Posted on 01/27/2013 6:18:38 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Yeah, rising food prices has nothing to do with the fact that due to the AGW hoax, America now burns a huge amount of crops in the form of ethanol. It really the evil rich’s fault. Uh huh.
I don’t know a lot about banking, etc—but something tells me that this entire article is pure BS!
Your instincts are correct. What is one man's speculator is another man's market maker. Futures and derivatives are financial instruments which allow actors (farmers, agricultural wholesalers, for instance) to disperse risk, much like insurance policies. Planting a crop is a gamble, as is contracting for future deliveries of agricultural products that do not even exist yet. Middlemen play a vital role by assuming some of the risks in these gambles.
Demagogues like Huey Long, Barack Obama, ad infinitum prey on envy and economic illiteracy. Given enough power they produce results like the Soviet Union, Maoist China and USA 2016.
Your instincts are correct. What is one man's speculator is another man's market maker. Futures and derivatives are financial instruments which allow actors (farmers, agricultural wholesalers, for instance) to disperse risk, much like insurance policies. Planting a crop is a gamble, as is contracting for future deliveries of agricultural products that do not even exist yet. Middlemen play a vital role by assuming some of the risks in these gambles.
Demagogues like Huey Long, Barack Obama, ad infinitum prey on envy and economic illiteracy. Given enough power they produce results like the Soviet Union, Maoist China and USA 2016.
--not surprisingly , as little rain fell , the price doubled---didn't really take a genius to figure out---
As ranchers became increasingly desperate to feed their livestock, "hay rustling" and other agricultural crimes rose.
You can easily deduce that the author is a Leftist ideologe when he writes a story like this and does not include a single sentence about the thousands of tons of corn being burned as ethanol simply as a political balm to the Environmental Left.
Is what Goldman Sachs did illegal?
What is immoral is not necessarily illegal
A for this entry, should anybody be gored for making a good investment? This presupposes that Goldman Sachs did not have the power to cause or ameliorate the conditions upon which they made their profit (which I think is unlikely!) Would this gent have been equally incensed if they had made their bet the other way and lost a bushel of money?
If you look to investment banking/securities/management firms for moral guidance, you’re doing something wrong.
wise words! A lot of Republicans are frightened of anti-trust out of sheer principal, but I think we should look to Teddy Roosevelt for our inspiration when it comes to the financial services industry.
Either break them up, or regulate them into being utilities, with the risk-taking parts of them cut away from government backing.
Are you making an accusation of immorality?
I fear you and the mindset that led to your comments.
I don’t think that would work, the idea of making them utilities. One of the reasons that people can make money is that they have the option of determining the amount of risk they wish to be exposed to relative to the possible profits that they might derive from that risk.
Turning the financial services industry into a utility would mean removing the risk, and I simply don’t think that would work. I am not one of those people who thinks there should be no regulation on the industry, I model my outlook on this viewpoint after those held by the framers of the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution by no means felt that government and of itself was bad, they felt that man is of a basically corruptible nature, and cannot be trusted by default.
I feel much the same way about financial institutions. Greed, sex, and lust for power are things that human beings are susceptible to as levers to immoral behavior, and if we set things up a certain way, we should not do it so as to encourage a breeding environment for immoral behavior.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but I don’t think that’s the correct approach. I will say that I do believe that the government should not be involved hand-in-hand with these institutions. That leads to things like bailouts and political decisions by politicians about who is and who isn’t too big to fail, as well is making it easy for people (both politicians and financiers) to get their hands in the public till.
You are correct. GS investments have nothing to do with children starving. It is just anti-business tripe.
I don't have the time to do the homework on the subject, but a little behind the scenes digging will reveal that the true sins of the big banksters lies in the buying and selling of political power.
The lieberals presume that the evil rich banksters manipulate republicans to ensure their pockets stay filled.
In reality, it was a meeting of bankers and securities “big whigs” that was held in the fall before Obama even declared his candidacy for the 2008 election cycle that decided the money was going to back him and not Hitlery.
Consider the timing of the “financial crises” in the run up to the 2008 election. Who benefited?
Consider the “cause” of the crises. Who benefited from the subsequent bailouts?
Why, in spite of being at the upper echelon of companies that packaged and sold securities that any insider would have known were worthless - has no one been held accountable for the loss of trillions of dollars?
What the bankers and commodities traders are doing is perfectly legal, in theory. But as others have mentioned, too often there are government policies in place that are unduly influencing the markets.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I believe in capitalism and the free market principles thereof. But what we have is actually crony capitalism and the blatant obvious buying of legislation to control and protect the players.
This can't be true. The GE promoters told us they would lower costs and feed the world. /sarc/
Pure BS. $400 million isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to global food supply. Just the US feed grains crop is worth $70-80 billion.
Food of all kinds has never been more plentiful worldwide.
People who are starving are the victims of their local political arrangements, not because there’s a food shortage.
Same as ENVIRONMENTALISTS who won’t allow DDT for mosquitoes in developing countries....Betcha Bill Gates would NOT use just a NET over his sleeping child to protect them from being bitten....but he provides nets to the third world so he can pretend he is helping. POS.
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