Wednesday, February 2, 2011

How Bankers and Their Speculation Raised Food Prices and Triggered Popular Response

Filed under: Middle East — by Will Kirkland @ 1:28 pm
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Politics Plus

I have heard progressives wonder why Americans are not in the streets like Egyptians, demanding a redress of grievances against corporate plutocracy.  Perhaps the reason is that an average American spends 10% of our income on food, but an average Egyptian spends over 50% on food. In Egypt, the price of food has doubled.  The problem is Wall Street.  Wherever Wall Street speculates, they create bubbles.  Examples include the dotcom bubble, the fuel bubble and most recently, the real estate bubble, whose collapse brought on the Republican Recession.  Since they trashed the housing market, Banksters have refocused their attention on commodities.  Some speculation provides the liquidity the commodities marked needs to operate, but before the GHW Bush administration did away with position limits at the request of Goldman Sachs, Banksters were prevented from the excess speculation that has raised world food prices.  Speculator profits account for over 50% of the cost of food, and there are more commodities contracts than there are commodities, so food prices will remain unstable, and hungry people are angry people.

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1 Comment

  1. TomCat:

    Thanks for the hat-tip.

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Words for Acts

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

-William Hazlitt, essayist

(1778-1830)



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