The genesis of the discontent which we now see surging all around the Moslem world – and likely to spread to other areas – is the fact that the price of food is rising very fast. Taking off from the point of food, it is taking on a decidedly political tint.
It hasn’t bit us here in the United States because we still pay such a tiny percentage of our income for food. But for people who spend half their income on the basic necessities, any price hike hurts. And prices have been spiking very high. Mish goes over a very large number of reports about the riots in Egypt and observes the following:
Most of the increases in food prices are due to droughts in South America, floods in Australia, and poor growing conditions in many places.
However, Bernanke’s “Quantitative Easing” policies combined with rampant credit growth in China and India have led to increased speculation in commodities. That speculation has forced up food prices.
If you are tweeting, please tweet this “Bernanke has blood on his hands”.
Please note that speculation in commodities is not a cause of anything. Rather commodity speculation is a result of piss poor monetary policies not only the Fed, but central bankers worldwide.
It is time to call things as they are. It isn’t deliberate in the sense that Bernanke and central bankers like him didn’t plan for people to have their food prices shoot up, but it is criminal none the less. It should have dawned on them that if you rapidly print up buckets of fake money, then things of real value – including food – will rise in monetary price. They wanted inflation on the insane theory that rising prices means prosperity – what they’ve got is a world on the verge of a breakdown as the poor are losing what little they have…and it doesn’t help matters that the bankers are raking it in.
As I’ve said before, we won’t go hungry here in the United States – even in our stunted form, American agriculture is still the wonder of the world. If we really turned on the power, we’d have food coming out of our ears – but, for now, its just that we’ve got enough, and the prices rises will be an inconvenience for us rather than a matter of life and death (though rising prices, in general, might tip us back in to full blown recession). But many people around the world are getting hurt and it is high time we stopped this – stopped the use of fiat money; stopped using debt; stopped being utter fools. It is time we got back to work – back to honestly earning a day’s pay by doing something useful.
Or, we can continue on – and watch as the world goes up in flames.
UPDATE: the violence continues to spread and increase in intensity.
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