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The pending global food crisis is due, in part, to a rich twist of irony: One of the factors driving up the price of T-bone steak, a dozen eggs and a carton of milk is a perfectly edible vegetable, a staple of many diets --corn. Adding to the irony, we're growing more corn than ever before. We're just not eating it. Corn is being diverted from human consumption, kicking off a domino effect of problems tied to food prices. It starts with ethanol produced from corn, which optimists hope will help solve the U.S. reliance on foreign oil, as well...

Investing in stuff develops into a fine art Carl Mortished Stuff you can burn, stuff you can eat and stuff you can hoard. The world is going back to basics. We knew about oil in three digits and gold beating its record and now silver is getting a polish. In Britain, we had forgotten about coal - and the price of the ugly, polluting fuel is riding the up escalator. Banks that invest in whizzy things such as credit card receivables and mortgage securities are yesterday's cold turkey. Instead, the moneymen are buying something to stave off the chill, to...

Peak oil, peak metals, and this year peak food. Every bookshop has a corner warning that mankind will soon outrun the basic resources of the globe. A combine harvester works its way through a field of barley in the chalk downlands south of Salisbury, England. Digging out the truth behind mining mergers Come a cropper: grain stocks are at their lowest in 60 years and wheat prices have risen by 145 per cent since April It was ever thus. Variants of the theme emerge at the top of each commodity super-cycle, only to be deferred for another 20 years or...

...Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairman Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., support Kyoto Protocol-like plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to trade permits to emit greenhouse gases – a.k.a “cap-and-trade.” ...investment banking firms, such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, that plan on profiting from trading so-called “carbon credits.” (snip) Anda starts out by saying that, “Whether you believe the science [of global warming] or not is beside the point. Policy should be more about risk than proof.” (snip) Although he doesn’t mention this in his Financial Times article, one big future winner may be...

SACRAMENTO – Like gold and pork bellies, California's carbon dioxide emissions credits may someday emerge as the big thing on commodity markets. Brokers who specialize in the art of the deal are closely following developments here as California steers toward a controversial, yet common, market-based course to reduce pollution many scientists link to global warming. Under the proposal, California would reward low-polluting companies with emissions credits that they can then sell on an open market to industries that cannot readily curb greenhouse gas discharges. Companies are already forming a line, said Josh Margolis, a manager with Cantor Fitzgerald Brokerage. “We...

Keynote Address to the Cornerstone Research Conference Market Manipulation in the Energy Markets Commissioner Sharon Brown-Hruska October 2, 2003 Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my thoughts on market manipulation in the energy markets. Let me just say from the outset -- I know this notable audience of economic and legal scholars and practitioners will appreciate this -- that the views I express are my own and, therefore, do not necessarily represent the official position of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the views of other Commissioners, or the staff. The observations I make today are those...

Rosen: Our silly little 'addiction' Sometimes you get great life lessons in unexpected places. Kudos to Scott Adams, the cartoonist who writes the Dilbert comic strip. Adams cut through the fog and gave his readers a valuable insight into the real-world international politics and economics of the energy conundrum. In a recent strip, Dilbert readers were treated to the following exchange: Dilbert: I'm thinking about buying a more fuel-efficient car. Dogbert: Why? Dilbert: It's my patriotic duty to reduce this country's dependence on foreign sources of oil. Dogbert: Why? Dilbert: Because then the countries that hate us will have less...

THE DOW REPORTCommodity Boom or BustIt's been a while since I talked about commodities, and given the price action seen this week, I thought that we would revisit this subject today. In early December 2004 it looked as if the commodity boom was over. At that time many of the technical pieces had fallen in place indicating a major top had occurred. But, there happened to have been one last gasp into the parabolic advance that ended in March.But what about now? Is the commodity boom really over? Has the recent decline really been another buying opportunity? Why have gold...

Commodities euphoria may signal bubble April 26, 2005 Goldman Sachs analysts sent crude oil prices soaring when they said March 30 that the price could eventually reach US$105 (HK$819) a barrel. To Larry Berman, chief technical strategist at CIBC World Markets, it had the whiff of late 1998, when analyst Henry Blodget forecast Amazon.com shares would hit US$400 a share. They did - and then tumbled 80 percent over two years, signaling the end of the technology bubble. A forecast like Goldman's ``does typically mark the euphoria that's seen at market extremes,'' Berman said. After a two-year surge in commodities...

A Castroite state-controlled media organ reports that El Barbudo is incensed about Cuba not having enough doctors in Cuba in this news item here. Oh really? It's enough to make me wonder if he's almost as oblivious to economics as El Supremo. Of course there aren't enough Cuban doctors, Castro! You sent them off to be spies in Venezuela! Cubans have noticed this. And so have Venezuelans! Daniel researched that Misión Barrio Adentro program and found quite a bit of evidence of such shenanigans here. You've got plenty of Cuban doctors, Castro. It's just that when you send them to...

BANGOR - Mainers could be paying as much for electricity starting March 1 as they did five years ago when policy-makers promised lower prices once the state's electricity industry was restructured. Today, the Maine Public Utilities Commission likely will increase the standard-offer electricity rate by as much as 50 percent, from roughly 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to 7.5 cents. It could mean paying about $16 more per month for the average homeowner.  Stephen Ward, the state's public advocate, expects this magnitude of price increase. It's a vote that wasn't supposed to take place. Standard offer, or the default rate consumers...

Twenty years from now, what might the world’s most precious, depleting, natural resource be? Oil? Steel? Lumber? How about working-age adults who are still contributing to a nation’s entitlement programs rather than receiving benefits from them? Want to know how short the future supply of such people is? Well, across the globe, nations like Japan, Australia, and Singapore are actually begging their child rearing-age population to procreate. For instance, according to the Tokyo correspondent for the BBC: Japan currently has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. [And] the government says that unless the trend is reversed quickly,...

Typically, whenever you hear bold predictions of how high prices can reach, we think it is in your better interest to ignore these. Nonetheless, one cannot help but conjure up projections of where corn and soybean prices could go this year in a weather market. Specifically, we wanted to look back historically at some of the gigantic upward price moves, and then try and correlate those with today's market. How about $30.00 beans and $10.00 corn? Obviously, we run the risk of sounding wildly optimistic, even eccentric, but we want to put in context just how we derived these figures...