Scary dream?
Ralph Jones
Saturday, April 19, 2008
SEVERAL WEEKS ago, I had a dream — it was a scary dream.
The Gazette interview with Mr. Porter made me decide to tell about my dream.
It seems that several Wall Street brokers loved to play the commodities futures to give crude oil a ride; now oil is $100 a barrel. As the talk about ethanol and big diesel increased, they decided to hit the bean and grain market.
The result was that grain doubled and tripled, and fertilizer went from $500 to almost $1,000 a ton and tractor fuel to over $3 a gallon.
Farmers must have those things to survive. Then have grain for livestock in order to market them.
So meat and grain products must rise in order to get them to market.
Any kind of food or fabric or other product that has been on a truck must rise a little in price for the trucker to stay in business.
The hard part is that wages have not followed, so the public must tighten their purse strings. Those strings will not stretch enough to pay all their expenses.
The mortgage could be the first to go.
A person must eat, he must drive to work and so on and on, some in desperation.
Now, my question is — could those few who sit on their fannies in their Wall Street offices really send crude oil and grain to their new heights — and are they the reason that wheat is up 47 cents one day and down 38 cents the next — the same with beans?
What else?