The Food Bubble (2010)

(Aside: this is one reason why I have so little trust in the web as a long-term historical medium.)

Although that article focused primarily on oil futures, it also discussed commodities futures, and specifically addressed the rollovers. Unfortunately, I neither understood it well enough at the time, nor remember it well enough now, to regurgitate it. Maybe someone else will come along with a cached copy.

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.

And those conversations have generally not gone very well.

So I've recently started giving up. HN is just not the place for that sort of thing. It's a place where the audience-participants want analysis, they want technical details, they prize expertise, and they can't discuss value unless there's a hard real-world number involved.

That's not altogether bad, but I do hope that somewhere there is a group of smart people who actually think about the real-life problems that other people have, and try to do something about it. If there is, I don't know of it yet.

Investors who bought the Goldman products did eventually lose money, however not soon enough to stop millions of people from starving.

For me, the takeaway here is that tremendous wealth and power inequality creates conditions where the stupidity and inattention of a wealthy elite can easily cause the starvation, death, and suffering of the people they financially dominate.

This story has repeated over and over throughout history. Usually, it happens when a powerful person like a King or Emperor behaves irresponsibly and causes terrible suffering.

I'm reminded of Nero watching Rome burn or Stalin starving the Ukrainians.

Concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few is a bad idea because their slightest indiscretion causes mass suffering.