Chickens and Slot Machines

Chicken Libor!

My favorite recent financial scandal may be chicken Libor, in which critics accuse chicken producers of price manipulation. What I like about chicken Libor are its (alleged) parallels to the actual Libor scandal: The Georgia Dock, an index of chicken prices maintained by the Georgia Department of Agriculture and used to set prices, is a survey-based index, and so it can be manipulated by just making up numbers, without going to the effort of manipulating any transactions. (Georgia has fixed the index by making producers certify that they have not made up numbers.) But, as with real Libor, just making up numbers was apparently not enough, and there are claims that chicken producers -- like the Libor banks -- also conspired with each other to move prices.