Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Phil and Ben's Excellent Famine
There has been some truly informative discussion at WUWT about world food prices, triggered by Krugman's claim that "global warming" caused the riots in Egypt. Most of the commenters simply took the line that food prices didn't go up anywhere, and used a chart of food prices IN AMERICA to make the claim. I knew that wasn't right, because I'd been following enough international news to know that food has become vastly more expensive in some countries... but I had no idea why this was happening.
Other commenters came along to explain the current situation. Gang Leader Bugsy Bernanke is pulling the old Weimar trick, on a somewhat smaller scale. He's devaluing the American dollar to "pay back" our massive debt to foreign creditors by lowering its value. We don't see a lot of the inflation here, because the devaluation is mainly with respect to other currencies; but the inflation hits poor countries when they pay much higher prices for American food commodities.
The most interesting link pointed to an earlier scam by the same people, which also caused starvation and riots in foreign countries. Our media didn't bother to tell us about this, because they were part of the scam.
Here's the story in concise form. It started, like all other recent economic problems, with Phil Gramm. Along with repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999, making the whole set of insane bubbles possible, Gramm also repealed specific regulations on farm speculation. Previously hedging had been restricted to farmers and grain dealers who had skin in the game. Now it was open to Goldman Sachs, and they grabbed it and ran into the Land of Infinite Greed with securitization. In 2006, when their housing derivatives began to crumble, Goldman transferred near-infinite amounts of mythical cash into their agriculture derivatives, which caused world food prices on the "futurable" grains to skyrocket. Poor countries went into famine; unknown numbers of people died. The prices returned to a normal range of variability in 2008, but only because the whole set of bubbles collapsed together and Goldman couldn't keep the balls in the air.
The blood is on your hands, Phil Gramm and Goldman Sachs.
Other commenters came along to explain the current situation. Gang Leader Bugsy Bernanke is pulling the old Weimar trick, on a somewhat smaller scale. He's devaluing the American dollar to "pay back" our massive debt to foreign creditors by lowering its value. We don't see a lot of the inflation here, because the devaluation is mainly with respect to other currencies; but the inflation hits poor countries when they pay much higher prices for American food commodities.
The most interesting link pointed to an earlier scam by the same people, which also caused starvation and riots in foreign countries. Our media didn't bother to tell us about this, because they were part of the scam.
Here's the story in concise form. It started, like all other recent economic problems, with Phil Gramm. Along with repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999, making the whole set of insane bubbles possible, Gramm also repealed specific regulations on farm speculation. Previously hedging had been restricted to farmers and grain dealers who had skin in the game. Now it was open to Goldman Sachs, and they grabbed it and ran into the Land of Infinite Greed with securitization. In 2006, when their housing derivatives began to crumble, Goldman transferred near-infinite amounts of mythical cash into their agriculture derivatives, which caused world food prices on the "futurable" grains to skyrocket. Poor countries went into famine; unknown numbers of people died. The prices returned to a normal range of variability in 2008, but only because the whole set of bubbles collapsed together and Goldman couldn't keep the balls in the air.
The blood is on your hands, Phil Gramm and Goldman Sachs.
Labels: the broken circle
¶ 6:55 PM
