Monday, April 10, 2017

With the Collapse of the International Gefilte Cartel We Aren't Hearing Any Stories of Passover Price Gouging

It was only three years ago we posted 'International Gefilte Cartel Blames "Weather" For Price Increases':
The real tale is in-situ storage of the whitefish, probably related to some sort of inventory financing deal which, similar to the eventual release from bondage of LME aluminum, can only have the effect of crashing the market as the extent of the inventory hoarding scam becomes apparent.

From The Chicago Reader's Bleader column:...
..."We should have 200 pounds," explains Burhop's manager Ademola Olurotimi. "Ten or 20 pounds is what we do have. We've been promised a few tomorrow, but that's not even guaranteed."

Even if you can get your hands on some whitefish, you'll be paying for it: prices have spiked to $18 a pound, up from the usual $12....
Now the suppliers will say the winter of 2016-17 was much warmer than  2013-14 and that accounts for the abundance of whitefish and carp but I think it was the full-on attempt to break the fishy plunderbund that did the trick. From the same 2014 post:
Apparently there is a seasonal pattern* to the trade:
Bnei Brak rabbi calls for gefilte fish boycott 
Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Stern issues unusual halachic ruling in bid to prevent stores from charging exaggerated prices for carp fish ahead of Passover....
*More accurately it is a quasi-periodicity as the Holiday has arrived as early as the second-to-last week of March and as late as the last week of April due to the calendar calculations to set the lunar date.

I'm told that last week's sale of Manischewitz by Phil Falcone's hedge fund to Bain Capital is a non-story, nothing to see here.