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I’m not at certain what her price controls are. I know the food production end of things (not the stores) is highly consolidated into a couple of big companies that therefore own most of the food market. Breaking up those monopolies seems like a good way to get grocery priced down a bit. If that’s what she’s actually proposing, I would support it. But she hasn’t been very clear on what her plan actually is.
Those companies have small margins—very small margins.
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I strongly don't believe breaking up these "monopolies" will do anything other than raise prices.
In order to be an entity with monopoly powers you need to be the only game in town. An oligopoly can imitate monopoly power if they are all coordinating (and punishing defectors).
The problem with calling single producers of a product a monopoly is that substitution is a thing that exists. There could be a single company that produces strawberries and all strawberry related products and they would not have a single bit of monopoly power. Hell, they could probably expand to all fruit products and still not have much monopoly power. Because people can eat different kinds of food. Even if someone cornered the entire grocery market they would still not have monopoly power. Because restaurants and fast food exists and some of the larger chains are their own suppliers.
It is basically impossible to gain any level of monopoly power in the modern day food market. If anyone says there are food monopolies they are either lying, or using a non-economic definition of monopolies. Its fine if they use a non-economic definition of monopolies, economists don't own the word. But these people often say "this company is a [non-economic] monopoly, so we need to do what economists say to do about [economic] monopolies".
I can't say I'm an expert on monopolies, but I'm beginning to think that with today's informational velocity and the past ~100 years of legal precedent, it's nearly impossible to actually function as a monopoly.
The term monopoly conjures up images of John D. Rockefeller and other robber barons. I know just enough history to be aware that the practices of Standard Oil in the early 20th century are now patently illegal at a variety of levels, not just at the level of anti-monopoly. I mean, for one, it's pretty evident that Standard Oil was routinely offering kickbacks aka bribes all up and down their operation. One thing America has actually become pretty damn good at is making bribery a really bad business strategy.
But the 8th grade textbook of monopoly still owns an unreasonable amount of mindshare in the minds of activist politicians and bureaucrats. Lina Khan loves to get up in the morning and begin the next chapter of her "I'm the main character heroine fighting evil money dragons" autobiography.
Inflation, inefficiency, and capital appreciation malaise are what has and will continue to kill the middle and working classes. Government do-gooders operate under the flawed assumption that they can (a) understand the complexities of the dynamic system that is the economy and (b) craft laser precise legislation or regulation that will target only "the bad thing" and have zero unanticipated or secondary effects. It really is an alarming level of intellectual hubris.
Its always been quite easy to become a monopoly. The trick is to get government to make it happen for you. The post office still jealously guards its first class mail monopoly.
The history of Standard Oil is very frustrating to learn. They were an efficient modern business way before its time. If there were kickbacks along the rail line it was because everyone had to do some version of that. They were something like 90% market share when the government brought a case against them for monopoly. By the time the case resolved against them they were about 60% market share. There was also a war about to happen and the government wanted access to the resource for cheap so they nationalized part of standard oil. Standard Oil created most of the Oil byproducts that we have today. All of their competitors were dumping toxic waste chemicals into rivers. They thought 'how can we use this "waste" instead of throwing it out?'
I was on capital hill briefly about a decade ago. And yes they are constantly looking for badies to fight. Back then they kept complaining how google has a "search" monopoly. Which showed a hilarious lack of understanding of google's actual business model (advertising), and an insulting level of paternalism assuming that people were somehow "stuck" with google search.
I went more in depth on the history back in my college days. And the only thing that has really changed is the ability of government propaganda to cover things up. They've gotten worse at that. Even when the economy was much simpler they routinely failed to bring in good regulations.
From what I have heard from friends with direct experience, it is a "children with dynamite" situation. You've got mid-20s to mid-30s people without any real world experience who think they can understand and entire industry / social problem / international conflict after a few briefings. Then, they have access to the actual fucking Federal legislative process. The formula for disaster is obvious.
It's a good thing bills move so slowly through Congress. I think more Americans would agree with this if they understood who the primary authors are.
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There has never been an incidence of 'cornering the market' as per the bogeyman definition of monopolistic price gouging. Technical abuses of mechanical inefficiencies arising from information arbitrage are not repeatable actions, and there is a different conversation to be had about the effect of frictionless cross national capital transfers.
The only successful way to perform market cornering to capture the producer surplus is by regulatory capture, not 'lose money until competitors all exit, then hike prices'. If your product was only bought because it was cheap, raising its price won't magically force the demand equilibrium to shift in line with your price manipulation. Open competition can certainly lead to value-destructive capability duplication and tragedy of the commons (public infrastructure is the most common example of this) but the stable equilibrium will never allow for a permanent marginal producer surplus. The only way that can happen is if the needle is jammed in place by a government exercising monopoly on force. In places where the government does not have a monopoly on force, parallel governments spring up to get their hands on the mechanisms of regulatory capture, even if we just call those governments 'citizen committees' or 'corporate towns'.
I feel like pointing out that this("lose money until...") is the actual exact method used by Dollar stores to choke out competition. They open a bunch of stores in an area, sell at a loss until they can kill the competition, then consolidate their stores into one and raise the prices once they kill off their competition. Predatory pricing is actually a real thing that happens, and the effectiveness of it is great enough that people want the government to do something about it. Sure they don't have a true monopoly, but an effective local one is a decent substitute.
Dollar generals are an interesting case, and they do indeed perform predatory pricing once local competition is snuffed out, but I don't think they are laughing their way to the bank once they kill the competition. Their price rises are only to whatever the local equilibria is for their provided service, and any presumed producer surplus the monopoly is expected to accrue is obviated by theft ("its only shrink" will be claimed by insistent progressives), low barrier alternatives (DG isn't the only dollar store after all, and delivery exists) or other intrinsic factors. DG does not have a cheat code that forcefields their stores against poverty induced crime paired with ineffective law enforcement.
The negative effect of DG isn't the subsequent price hiking as DG tries to stabilize its price needle after factoring in theft while outcompeting alternatives, it is the utility calculation of the goods on offer and the utility destruction stemming from misallocated capital. The legacy mom and pop stores are only in dead small towns or shit neighborhoods because they are the ones with a 'monopolistic' hold as the locale simply cannot justify additional investment for higher grade inventory, much less fitouts. The fresh produce on offer (I presume; I've never seen fresh produce at a black-heavy bodega, but spanish harlem always had peppers and onions) has a presumed higher utility per dollar for health outcomes, but for personal utility calculations that same dollar spent on ricearoni and DMD goes much further. These 'food deserts' exist because the local population simply was not having its personal utility preference exercised by expensive and effort heavy 'healthy' foods. The cheap consumer surplus phase of DG expansion is DG rolling the dice on where the stable marginal surplus needle lies, and DG bets on its competitive advantages to be the one that captures a greater marginal surplus. The consumer surplus returns to its stable point after the ZIRP-funded gambling ends. At no point is DG laughing its way to the bank.
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Indeed. Ask the Hunt brothers (also note CIA / Watergate ties) about cornering the silver market. One went broke trying to defend it, having overleveraged in the process. Some lawfare was waged against him, for sure, but no one agent can outweigh the market, in a fair and free market^TM. Even when collusion and cartels are attempted between multiple agents, the incentive to defect generally busts the last empty bagholder.
Defect is both active intent and incapability. There are a number of Indonesian and Malaysian financial scandals that all shit themselves because the parties involved were too stupid to execute the bare minimums of their plans. Failure was inevitable for things like the maminco tin scandal, but the fail point occurring earlier in the chain than expected happens because incompetent retards fuck up their end of the conspiracy without knowing they fucked up.
This could be inverse survivorship bias too. There likely are a number of successful corners and exploits conducted under the radar without common knowledge. What little I know of shadow banking is that avoiding the taxmans eye is the most successful way of 'exploiting' a market opportunity, and these small scale illicit money movements are simpler to aggregate into pools steered by bankers and accountants to magically clean cayman island accounts.
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