From another article I'd read before (which I linked to down below, and which is gone now), the funds made quite a bit of money in the rollovers by charging a fee to every investor who wanted to roll it over. Since none of their investors actually wanted a dump truck of grain showing up in their driveway, and since the price kept going up and up and up, they paid the fee to roll it over each time.
Somebody probably did lose their shirts, but it sure wasn't the funds, and the funds won't have any trouble doing this again, because there will always be more customers eager to park money somewhere to make more money.
Is there really any confusion as to who lost their shirts?
What happened whe the Soviet Union gained control of the Sahara desert? For five years, nothing, then a shortage of sand.
It seems we can replace Soviet Union in such jokes with Investment vehicles.
A free market means a free market. When one monolithic organization with access to controlling capital makes its goal not to preserve the freedom of the market, but to extract value from the rest of the market for itself and its shareholders, that's not a market. That's a centrally planned economy.
The bankers have turned Communist oligarchs in all but name.
Nope, just a regular capitalist enterprise
Get outta here with that.
Then you can ride away on your unicorn.
The western world doesn't have food monopolies. The 2nd world occasionally does, but they're created by their govts.
Of course, it doesn't help that the US govt decided to raise corn prices by subsidizing corn ethanol.
I'm against payments to farmers other than by folks voluntarily buying said farmer's output. That's a special case of a more general rule that applies to every work product.
So I'm against "pays farmers to grow one thing" if it isn't money paid by folks who want and get said thing in exchange for said payment.
That's the only difference; in neither case do the people who wind up actually eating the food, i.e. everyone else, have a choice what to pay.
You're trying to draw this distinction between "voluntary" and "involuntary" payments which doesn't exist in the real world. I guess taxes are supposed to be involuntary, while food purchases are voluntary? Except that in the real world, if you don't buy food you die, and when one group of people who know they will never be hungry have the power to raise food prices across the board... That's a very twisted idea of "voluntary."
That's because, as I pointed out, you didn't actually express a point to challenge. You blathered some vague description and an accusation.
Now that I can see what you were trying to say, the error is clear.
The "food investor" spends his money, not mine. If he's wrong, he loses his money. Moreover, the food investor doesn't stop someone else providing food. Govts do that all the time.
Moreover, govts tend to go all-in on their decisions - so the amount lost when they get it wrong is much larger. Investors aren't monolithic - some get it right, some get it wrong.
Yes, you need food, but unless govt gets involved, you have considerable choice about how to aquire it.
> Except that in the real world, if you don't buy food you die
Speak for yourself. The "square foot" folks have shown that it's possible to grow an amazing amount in a very small area. And yes, poor people have the time.
> when one group of people who know they will never be hungry have the power to raise food prices across the board
Govts are the only group with that power. If I don't like the prices from ADM, I can buy elsewhere. If I don't like the food prices set by govt, there is no "elsewhere".
For some reason I thought I read this article about how between 2005 and 2008 investment into grain futures pushed the price of real grain high enough that hundreds of millions of people across the world starved, while hundreds of millions of bushels of grain sat in silos, resulting in inflated food prices everywhere which still have not returned to what they should be, meaning people at the margins who starve every single day.
But I guess I must have imagined that. It's good to know only governments have that kind of power here in Bizarro World.
Starved? Exaggerate much?
What, exactly, kept them from buying something else instead?
> which still have not returned to what they should be
What is this price "that should be"?
If you think that wheat should be sold at a given price, what is stopping you from providing it at that price?
You're claiming that "investors" are buying grain for less and waiting for the price to go up. What stops you from buying at the same price that they buy and selling at a lower price than they demand?
Never mind that, though. If you are seriously trying to draw some kind of moral distinction between a child "literally" starving and a child who goes to sleep every night not having had enough to eat, having a little bit less every night... I don't say this a lot, but God damn you, sir.
The only organization that controls enough capital is govt.
The roiling agricultural commodity prices in the last decade were largely the result of dollar currency devaluation by the Federal Reserve. The same patterns occurred across other global commodities like copper and oil.
1) Large institutional long investments in a certain type of wheat future (Chicago soft red winter) started crowding out the real customers of physical wheat, such as bakers.
2) Because wheat varieties are moderately fungible/exchangeable, the downstream bakers started to use a different brand of wheat (Minneapolis hard red spring) and changed their recipes accordingly.
3) This second class of wheat is very widely consumed, and bidding up its price caused riots and food shortages around the world (or so the reporter states. He didn't provide specific examples, as this predates the Arab Spring).
The overall effect is if a particular food staple suddenly became a fashion item, with wealthy people buying it off the market for non-dietary purposes at such a rate that poor people could not afford it.
However, the key bit I don't understand, and which the reporter doesn't explain, is how commodity fund investors didn't lose their shirts by betting on wheat to keep going up. If they did lose their shirts then this bubble is unlikely to repeat in the near future.