Samsung Slows Memory Chip Production to Keep Prices High - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-slows-memory-chip-production,37824.html these idiots are fucking evil.

but the free market, guys /s

All the other companies will seize on this and take a chunk out of the global market, there are only so many buyers in the world you know.

At this rate, I'm going to be rocking DDR3 well into the 2020's then.

Samsung is by far the single largest DRAM supplier. The other fabs (SK hynix & Micron) can't spin up that capacity (and even if they could, the DRAM industry is no stranger to market manipulation).

Still no ryzen for me then I guess :/

Seriously, fuck the price of DDR4 with a pitchfork. Fuck Samsung and all the other memory giants.

Samsung will just collude with SK Hynix and Micron and fix prices again.

They all laughed at me when I bought an X99 and DDR4 when it dropped WHOSE LAUGHING NOW

samsung, at literally everybody involved

Yes, the free market. Are you implying that we should force companies to produce as much product as there is demand?

It takes a real sophist to be able to take an undeniably bad thing (price fixing) and spin it as a good thing using a hypothetical idea that literally nobody put forward. Congrats!

If as single producer is spinning down production, that's not price fixing. That's also not what the word sophist means, and I was directly responding to the implication that the free market acting is a bad thing. Would you like to try again?

The government could step in and force them to maintain their supply at some level, perhaps the level that people are most willing to buy at.

This is a really terrible idea, you're describing a command economy.

Well some people think of the economy as serving people in general, not just a select few people who profit from it.

Command economies serve nobody. The free market actually works extremely well for commodity goods, even if every individual decision doesn't make you as a consumer happy.

Command economies serve...nobody? How could that be? A constitutional command economy, or a democratic constitutional command economy, would serve the people...

Command economies lead to total economic ruin. They just don't work. Even if they did "work" as they were intended to, there would be no competition, innovation, etc. The free market isn't the enemy.

I don't think that's true at all. A command economy could have plenty of reasons why people would want to compete and innovate, there are many degrees of how under control the economy has to be. It isn't like we don't already have some elements of a command economy.

Not really; definitely not as much as the free market currently allows for. If the government is forcing producers to produce a certain amount of flash memory, then what about what happens next? How does competition even exist at all if the state is controlling who produces what? That would put Samsung on top forever, and if something better were to be invented, then the government would have to be the one to make the call to start producing it which would be extremely inefficient at best. Regulation is important, but it's only really effective in instances where companies are not facing the price of their actions; whether it be externalizes (pollution, overfishing, anything where someone else has to 'pick up the bill' for your behavior), cartel behavior (actual price fixing is a good example of this, when you get companies banding together to agree to not sell below a certain amount), etc. Anything else disrupts the free market in a plethora of ways that we don't even entirely understand, and leads to an extremely abusable system. I agree that we should regulate businesses, but I think you will be extremely hard pressed to find any research that indicates that regulating production levels is a good idea. Producers are very good at optimizing themselves to the market in a way that is sustainable. We don't.

Then there's the small fact that there's a memory cartel. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are all in on it. The EU punished them for it, but as usual it was just a slap on the wrist

This is a cartel. As others have said, Samsung cooperates with SK Hynix and Micron to keep prices high. Under normal circumstances another would be able to undercut Samsung for their blatant efforts to keep prices high, but because they all agree to keep prices high, and rarely ever get more than a slap on the wrist for it, the prices remain high. I'm not asking for a command economy but I'm also not asking for "The Literal Roaring Twenties, But on a Global Scale This Time". Both suck absolute shit for everyone besides those in power.

companies colluding to control prices LITERALLY goes against the purest definition of a free market

If there's cartel behavior involved then that's a different situation altogether; I was responding solely to the info that Samsung was reducing production, my bad. Nobody in the thread is disagreeing with that statement.

Your utter detachment from reality and reliance on semantics is becoming tuskin level cartoonish.

Sick zinger, care to respond to my points or are you just going to do the usual thing? They all remain valid, I even mentioned the cartel issue before I was made aware that Samsung was participating in one.

The free market only works aslong aswell as there is healthy competition, in this age of corporate consolidation, what we need is less union-busting and more monopoly-busting. But good luck getting common sense regarding free markets into a two party system. Especially in buzzword-nation where socialism is still such a hot topic. Hah, fat chance.

Isn't that sort of corporate collusion illegal? I know it is in Britain.

This doesn't have TOO much to do with America busting monopolies. Only micron is based here, the smallest of the big 3. Everything else is Korean or Taiwanese. There is a class action lawsuit going on but eh dunno what that'll accomplish