Via Doug at Eschaton, an article by Frederick Kaufmann on commodity inflation:
It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).
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in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food.
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The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was “long only,” which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy.
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This imbalance undermined the innate structure of the commodities markets, requiring bankers to buy and keep buying — no matter what the price.
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The result of Wall Street’s venture into grain and feed and livestock has been a shock to the global food production and delivery system. Not only does the world’s food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.
I don’t think the article is entirely accurate. Food costs should be rising as Asian incomes rise. The rise in food prices encourages the conservation and efficient utilization of farm land and potentially gives small farmers a chance to make a living, though Kaufmann counters that attendant volatility in input (oil and fertilizer) prices means that the farmers aren’t making money. More on that in a moment.
I think the main problem of this kind of commodity speculation is the usual one: margin buying. According to Ravi Batra (on Thom Hartmann today), they’re back to putting down 5% of the purchase price. This, of course, creates incentives for traders to walk away when trades go bad. On a day to day basis, volatility is greatly increased. Over longer periods of time, the chance of booms and busts is increased, and with it, an increased chance of a disastrous farm depression.
And there’s a second key point that Kaufmann makes:
The higher the cost of corn, soy, rice, and wheat, the more the grain producing-nations of the world should cooperate in order to ensure that panicked (and generally poorer) grain-importing nations do not spark ever more dramatic contagions of food inflation and political upheaval. Instead, nervous countries have responded instead with me-first policies, from export bans to grain hoarding to neo-mercantilist land grabs in Africa.
Now, there’s an interesting point about input prices. Oil, nitrogen, and potash are one set of inputs to improve productivity. But there are other approaches, such as humic and fulvic acid, which are a significant source of potassium. Nitrogen can be fixed by microorganisms. If the price of food rises in a sustained way, farmers will find ways to work around the conventional inputs. Just as the rise in oil prices encourages green energy, it encourages green agriculture. This is the invisible hand at its best. We just have to keep the poor of the world alive long enough for that to happen. And we should tax and regulate the %$#@ out of speculators to make sure they don’t blow up the agriculture markets the same way they blew up the housing market.