explosive New Do ents Unearthed On Live Nation/Ticketmaster (thebignewsletter.com)
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