M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — From 2003 to 2008 – the
years when the uncontrolled greed of a handful of speculators was sending the
price of commodities to intolerable levels – this columnist was among the few
who pointed to such market manipulation as the cause of price fever, rather
than "market conditions."
Today it is clear that it was the greed of
a few financial institutions and their managers that caused the rise in food
prices that killed hundreds of thousands in Asia and Africa from starvation.
Super-high food prices sucked the purchasing power out of middle- and low-income
consumers by raising the prices of oil and other commodities to levels where
continued economic health was unsustainable.
The 2008 market crash caused not a ripple
in the consciences of this handful, who continued to award themselves generous
bonuses after creating economic disaster. Speculation – forward trading where
the speculator need not take delivery of the commodity – caused death and
hardship across the world, and it was expected, not least perhaps by U.S.
voters, that President Barack Obama would make good on his promise to deal
harshly with such economic depredators.
Instead, he handed over the reins of the
U.S. Treasury Department to Timothy Geithner, himself a creature of the very
system that is causing a second tsunami of high prices and a collapse of
consumer demand. Under Geithner, the U.S. taxpayer has underwritten nearly US$2
trillion in write-offs and advances to the very agencies that caused the
speculative fever which began in 2003, after the defeat of former Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein.
