Is an Oil Shock Brewing?
The oil price jumped to an eighteen month high last night. Can we expect this trend to continue?
Read more...Category Archives: Commodities
China’s Most Famous Ghost City Busts
The Chinese government, as has been widely reported, is trying to cool growth, in large measure to take the hot air out of its shadow banking sector. But can it engineer its hoped-for soft landing?
Read more...Gaius Publius: Obama’s New Climate Plan: Less Coal, More Fracking
There’s speculation on whether we are being prepped for a Yes to Keystone.
Me? I think we’re being set up for a Yes, but I’ve thought that since the subject came up. If the baby keeps grabbing for the candy, you have to conclude s/he wants it. Same with this.
Read more...South Africans Plan to Protest Obama’s Crimes Against Africa During Presidential Visit
An Obama tour of Africa is likely to provide a marker of he is perceived in the rest of the world, although any negative reports are unlikely to get much play in our lapdog media. But since Obama was shunned in the recent G-8 conference, it’s going to be interesting to see how his African hosts muster up the appearance of enthusiasm during his visit.
Read more...Wolf Richter: One Part Of Japan’s Abenomics Salvation Is Already A Fail
Japan’s attack in the Currency War was supposed to make it more competitive in international trade – but that, it failed to do. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Read more...Extreme Energy, Extreme Implications: Interview with Michael Klare
If oil and gas is a profoundly dynamic phenomenon, then so too must be environmental risk and conflicts over natural resources—and we are not getting the full picture from the mainstream media, according to Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, TomDispatch blogger, and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, 2008). As risk multiply, conventional sources evaporate and we are left with “extreme” energy, renewables may be the only way to avoid war and disaster.
Read more...Sasha Breger: More Ways That Financiers Suck Wealth From Agricultural Providers (and Ultimately, You)
By Sasha Breger, a lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of the recent book Derivatives and Development. Her research includes global finance, derivatives, social policy, food, and farming. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
In my last two posts (http://triplecrisis.com/a-great-sucking-sound-part-2/, http://triplecrisis.com/a-great-sucking-sound-part-1/), I addressed the roles of debt, farmland acquisition, and physical commodity hoarding in helping finance siphon wealth from global agriculture. In this final post, I discuss the role of derivatives and insurance markets in this redistributive process.
Read more...Sasha Breger: How Commodities Hoarding Distorts Food Prices
Despite financial firms’ pious claims to the contrary, their commodities machinations extract wealth from agricultural providers, and thus also ultimately from consumers.
Read more...Sasha Breger: How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth
If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system.
Read more...Richard Alford: The “Dutch Disease” and Once and Future Economic Crises in the US
By Richard Alford, a former New York Fed economist. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side.
The term Dutch Disease refers to negative macro-economic effects on a country of a boom in commodity exports or other developments that result in large capital inflows. It may be that the Dutch Disease contributed to the recent US recession and that the prospective energy-led US economic recovery could amount to nothing more than another bout of the Dutch Disease.
Read more...The Case for 4% Inflation
Yves here. Some readers are likely to recoil at the idea that more inflation might be a good thing. But the flip side is that economists are still fighting the war of the 1970s.
Read more...New Paper Links Food Price Inflation to the Power of “Agro-Trader Nexus” (ie, Monsantos + Cargills)
Joseph Baines’s new article, “Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System” is a must read if you care to understand how major corporations exercise hidden influence on our daily lives.
Read more...Gold Crash Signals End but End of What?
Whither gold?
Read more...The Damaging Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Growing Threat to Food Security
By Timothy Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
Just when you thought the unhealthy ties between food, fuel, and financial markets couldn’t get more perverse, we get the announcement that Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is entering the grain-trading business, hiring a team from Viterra, based in Toronto, to run the show. And lest we toss this off as just another corporate deal, Javier Blas in the Financial Times reminds us that Viterra has itself recently been bought by Glencore, perhaps the world’s greatest global commodity speculator.
What could go wrong?
Read more...Real Pragmatism for Real Climate Change: Interview with Dr. John Abraham
Dr. John Abraham is a thermal sciences researcher and professor at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota who has straddled many worlds in his quest for answers to climate change, from working with the US defense industry to pro-bono work creating low-cost energy solutions to Africa’s remote areas.
Dr. Abrahams discusses:
Read more...• What climate change REALLY means
• How the Earth’s warming bears a human fingerprint
• How we can do something now about climate change, with today’s technology
• How and why the public remains ill-informed on the issue
• How Hurricane Sandy can be viewed from the climate change spectrum
• How the Earth’s warming has a human fingerprint
• Where the silver lining in all of this is
• Why Keystone XL will probably (but shouldn’t) be green-lighted
• How ‘micro-wind’ may be a hot seller in our renewable future
• How the future could see a merger of interests in the fossil fuel and alternative energy sectors
