Seriously though, if crabs used currency this would never happen. There would be one crab with all the shells and the other crabs would have to bring food offerings or whatever their currency would be in order to get one.
I counted the word "institutional" used almost once per sentence. There were a couple of sentences that didn't use it, but there was at least one sentence that used it twice. Plus all the figures and captions for them too.
Though despite being not "institutional", the market seems to have behaved a little as if it were, due to use of software to fix prices at what the landlords believed that the market would bear. So still price gouging, regardless of whether done by individuals or giant mega-corporations.