With mander.xyz down right now, I’m not sure where to be posting this one, but I thought it might go here since pharmaceutical pricing affects supplies globally.
Excerpt:
Martin Shkreli—the ex-pharmaceutical executive infamous for illegally hiking the price of a lifesaving anti-parasitic drug by more than 4,000 percent and getting a seven-year prison sentence for the fraudulent scheme he used to do it—has been under a lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry since 2022.
However, according to the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of seven states, Shkreli has “flagrantly and repeatedly” violated that ban nearly the entire time—allegedly by trading stock in dozens of drug companies and discussing the industry during livestreams on social media.
On Tuesday, the FTC and the seven states asked a federal judge to hold Shkreli in contempt for the alleged violations. The states include New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—the same states that joined the FTC in suing Shkreli in 2020 over the “elaborate anticompetitive scheme” involving the anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim. The scheme raised the price from $17.50 per pill to $750 per pill virtually overnight, while blocking generic competitors from entering the market.
If there’s one thing I learned from working in the Finance Industry in London before, during and after the 2008 Crash is that the function of Financial Regulators is Maintain Trust In The Market, nothing more, and their interpretation of that is invariably to keep Retail thinking the Markets work fine and are totally fair, and as it turns out the easiest way to do that is to act like nothing is happening in the face of market abuses which aren’t obvious and if something does come out cover it up as much as possible and if that’s not enough, make sure any legal actions against those abusing the Market are never damaging for market players who are big enough that their demise could make the markets unstable (aka the Too Big To Fail philosophy).
Market Regulators aren’t there to make sure the Markets are fair, they’re there to keep the peons gambling and thinking that the money they have in their retirement funds is safe and growing and thus they’ll actually be able to retire.
The whole thing is one gigantic systemic SCAM.
Yeah, I mean. One only has to watch The Big Short for that one. The FTC and other regulators are a fucking joke. All of capitalism is a scam and the financial industry is its punchline, parasitizing on our labour and playing with pretend value until they inevitably break shit again