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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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