Comments on: CBOT Resembles Carnival Act as Billion Dollar Black Box Operators Move In

By: thucydides

thucydides — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:05:42 +0000

@anothernut: if you want to know what a world without credit looks like, read some history on non-European societies prior to the late 1300s in Africa, 1492 in the Americas, or the 1500s in Asia. credit financed the massive worldwide European expansion and resulting Anglo-American global hegemony, along with many (most?) of the corresponding technological advances.

the very PC or mobile device you use to submit your comment, the software and electronics that handle the networking and transmission of the signal, and the privately owned copper-and-fiber infrastucture that we call the Internet would not exist, were it not for credit.

BBN, Intel, MSFT, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, AT&T, Verizon and all the other companies that created the Internet, in conjunction with academic research and some initial government grants, would not exist were it not for freely available credit on good terms.

credit, it’s how you build empires.

By: Loveandlight

Loveandlight — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:07:44 +0000

There may be some people reading who don’t know marketspeak, so what “leverage” essentially means is participating in the financial markets with borrowed money. Because the central bankers in a fiat currency system essentially create money by lending it into existence, those in a good position to secure loans for engaging in such financial-market speculation, are those who are also in a good position to distort the effect of the laws of supply and demand on critical physical commodities such as bushels of wheat and maize-corn. And this is simply because having access to such “leverage” means they can buy and trade these important things in a way unconstrained by their own personal financial means.

So then the price of a loaf of bread for Joe and Jane Sixpack goes up, up, and up! And because we feed our cows corn instead of grass, the price of beef and dairy products is similarly effected as well.

I find Kevin’s position on this practice to be a perfectly reasonable one with which I totally agree.

By: anothernut

anothernut — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:50:00 +0000

I you really want to do away with “zombie money”, do away with loaning money at interest, what used to be called “usury”. That is the fuel that makes the whole greed engine go.
I know it ain’t gonna happen, but it is interesting to think what kind of world it would be if loaning at interest were not a part of it.

By: jon

jon — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:02:24 +0000

I wouldn’t worry too much about the hedgies playing in the soft commodities, PM’s are another matter, but like Kevin says the manipulation will eventually end. I gave up on technical analysis a while ago and now just try to focus on fundamentals and long term trends. The way I look at it, if you’re a small guy using the exchange funds to go long for the mid to long term, the Chinese, Russians, and anyone else with excess USD’s and a hungry populace are backstopping my DBA position from catastrophic loss. That being said, I lightened up on my PM ETF’s this week because I wanted a food position in my portfolio and any monies I saved on GLD & SLV slides went into DBA losses so it was a wash. But I have my food position going into a holiday weekend where nothing will most likely happen, but given the roiling the markets have been through lately, one never knows.

-mod feel free to delete the following…

The only other area I’m currently looking at is junior miners and want to pick just one, which I know is very risky. Anyone have an opinion on KBX?

By: zoltan

zoltan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:41:36 +0000

Its a scary prospect to have the boom/bust financial spivs anywhere near the operating mechanism of food provision. They have broken their toys, now they are stomping around breaking all of those used by others.

Client-9 shows its not going to change anytime soon.

I’ll spend this holiday reviewing my seed requirements for this year.