I think rather than pricing regulation we just need better antitrust enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock
Im continously suprised that people, by assumption of brands and company names assume we still have duopolies or oligopolies.
You can own a whole industry sector without mergers and funny make pretend competition. The competition may hold true for software, because its such a young sector, but for everything else...
Collusion at board level? Or the two sides playing chicken, enjoying the profits and hoping neither does something drastic? It doesn't seem like a stable state but I could see it go on for a bit until there is a correction.
EDIT: Ah, the "Ownership and transparency" section of the article clarifies.
Those M&A have devastated so many markets and companies, IMHO.
The problem is that the the big stores (Walmart, Amazon, Costco) are too big to compete against: they can afford loss leaders or, hell, even entire loss stores simply to drown the entirety of smaller stores in dozens of miles around them, and on the purchasing side they can demand insane rebates and other terms (e.g. payment schedules >> 30 days) from vendors which makes it fundamentally impossible for smaller stores to get the same terms.
Some of these forces are things we want to encourage (economies of scale), some of them we probably have to allow, and some of them are pure emergent evil that we have "collectively" decided not to mitigate.
Deregulation only address one of these forces. It's not a useless idea, but it gets wildly over-promoted by people who A. can't bring themselves to admit that the free market would ever create emergent bad incentives on its own or B. don't want the government to stop them from exploiting said bad incentives.
If raising capital for competitors is hard (see current financial situation) then even without a trust, the competing entities benefit from raising price as the demand is captive.
Competition by itself is not a solution. You need new competition. The current state of financing a new entrant is what needs to be looked at.
If capital is expensive, being a good business with profits becomes a competitive advantage again, so I expect more competitors in the long term.
Which. Is not a given rn.
For example, if there's a sudden spike in demand for, I don't know, remodeling homes, even perfectly competitive suppliers will take time to increase production.
Pine trees take time to grow before they can become 2x4s I suppose.
Then there's the question of if they believe the spike is temporary, in which case it may be too costly to expand production enough to restore the old equilibrium.
There's some ways to deal with it like futures contracts and strategic reserves... or more aggressive gov intervention like how Quebec built their awful maple syrup cartel via forcing companies to stockpile supply centrally. But mostly there's some hard limits to how much you can optimize a market.
Following your example, a lack of 2x4 has to drive timber prices up, so the scarce resource is used where is most needed: to the people who is paying the higher prices. If that people is wrong in their predictions, they will suffer the consequences. The market dynamics should 1) allocate the current available 2x4 where they are more needed, 2) accelerate the production of 2x4 that previously were non profitable (e.g. remote forests) and 3) explore possible substitutes previously non profitable.
But when you study inflation history, you notice it's always blamed on the business raising prices. With an ideal fixed amount of money in circulation, a spike in timber prices is only possible if other prices fall. If prices are increasing everywhere, someone is playing foul with money. Sometimes and for short periods it can happen a credit expansion or crunch (imagine people hoarding or spending gold thus varying the amount of money in circulation), but that won't extend for long unless someone is minting gold coins with some cooper in them.
I don't think this is evident at all - a supply shortage will still cause a price increase? Nothing in the classical demand curve model depends on money supply. You can get shortages that increase prices in one area and change the distribution of consumption and investment. The business cycle is still real, and indeed theory was developed around it, even on the gold standard.
But this is something missed by all sorts of hard money advocates. Using bitcoin can't stop OPEC from driving up the price of oil, for example.
This isn't true. If there's less stuff being made then prices go up and people get to buy fewer things. Which is roughly what happened during covid.
Ultimately it's gigantic corporation vs gigantic corporation. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, et. al. aren't being pushed around by suppliers. If there were great margins to be made in manufacturing these companies would (and do) step in with their own branded products.
Anecdotally, I think Covid was like a conductor giving the orchestra a cue to start playing. Everyone ran into supply issues at the same time and naturally raised prices to the new point on the demand curve. Those that didn't see supply issues saw everyone else raising prices and figured why not take some easy money. Even if they wanted more market share they wouldn't have been able to expand production.
IMHO, it also revealed that demand was more inelastic in the short term than expected. Like my kid's frozen waffles went up like 2 bucks for an 8 box over Covid. I pay more than I want to but my demand's pretty inelastic. Not gonna fight my kid on his food choices over 25 cents a day. Eventually that will break and I don't think I'm gonna start the next kiddo on the same habit.
Some fancy pants buying a car with cash at $35,000 over MSRP last year during the new car shortage could be called a "new point on the demand curve." But actually financing a car for that last year? Unless there was an enormous increase last year in down payments, it points to bank shenanigans. Loans typically last longer than a year, and banks look at trends past the year in which they write the loan. Granted $35,000 over MSRP is the worst case I've heard. But the more common case of vehicles financed for 5 - 15k over MSRP for rapidly a depreciating asset is still a problem.
And now, a year later, it seems we're already seeing the other end of those shenanigans-- increasing delinquency levels and banks holding off on repos. Because after repo, the difference between the loan and the actual value of the vehicle is stark for all to see.
I have no idea where this market is going. But greedy dealers and finance depts have added so much energy to "natural" market dynamics that it could push many of the cash-strapped used car dealers out of business. Hell, even Carvana may not have the billions needed to survive this volatility. None of this is good, and it's all based on short term greed with little to no basic oversight last year to stave off the obvious risk.
If that behavior is in the set of "natural market forces" then the term is so broad as to be meaningless-- might as well say "inflation is what it is" at that point.
As far as I can tell, the claims about unchecked corporate pricing power being to blame are only about the steps after that and the companies further down the supply chain that rely on the bottlenecked sectors for their inputs, either directly or indirectly. The argument is that unchecked pricing power, a lack of competition and the knowledge that their competitors are facing the same cost increases allows companies to pass on the costs in full or even pad out prices further and increase their profits.
(Also, a lot of the capacity issues are in fossil fuel production, which the mainstream media and activist investors have been campaigning to further reduce capacity in by trying to end new investment to replace declining wells - and telling people that the only downsides of this are for fossil fuel companies whose profits will reduce. Then they blamed corporate greed when this actually had the effect that basic economics said it would.)