A conspiracy to inflate pork prices?


 
I've got two problems with that ............

1. That kind of conspiracy would mean that hundreds, if not thousands of people would be involved ... and somebody is gonna talk. There's gonna be an inside whistleblower eventually.

2. The length of time they're talking about, going back to 2009, means there's been periods of low prices and high prices. If they could control the retail price, then why do they let prices go down ? These price conspiracies seem to always come up during periods of high prices.

My only real complaint about meat prices has been due to covid, and I think this will eventually work itself out, hopefully. Unless there's been some major structural changes to the meat industry that will never be reversed.
 
Wow! Guessing the Western US has been sheltered from this until the last few months. Before that, we've been finding pork to be the best value out there for meat. Common here to find butts, hams, mixed chops and loins for under $1/lb. and spares for under $1.50. Now I understand some of the outrageous prices I've seen posted here.
 
The beef producers here in Oklahoma, are concerned that there's not enough competition among processors. They say there's only four processors and it creates a bottleneck. They see consumer prices going up while the prices for their cattle are not going up.

But there's a lot of processors in that pork class action lawsuit. Lack of competition in an industry is usually due to difficulty of entering the industry. Big Tech's social media platforms come to mind , right off. Very difficult to cut into Facebook's market share.

Our state govt used some of covid Fed money, to help small processors. Both get started and to enlarge their operations. Our beef producers want to sell direct to the consumer. The problem has been processing. So there's State money available for small processors.
 
Many of these industries now (Canada included) are subject to many levels of supply chain, distribution, processors, licensing/permitting, so I have also many concerns as well with industries taking advantage of "perceived" shortages etc.

Our Canadian Dairy Industry is a prime example....hard to break into as a producer, limited production quantities, inflated prices that seem artificially high etc.

I have that there are pork producers this year in Canada "giving away" pork as they cannot afford to feed their stock with the high grain prices etc, and yet they complain no processors will buy their product at all....very weird things at play.
 
Lynn Dollar said:
I've got two problems with that ............

1. That kind of conspiracy would mean that hundreds, if not thousands of people would be involved ... and somebody is gonna talk. There's gonna be an inside whistleblower eventually.

2. The length of time they're talking about, going back to 2009, means there's been periods of low prices and high prices. If they could control the retail price, then why do they let prices go down ? These price conspiracies seem to always come up during periods of high prices.

My only real complaint about meat prices has been due to covid, and I think this will eventually work itself out, hopefully. Unless there's been some major structural changes to the meat industry that will never be
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Pork commodities are traded so they could benefit when prices go up or down if they know what's going to happen.
 
Dustin Dorsey said:
Pork commodities are traded so they could benefit when prices go up or down if they know what's going to happen.
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Yes, they can go short or long, but the trick is knowing what's going to happen. Commodities are high risk trading.

And if they're hedging, they're trading contracts not the physical commodity .
 
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