“When I use a word” said Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” It has always been the ambition of Wall Street to bring its financial statements under a similar type of discipline.

Congress has threatened to take action against speculative commodities traders, as food and energy prices break fresh records.

A desperate Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, warned during a Senate hearing on commodities speculators that “the American people are about to take out pitchforks” because of the cost of groceries and gasoline.

McCaskill then told an official from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission: “If you don’t do something, Congress will,” according to a report in the LA Times.

Of course, it doesn’t appear to have struck the outraged Senator to consider mere market forces such as supply and demand or, in the case of oil prices, increased demand from emerging markets and decreased supply because of bad weather or geopolitical events.

To learn more about…