What are you talking about? Aren't scalpers doing exactly what efficient market hypothesis would suggest by buying products that are underpriced (graphics cards, consoles) relative to demand and selling them at the highest price people are willing to pay?
They only become that valuable when you completely restrict the supply by scalping them. If I went to the shop and bought all the food and resold it at a higher price that's not 'the market at work', I'm just not a dick head.
This! Particularly when we've reached a point where "scalping as a service" has become a thing.
There are outfits out there that charge a monthly subscription for access to prioritized acquisition channels in combination with bot networks.
This is streamlined to such degree that people don't even need to hold physical inventory themselves: The scalping outlet handles all of that for them, all they need to do is supply the capital for the bots and set the parameters for buying/selling, everything else will be handled by the service.
What you are talking is market manipulation not scalping. How many scalpers do you think truly have $30 million to buy 100000 GPUs?
The situation is far simpler. Consumer demand exceeds supply which drives prices up. Some people figured out where the current equilibrium price is and it turns out that it is really high.
Those high prices encourage consumers with old GPUs to sell them on the market and thus provide more supply instead of throwing their old GPUs away every time they buy a new GPU. If you were to artificially restrict the price it would result in less people selling their GPUs and thus you would end up with less GPUs for everyone.
If the manufacturer is selling a product that is worth X at market rate for a lower price Y then it basically gifted the difference X-Y to the buyer. If the manufacturer is selling the product at market rate prices they will have higher profit margins which encourages them to build a slightly bigger fab next time. It would also ensure that existing manufacturers make enough money to continue running their business despite the paper thin margins outside of a shortage.
