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Nvidia Settles GPU Price-Fixing Antitrust Case
arcticstoat writes to report that Nvidia has offered up a settlement for the GPU price-fixing case. As a part of the settlement Nvidia would be required to pay $850,000 into a fund projected to hit $1.7 million (supposedly AMD/ATI would make up the other half). The antitrust case indicated that Nvidia and ATI worked together in order to 'fix, raise, maintain, and stabilize prices of GPUs sold in the US.'"
...anyone who bought a graphics card directly from Nvidia or ATI's website in the US ...
How is that going to help the rest of the affected customers?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
The at least once daily "survey" every corporate gas station in the US has to do everyday can't be passed off as anything but price fixing / a trust.
That's not ever going to happen. Composite government funds (investment funds and otherwise) own a majority stake in Exxon and probably most other publicly traded oil companies. The state of New York had 24.8 million shares of Exxon in 2006.
Could it be that our own Government over the last several decades has been promoting to those fortune 500 companies, of which Government owns most through Bond - Loan investment / stock ownership [EXAMPLES: 82% stock ownership of Microsoft Corporation, Disney 61%, AOL - Time Warner 58%, EXXON 72%] to manufacture abroad so that Government would realize greater returns on their investments at the Peoples of the USA's expense in jobs and wealth retention.
http://cafr1.com/
It should be pretty obvious why most corporations are allowed to run roughshod over the American people. If they properly investigated these companies it would cut into their bottom line. Welcome to the Corporation of the United States of America!
Just google CAFR with any state, city, country, school district, etc... to find out how much money they are hiding from you.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
You don't understand the system.
If the local grocer notices that a competitor has apples for sale for $.20 less than they do, what's to prevent them from lowering prices to match? Likewise if the price is $.20 higher -- why not raise yours, perhaps only $.10, and make a little more profit?
If you have apples already purchased and on the shelves, and your supplier suddenly raises prices $.50, do you keep selling the apples you have at the old, cheaper price, or do you eat the price difference and hope that you can still afford to restock your shelves when you sell out of the cheaper ones and have to buy the next, more expensive batch from the supplier?
The answers to those questions are somewhat easier if you are a grocer, because your product is diversified. You can even out your costs and sales across your entire produce selection. Maybe you really can sell a product far cheaper than cost to bring people in to buy other things. Maybe you can eat the higher supplier price, as long as you make your money on everything else that week.
But if you are a gas station, where you essentially sell one product, can you afford to charge the same price you paid, plus a few percent, if the supplier gas prices go up by 10%? No. Not when it might cost you $50000 to fill your storage tanks. If your cost from the supplier goes up $5000, you can't afford to keep the prices at what you paid for the previous tanker from the supplier, you have to up the prices right now, otherwise you won't be able to afford to pay the tanker when the next one rolls in, and it costs you $55000 this time, and you don't have $5000 laying around. Actually, maybe you'll manage for a little while, but you'll be out many thousands of dollars and out of business in a month. Retailers only survive on a few percent margin (typically 5-9% or so), and a 10% supplier price change is therefore the equivalent of ALL of your profits.
What you are looking at is ordinary, competing, market forces for the price of gas at the pump, combined with the time-averaged ~$10k to ~$100k cost for each batch of fuel from the supplier (depending on the size of the tanker and the flowthrough at a given station). And are the suppliers colluding setting those prices? Not likely. They are competitive too in most markets, but their time average is much longer because of the time/cost of refining. If the price of crude goes from $120/barrel to $90/barrel in a couple of days, are you going to knock off the price of the gas you sell to the stations? Heck no, because you already paid the $120/barrel a few weeks or months ago at the input to the refinery (the crude sitting in your storage tanks), and you've got to make that money back or you will lose MILLIONS of dollars rather than the mere thousands of a retailer. Plus, for all you know, it will go back up to $120/barrel next week, and you'll need the money to pay for the next supertanker full.
People do not understand that prices at some levels in the system will naturally lag the "instantaneous" price at other levels. They aren't synchronized because of the vast differences in the size of the batches of fuel and the processing/delivery times involved. It might not look that way sometimes, but what you see isn't price fixing, it's a fairly responsive market with substantial time lag.
Oh, and there's another way to look at it. If you think the current price rises are due to fixing, then ask yourself this question: why on Earth would companies pay billions of dollars to develop tar sands projects in Canada, to pay 5-10x the cost per barrel of oil for extraction, unless the regular/cheap oil elsewhere in the world really was getting harder to find?
The reason prices have risen is simple. The supplies that are left are genuinely harder to find and extract and/or to ship securely, and global demand still continues to rise. Superimposed on this are short-term fluctuations such as from hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which causes temporary shutdown of refineries at major oil supply ports.
Oh, and on top of all that is currency fluctuations.