The commodities futures (a busy table these days) use a trading system (croupier), which runs as a non-regulated bank (the casino) to pay out the trading positions (chips) from the options traders (the players).   This options futures is speculative game where institutional insiders (fund managers) make money from the multitudes of day traders (newbies) in the market, by sweeping up large amounts of small speculator's positions (chips) into their hedge fund (house bag) at the end of the game.

The well connected insiders are allowed to tilt the wheel in their favor, by pulling media strings under the roulette table as it were.  They plant  and pay for news stories in the mainstream media that invariably read "commodity such is up, due to this-and-that".  The actual inventories of the commodities are normal and sufficient, it is the effect on the day traders that the headline news elicit which induce more newbie bets on the color and number set up for the  "kill" by the insiders at the end of the game.  The faux raison-d-etre paid for is never in enough detail to make a logical decision, it appears on the news of the day so that the public at large can rationalize the speculation, and impotently pay the high prices at the pump or at the supermarket.

The casino  secretly notifies the insiders when enough newbie looser bets are placed on the color and numbers desired.  They can then  "close"  the market, by pulling the roulette media strings in the opposite direction, or if need be, by buying or selling vast quantities of the commodity, a practice known in the past as "cornering the market".  All of the ignorant newbies then loose their small investments, the house collects a commission on the bets, and the insiders collect their winnings in the back room, which is then spun to the media has the bubble having  "run it's course".

This is a well organized and smooth racket, as long as the underlying "fundamentals" are predictable and steady.  When a truly unforeseen event happens, such as a mortgage meltdown, all of the casinos are suddenly in peril of a "systemic" crash.  At that point in time, all bets are off, even the countervailing insider bets, because no one can calculate the true odds. The roulette tables are warped, the media strings under the table do not work.  There must be a new "price discovery", redefining the game, building a new roulette wheel.  In the mean time, the game goes on at a different table, such as our food and oil supplies at the commodities futures.  

A "systemic failure"  caused the Bear Sterns investment bank fiasco when a stampede of small speculators wanted to cash out their positions before matters got any worse at the mortgage backed securities table.  Since the "bank" did not have enough cash in reserve, it could not pay it's players, and had to ask for an intervention from their republican cronies at the Fed. Freshly minted money was then granted, so that all players could cash out and play another day, at another table.

Normally, we would not be concerned as to how gamblers and swindlers make their fortunes, because it is their own karma that they will invariably have to deal with.  Some crumbs do fall off the table and provide for some meager income from servitude in the "trick the dumb" republican reagonomics. In today's speculative commodities options market however, these con artists are impacting the world's food and energy prices, causing a speculative bubble that has brought hunger and chaos to the entire world. 

Are we going to allow a few hundred wealthy speculators in New York and Chicago to gamble with the world's food and energy prices?  I wonder why  no one in the mainstream media seems to think that may be the root cause of the high price of our food and oil.   Is it because they too are insider cronies?  They rely on rote TV repetition to dupe the People, for a cut of the action.  For them, what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas.  

Atlanta, GA
Apr 24, 2008