Snoozegate basically ran its course.
http://news.yahoo.com/sandra-fluke-her-role-contraception-controversy-again-110000215.html and Fox News has taken to calling her a "liberal plant," because any failure shall be spun.... It couldn't possibly be that some sexist old guy was sexist, or if he was, then it was the equivalent of entrapment. She simply must have set him up....
Really?
Let's change subjects then. Go back and discuss the effort posts I made last night, about GSCI speculation. There's some meat there I'd like to yell about.
The idea of funneling money to places it needs invested is a good idea and it works, in theory. In reality, there are a ton of things that can go wrong and we're so in love with the theory that we deny the existence of its flaws. Wall St. be damned, financial markets work best when heavily regulated with well designed rules aimed at stability. Saying we should just ... let things go where they will due to some
imaginary invisible hand is irresponsible in the extreme. The invisible hand exists, but real hands exist even more and who are we kidding, those real hands reach into the til or just plain old don't get it sometimes. Then we have a "correction," or a nice big loss, which none of the economics text books talk about in great detail....
That doesn't even start on the secondary effects and the feedback loop where it all becomes a vicious cycle....
Commodities futures markets are not a bad thing and I've explained before how it was a sort of ... I guess you could call in "insurance" in a non technical sense. They guaranteed a farmer a certain price, thus insulating the food producers from price shocks. This is wonderful. But, then people came along and sought to maximize the profits beyond reason and promptly ruined it.
It's to the point where, we aren't going off price value, we're going off "perception." This is why every time something happens anywhere, the price of oil goes up despite demand being weak and supply being high in the US. If things are bad now and gas is $3.75-$4.00/gallon, then what the crap is it going to be when things get good? We're going to be talking $5-$6/gallon minimum then (if that doesn't kill any economic recovery we might have). Drilling for more oil won't help when the problem is commodities speculation. The US has lots of oil, and we're currently exporting it after we put it through our refineries. There is positively no logic as to why the price is going up.