The new luxury item being smuggled from Mexico to the US? Eggs
Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was quoted in this Times of London article about egg prices. Read full piece here.
But Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics in Minnesota, says the main driver of egg inflation is an obvious one: the avian flu outbreak that has prompted mass culling of hens.
“The first culprit is the killing of 15 per cent of the population of egg-laying chickens,” Albrecht said. “That’s a pretty clear smoking gun.”
He noted that the previous spikes in egg prices, in 2015 and 2023, also coincided with culling due to avian flu outbreaks and prices fell as flocks restored their numbers over the following year.
That’s a long time to bear the political heat of high egg prices, given that the attention people pay to the price of eggs is second only to that paid to the price of fuel, Albrecht said. “In the US, eggs and milk are often put together as the the quintessential indicator of how grocery prices are doing.”
Right now, eggs are an anomaly. February’s inflation data came in “a little cooler than expected”, with the yearly inflation of items in the Consumer Price Index at 2.8 per cent, Albrecht said.
It is much lower than inflation during the Covid pandemic, though it is still above pre-pandemic inflation, which was below 2 per cent.