Patrick Thomas
speaker
216 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 10 Jul
Patrick Thomas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
had an idea for how to push the price higher if they all started bidding really aggressively during this time period and flood the clearinghouse with bids they could lead to higher prices because it'll look like there's a lot of market activity still going on and if they bid higher prices that could keep the price up then maybe it normally would have been
An alleged coast conspirator said that as a group, they needed to bid like they vote in Chicago early and often, basically saying that they needed to keep flooding that market with bids.
It's basically a bluffing strategy in which a trader places buy or sell orders, which they would do on the egg clearinghouse, hoping to move a price, but then cancels the order before they are filled.
So putting fake orders out there at certain prices and then deleting them.
After egg prices continued hitting records, the Hickman CEO said, great job in the Northwest today.
And what he was trying to say was the price of eggs in the Northwest were pushed higher following their bids.
So basically touting this as a sign of success.
Unfortunately, I don't have a great answer for this one, but...
The bird flu is still the ultimate driver that got us to eggs above $6 a dozen in 2025.
It is ultimately what led to huge supply shocks and, you know, egg surcharges at restaurants and limits on buying two cartons of eggs at the grocery store.
I think when you have kind of
crazy time periods like the bird flu, it does provide some cover for this.
And I think that's what the Department of Justice is spelling out here is that this was a crisis that executives used to toss higher bids around because prices were going crazy and it was a great time to throw out higher numbers and flood the market with bids.
And you could kind of get away with some of this more reckless behavior in an area where there's not a lot of trades on this Wall Street of eggs.
— Well, the Department of Justice is saying that they're colluding as competitors.
They're colluding to keep prices high.
And it's a textbook civil case that they're bringing, basically.
What they do outline is that the companies did talk amongst each other in ways that were meant to try and keep the prices higher for longer periods of time, which they shouldn't do.
Their defense has been they wanted to make money during times when prices are high so they can kind of keep it away, put it back in the coffers, because inevitably, and you're seeing this right now actually, is if bird flu cases went down, egg prices were gonna plummet.
And that's exactly what happened.
Showing 41–60 of 216 · page 3 of 11
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