121–125 of 125 posts
Most kinds of trading are just fucked up.
Agriculture and trading are inextricably linked. How f-ed up is that? Care you tell us your opinion of foraging? Also know as ...trespassing... now that almost every acre of land on earth is owned by someone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if I'm born into a world where someone has cornered the market on, let's say, food, and their perfectly rational strategy is to choose not to sell food to anyone who competes with them, I'm not any less free to compete than if one person didn't get to make that decision? Get outta here with that.
> So if I'm born into a world where someone has cornered the market on, let's say, food 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet I note you haven't actually challenged my point 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. G…
Oh, thank God for that then. 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…
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?
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There's an old economist joke that goes like this: 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.
I don't see any reason to distinguish them. 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.
The only organization that controls enough capital is govt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, thank God for that then. 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…
> 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 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 g…
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.