Profitability in vitamins has suffered since the European Commission broke up an international price-fixing cartel in which Roche was a leading figure.
It was because the world cartel backing the price went bankrupt.
That would give the cartel more power to determine the price.
On the other hand, as Venezuela and Iran point out, the greatest risk facing the cartel is not high prices but a price collapse.
It stands to reason that replacing OPEC's monopoly with fuel competition will force the cartel and commodities speculators to drop the price of oil.
Chavez is a price hawk and he, unlike most of the cartel members who are Middle Eastern, is basically asking the cartel to lower its output of oil so that prices will go up.
Such gratitude is not, of course, due the Saudis - who, we are endlessly told, are among our most reliable "friends" in the Middle East - because they are working to drive down the price of oil set by the OPEC racketeers' cartel.
By making the rules clear in advance, the price band also promises to shine a spotlight on the cartel's opaque mechanism.
Meanwhile, Opec has cut supply repeatedly but eventually admitted the oil price is being controlled by countries which are not members of the cartel.
In many ways, Korean brokers still behave like a cartel, all offering the same service at the same price, albeit one that has fallen to a suicidally low level.
It was a desire to keep the oil cartel's market power in check during the oil-price shocks of the 1970s that led western oil companies, denied access to the bounties of the Gulf, to begin extracting oil from the North Sea, Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.
Thanks to Newt Gingrich and his band of zealous Republicans, the 1996 farm bill abolished the guaranteed minimum price, increased the quota for imports and, most importantly, scrapped the domestic cartel of producers.
In 2001, for example, the cartel had to resort to a series of cuts, totalling 5m barrels, before the price finally began to recover.
Long before vast numbers of such Flexible Fuel Vehicles are on the roads, the OPEC cartel-induced speculative bubble that has contributed to the recent run-up in the price per barrel of oil will be lanced.
Pharmaceutical companies, already humbled by the fines for the vitamin cartel, became the target of yet another investigation in Britain, earlier this month, into the alleged price-fixing of generic drugs.
The Chinese case follows U.S. and European Union investigation into LCD price-fixing by several Asian companies between 2001 and 2006, when executives were accused of setting up an industry cartel to drive up prices.
FORBES: China Fines Asian LCD Producers $57 Million For Price-Fixing
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