What an Egg Cartel Can Teach Us About Critical Mineral Markets

While Americans were paying more than $6 for a dozen eggs, the CEOs of America’s largest egg companies conspired to jack up prices even higher. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is not restricted to the aisles of your local grocery store. China carries out its own price manipulation in an essential market for America’s military, auto industry, and so much else in modern life: critical minerals. From 2022 to 2025, top U.S. egg producers conspired to make flurries of deceptive bids on domestic egg exchanges (a real thing) like Egg Clearinghouse. By making high bids — and then backing out of purchases — the executives artificially inflated the companies’ price quotations, on which grocery stores base their contracts with egg sellers. Their efforts were targeted to periods when eggs were already scarce due to avian influenza outbreaks, leading to wholesale prices of $5.36 per dozen by the end of 2022, compared with $1.28 in the first week of August 2026. This manipulation of price benchmarks using a little-known bidding system created a major economic headache for Americans. However, the executives were left with egg on their faces after a Department of Justice investigation brought these shady practices into the light. Under a proposed settlement, the egg companies will pay a total $3.3 million to states participating in the complaint, donate over 50 million eggs to nonprofits and food banks, and face prohibitions on communicating with competitors about bidding or transactions. While the egg executives used strategic bidding to manipulate prices, Chinese companies use their production and refining dominance on key critical-mineral trading floors to manipulate supply and influence prices on metals exchanges like the market-setting London Metals Exchange (LME). Chinese companies can drive competitors out of business by tanking prices or raise their own profits by driving them sky-high. In one stark case, when demand for lithium-ion batteries spiked in 2021, Chinese lithium producers cut their supply and prioritized deliveries to domestic battery manufacturers. Later, Chinese companies ramped up mining to drive global prices to record lows, making it extremely difficult for Western mining competitors to turn a profit. In 2019, several Chinese executives lobbied Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel producer, to ban the export of unprocessed nickel. Right before the ban came into effect, a Chinese nickel giant, Tsingshan, secretly snapped up 80 percent of the LME’s nickel reserves. Since the market lacked proper transparency mechanisms to spot and prevent the purchases, prices surged. This tactic benefited Chinese companies, which control three-quarters of all nickel processing in Indonesia, while constricting Western supply. After another debacle in 2022 involving Tsingshan — which the LME bailed out by freezing nickel trading following a catastrophic gamble on nickel trades — the LME began implementing stricter controls and pricing transparency requirements. However, separate pricing mechanisms for other critical minerals (such as rare earth elements) remain far more opaque. China more broadly benefits from opacity in critical minerals pricing. Just as market reporting company Expana sets egg price benchmarks for grocers, the Fastmarket pricing feed sets the standard for commodities traded on exchanges. Fastmarket benchmarks are based on information shared by Chinese state-controlled firms, whose underlying contracts remain confidential. Chinese regulations require commodity producers to set prices within government-prescribed bounds and make it illegal to “fabricate” information about price hikes. In practice, this means that when Chinese minerals are sold at extremely low prices that undercut competitors, producers do not have the discretion to raise prices to market levels. The companies are bound by government policies and edicts. What can we learn by comparing domestic egg markets to Chinese price manipulation in critical minerals markets? When U.S. egg companies formed a cartel, the DOJ was able to prosecute their collusion. In the case of China, the Chinese Communist Party supports another form of price manipulation as a non-market practice meant to get ahead. The key is transparency — one of America’s most powerful economic weapons. When positions and trades on critical mineral (or egg) markets are opaque or lack rules of fair play, actors like Tsingshan can exploit this absence of oversight. The United States cannot afford to sit on its hands and wait for a new crisis to emerge; it must push for transparency standards on existing exchanges and could even legislate the creation of a new exchange backed by American mineral stockpiles. The work to create critical minerals stockpiles is already underway via Project Vault, a $12 billion public-private partnership to create strategic reserves that firms could access during supply disruptions. The United States should also develop non-Chinese pricing mechanisms so that market players can spot when minerals are not being valued fairly. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should leverage its Section 6(b) investigative authority to require major players to report information on their costs and production, then use its Section 6(f) authority to make these reports available to the public. Additionally, the Department of Commerce could work with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop an international price monitoring tool based on trustworthy data, rather than opaque Chinese reporting, which could flag early warning signs of supply disruptions or market manipulations. If the United States does not want China to rule the roost on critical minerals markets, it must guard against Beijing’s price manipulation tactics. Angela Howard is a research analyst at the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Cameron Timlin and Emilia Marshall are interns. For more analysis from Angela and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD. Follow Angela on X @angela__howard. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.