"The Dangers of Agricultural Speculation"

[Smaland]

Financial speculators have discovered agricultural commodities, and the result has been skyrocketing prices for wheat, barley and other grains. SPIEGEL spoke with agricultural economist Joachim von Braun about how to curb such speculation and the dangers for the world's poor.

Full story

[Agrippa]

Free Market and speculation is, like other parts of Capitalism, definitely one of the causes of "world hunger", rather than anything like "waste" of average Westerners, what they still teach many European children in school, as if they themselves would be responsible for hunger anywhere else, which is part of the re-education and "guilt-program" for white people.

Whereas the real causes are something which only educated and better informed people even talk about - most of the time not free of Cultural Marxist "political correctness", which prevents them from viewing genetic and memetic aspects of regional underdevelopment...

[Great Dane]

It's good for some people! It is not just commodity prices that are rising but farmland prices are also going up. My farm is worth $100k more then it was a year ago. The danger is that this could be another bubble and people who are not careful could be wiped out if they over extend themselves at the bank on the assumption that the current grain prices are the new normal.

[Groenewolf]

Many of the big investors* are also going in to agriculture. Just like their growing investments in the gold/silver (mining) sector it must be viewed as a strategy to protect their wealth against the next phase of the crises. That is when all that extra printed money starts circulating and governments can no longer hide that their bail outs did not do any good.


*not to be confused with speculators, who are nothing more then gamblers.

[SwordoftheVistula]

Speculators tend to get burned more often than not. If they didn't get bailed out, we wouldn't have such a problem with them.

The futures market in agriculture is good on the whole because otherwise the farmers would just grow random shit and there would always be shortages and oversurpluses of things.