Skeptic Project

i want someone to debunk this shit, if this is bunk that is.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/19/how-goldman-sachs-created-the-food-crisis.aspx

Mercola is trying to spin this into some sort of deliberate, sinister conspiracy by Goldman Sachs to drive up the price of grain. I don't see it that way, I see Goldman Sachs looking out for their own profits and thanks to de-regulation they were able to do so with greater efficiency. But a deliberate, sinister effort to raise the price of food? No, I don't see that.

The problem with Mercola's doom and gloom article is that in one of the articles he links as a source, it says this:

“There seems to be some easing for a lot of commodities, but whether this is demand rationing, we have to wait and see,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the FAO, said before the report. “If the weather is good, if plantings expand, I think we could see some relief in food prices.”

It also says this:

Of the grains, corn “is the most worrisome,” Abbassian said in a statement. “We would need above-average, if not record, yields in the U.S.,” however, “plantings so far have been delayed considerably due to cool and wet conditions on the ground,” he said.

While its fashionable to blame everything on evil banksters, it appears climate change contributed to this as well.

heh

lol ok! Agent matt, some good work there btw

Not me I work for the Illuminati. I am just chilling at the Grove. Henry Kissinger just challenged George Soros to a Brake Dancing contest.

Mercola is just respinning the Foreign Policy article to fit his narrative. Read the original, it's fairly good.

It wouldn't surprise me if Wall Street were one of the major causes of this, they essentially caused the (somewhat) recent fluctuation in oil(=gas) prices and pretty much got away with it unnoticed while the left blamed it on evil oil corporations and the right blamed it on environmentalists opposed to drilling in protected areas. While this was going on, (commodity) futures and options found their ways into pension funds and investor portfolios.

If you follow the logic of the market - and I usually don't, but I try to at least understand it - there is a place for derivatives, basically as a type of market-backed insurance for one's profits: If a farmer expects grain prices to fall, he can buy futures allowing him to sell at the current price and thus save his business.

These types of derivatives however don't have a place in speculative markets, as you are essentially gambling with the necessities of life of whole populations, and some in the OECD have been pointing this out since the deregulation was put in place.

There is however no realistic way to fight against it. The financial markets are global in scale as well as multicentric and the herculean task of closing one will simply send the traders to another one.

In short:
Yes, it is a real problem and it's one of the situations where I prefer to be realistically disenchanted and not Pollyanna-ish like some of the environmentalists who think telling people to start a vegetable garden in their backyard is a proper way of solving this problem.