[Economist] SHARING pain is usually deemed a good thing. So advocates of dishing out agony will be gladdened that the wallet-crunching pangs of car drivers filling up with petrol are now equalled by the wince-inducing stabs felt by shoppers piling up their supermarket trolleys. As oil prices stay high, wheat prices hit an all-time peak of over $7.50 a bushel for December delivery at the end of trading in Chicago on Thursday August 23rd.
The soaring prices of bushels and barrels are not unconnected. The cost of agricultural commodities, just like oil and metals, has gone up sharply over the past couple of years. Aside from wheat, the prices of corn, rice and barley have all risen by over a third since 2005. Food prices around the world are rising so quickly that a new term has been coined to describe the ballooning price of breakfast staples and dinner-time favourites: agflation.
[TheAge.com] HOW much do you think a litre of milk costs? A dollar? Two dollars maybe? Actually it’s $2.30 and it’s going up so fast the guy in the coffee shop below my office on Flinders Lane has put up a big sign explaining the new prices.
The price of milk has risen 20 per cent in the past year, says Bill Barbour, and he should know. He’s the investment manager at the DWS Global Agribusiness Fund, a $1.6 billion fund from Deutsche Bank that was formed last year to capitalise on what he calls “Ag-flation” — the sudden and irreversible upward momentum in food prices which is going to change the world as we know it.
Gaza has become the Sarajevo of the Middle East. Israel, in an action similar to that of the Serbs in Bosnia, has surrounded and cut off nearly a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the Islamic militant group Hamas took control in June. Electric fences and watch towers manned by Israeli soldiers keep the Palestinians trapped inside the strip. The land and sea blockade, the halting of all but minimal humanitarian aid and the refusal to allow Gaza to receive financial support are crushing Gaza’s industry, farming and infrastructure.
[NY-Times] A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
Pundits and financiers who were announcing vast profits and crowing over new stock market records a month ago are adopting a noticeably different style as they try to explain why many billions of dollars invested in hedge funds and the like aren’t there any more. The baroque financial architecture of yet another economic new era has turned out to consist mostly of bubbles rather less tiny than the ones that Don Ho used to sing about, and the results, to put things charitably, have not been good.
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[Protégez-vous] Aujourd’hui, il n’est pas rare d’entrer dans une maison où se trouvent plusieurs ordinateurs: un dans le bureau, un autre dans une chambre d’ado et un portable qui se promène entre la cuisine, le salon, la terrasse et parfois même la chambre à coucher.
Entrevue avec Mat Simmons [
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