"I can't think of a single moment in history where a small number of sufficiently small number large competitors didn't eventually align behind some measure of value fixing" i can, basically all of them. it is stunningly hard to do this and not attract new investment/market entry. "the cure for excess profits is excess profits" look at basically everything in the US from clothing to grocery to furniture to homebuilding. where are these "excess profits" from value fixing? it seems like one of these "bigfoot" things, often reported but never found. (see sweden example above) it really takes very little to generate near perfect competition outcomes. you need to try REALLY hard to do it. not even things like telcom/cell service/internet in the US can manage it despite having literal oligopoly grants.