On a more serious note, won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?
> In Japan, paying more than half a million dollars on a single fish is considered good luck for business (and also comes with a round of free publicity).
https://qz.com/878980/a-japanese-sushi-chain-owner-just-boug...
Or, maybe this is an expensive marketing stunt. The guy who bought the big tuna is the owner of a chain of moderately priced conveyor-belt sushi restaurants; hard to imagine he’s pushing $60 nigiri through them. He does say that he might’ve gone a bit over (https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/05/asia/giant-tuna-sets-record-a... he was expecting to pay $300-500K USD.
It's a PR move more than anything. How much press does this get the buyer and the market as whole? A lot more than he paid for the tuna.
> On a more serious note, won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?
It's a once in a year publicity stunt. They don't pay record prices every day. But yes, if bluefin or any resource brought in record prices every day, it would certainly entice unscruplous people to cheat which would lead even the honest people to cheat - tragedy of the commons.
For example. If you get money in some illegal way and need to launder it. You can use it as a "customer" at your own coffee house and pay a ridiculous amount for a latte. The money then goes to the bank and become laundered.
That is how money laundering work afaik.
Laundering money at scale is actually a pretty big nuisance, unless you have and evil bank like HSBC to assist you [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering_(2003,_2...
Not to be that guy, but it's laundromat.
A nuisance but not one that will stop criminal enterprises which tend to have extremely high profit margins.
Society gives up a lot freedom in the quest to stop illicit cash from circulating. It necessarily requires making all financial transactions subject to formulaic 'suspicious transaction' reporting requirements, which is a form of warrantless mass-surveillance.
Yes, will add a lot of pressure to the population (that eventually will be crushed).
Yes, it's a basic flaw in the free market.
And it isn't the only tuna species extremely near extinction. I believe one should think about the personal necessity of consuming this species.
It may seem like exaggerating will encourage more action, but my experience is it just causes people to tune out.