Thank you for the update. It is really good of you to give us some on the ground perspective.

Jordan does strike me as being critical. It is seen, I think, as the stable and reliable partner and also a moderating force to counter the perceived belicosity of Syria. I don't know if you think that sentiment is at all accurate. But I have heard it expressed here.

As far as provocateurs are concerned I would be amazed if at least some of the thuggery isn't official. It is elsewhere. Ugly is the word.

Keep us posted if you can. Thank you.

Middle eastern/arab world instability pushes oil prices even higher. Economies can't grow with $100+ oil. Forecasts & programmes of growth & recovery scuppered.

European banking/sovereign situation still unresolved and the debtbomb continues ticking. Likewise in US. (And Japan)
When it blows, next round of financial crisis and people start recognising it for the economic depression it is.

Climactic extremes, rising oil prices, overpopulation aren't helping food harvests. What'S going to happen when these people'S revolutions can't deliver on lower food prices & employment?

Anyone noticed the people are even on the streets in the US now – Wisconsin.

Popular mood is heating-up and is spilling over into the political.

So far, activists are bending over backwards to underscore their allegiance to the crown but are making it clear they are not happy with the wife of the crown holder. Once activist in particular has asked publicly for the crown holder to let the government do what the government does without interfering. This prompted the crown to speak out to say that ministers and politicians in charge should not hide behind the excuse of instructions being handed down from above and that each one of them will be held personally accountable for and success/failure henceforth.

One ugly item. There was a peaceful demonstration last week that was disrupted by thugs wielding sticks. Scores of injured. Rumors making the rounds have people believe the thugs were seen boarding a police bus. This is not good. The crown holder has promised a full investigation.

In light of a number of local circumstances, my sense is that the thugs were provocateurs…

To be continued…

If the table could include shipping and storage costs, as a legitimate oncost, we would have an idea of how much it's costing us, and the producers, by letting the speculators in on the act.

In many instances the product is grown in third world countries with farmers on subsistence farming.

It's the canary principle; by cheep in the third world sell cheep relatively speaking in the first world, but with a huge margin in between.

Whether in agriculture or manufacturing this keeps the third world poor and unemployment up in the first world which gives the added bonus of keeping wages down.

So I mentioned the factor of how essential is the resource/commodity/product/service.

Now Magicalsushi has raised the issue of frequency of both supply and demand.
Growing seasons, harvests, oil ‘production’, etc. whereas food and fuel are daily requirements.

Which naturally leads on to the idea of stores or reserves to cover shortfalls. But when systems are really stretched to their limits(um, like now – financial crisis, climate change, food production, population growth, peak-oil) then reserves run dry and you enter into dangerous territory.

Again, now the effects of slight shortfalls can be highly disproportionate and non-intuitive indeed exacerbated by the interconnected interdependence of globalised systems running at full steam ‘efficiency’(think ‘just-in-time delivery’ of our food to supermarkets) in a smooth predictable steady state with little or no margin or appetite for unpredictable turbulence(I think David refers to this in his film, ‘High Anxieties – The Mathematics of Chaos). All in all a recipe for disaster. Sorry, the engineer’s systems analysis angle is kind of a pet subject of interest for me.

If you are interested:
Tipping point
Schumacher lecture

"…and that's not going to endear them
to anyone, including politicians…."

The politicians could care less so long as they can persuade us, or more often simply throw enough mud on the issue. They get a lot of help from the media. Just 'sow the seeds of doubt' – confuse – is the standard tactic. This was the very phrase – PR instruction – of a tobacco industry executive when he knew full well of the medical evidence for harm by using his product.

This is followed by all similar campaigns since then, notably including the fossil fuel industry's PR efforts to reduce efforts to stop Climate Change.

The politicians & media have a highly co-dependent relationship. The media are in competition for the story. Any journalist who speaks too critically will not get access in future. In fact this principle applies to all powerful institutions where regular 'news' is derived which media need to report. The most recent one highlighted by this is the Metropolitan Police in the phone hacking scandal. Both Murdoch's media & the Met did not want to upset their cosy relationship, so the Met's investigation was less than stellar to put it mildly. The only reason investigations have apparently 'reopened' recently is because individuals whose phone messages were hacked are taking private court actions against the News of the World. (A lot of out of court settlements, complete with gagging clauses have been made also.) Law? Justice? Public Interest? All depends how much money you havew…

Anyone notice the preponderance of Prof Larry Meade in the media recently with his work-for-welfare proposals? Meade was invited to Downing Street last June & has had considerable contact with Tory insiders. He's a Professor of Political Science, not Economics, but there's no doubt he's been chosen to give the Tories extreme program an 'academic' gloss'. He's a member of the US right wing 'think tank' American Enterprise Institute & was a speech writer for Henry Kissinger. Both Newsnight & BBC News have giving this guy free reign to air his views. His credentials & history are selectively reported & what passes for 'balance' is interviews with far less articulate benefit claimants mostly. Ludicrous statements by the Professor like "..the jobs are there.." pass without any challenge or recourse to actual evidence. We know that in the UK alone 1.5 million people who +were+ working 2yrs ago don't have jobs now.

As John Pilger & Noam Chomsky put it, it's a process of 'normalisation' of the extreme right wing interests of wealth. But look who finances politics & media? Why would we expect anything different?

He had trouble posing it so I have posted it for him/her.

Cheers for the various responses to my comment. I started working on
a reply this lunchtime but had an epiphany and have chucked most of it
away. Golem, I think you may be right that the speculation has
contributed to the price increases for consumers, although I do still
think they'd be substantial even without it.

Basically, I'd not really been thinking in terms of harvests. People
need to eat every day, so I'd just pictured wheat being produced every
day, but of course, it's not. It's produced twice a year (once per
hemisphere), then stored. That changes everything, as it gives the
banks nearly half a year of control over the wheat supply before
another harvest occurs. I'd been thinking that, whatever might happen
in the wheat derivatives la-la-land that the banks are busy creating,
the sale of actual wheat to the consumer wouldn't be affected. The
derivatives bubble caused by the banks' speculation would inflate
harmlessly, without affecting the real life market, until eventually
it would burst (and banks would demand a bailout, but that's another
issue). But I think I was wrong about this.

The housing market was perfect for the finance industry's speculation
shinanigans. Because people don't need to buy or sell houses very
often, the bubble could float far, far away from reality for a very
long while before it finally burst. In a market where consumers
*need* a product every day, and producers are able to produce it
immediately, I don't think it'd be possible profit from speculation.
People need wheat (or some sort of food) every day, but unfortunately
it's only produced twice a year. In the meantime, a bubble created by
traders *will* affect prices for consumers. Each bubble will probably
burst before the next harvest, but until then, there's plenty of time
for people to starve.

I think this shows how desperate the banks are though. They'll only
be able keep the bubble growing if they hoard masses of grain while
people are dying of malnutrition, and that's not going to endear them
to anyone, including politicians. If it's come to this, then
opportunities for other scams must be scant indeed.

My explanation for the price rises would otherwise have been due to
the very high price inelasticity of demand that myopia mentioned. In
particular, wealth is distributed in a pyramidal fashion – for any two
levels of income, there'll be far more people at the lower level than
the higher level. While we're starving the very poor, the prices
won't rise by much. Once we start to starve the slightly less poor,
the prices have to rise by quite a bit more, since it takes a bigger
price rise to affect the same number of people, as each "layer" of the
wealth pyramid is smaller. If a 2% fall in wheat production means 2%
of people are going to starve (although I expect that's a gross
oversimplification), I don't find it unimaginable that that could lead
to a 50% price rise (even without distortions due to speculation).
But I think you're right that it's not the full story here.

I agree that Oil is another sector where speculators enjoy themselves. Our system of governance, including the media have been very largely captured. Our challenge must surely be to rid ourselves of a ruling class and system which is harming us.