American consumers are feeling the pain both at the pump and in the grocery store. Meanwhile with real full-time unemployment rates climbing towards 10%, penny-pinching consumers are wondering just who is to blame.
Short-term speculators are selling Asian stocks in their droves. No more so than in my favourite market of them all: Vietnam.
Prices should remain more or less stable when the supply of money increases at the same rate as the supply of goods and services.
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.
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