Goldman Sachs Responds To the Food Bubble

Here's a followup to the "Food Bubble" story by Frederick Kaufman that we linked to in our 'How Goldman Sachs Starves Children' post.

Here's a link to Goldman's self-serving response to "The Food Bubble," a simmering serving of swill concocted by Steve Strongin, Goldman's Head of Global Investment Research.

And here's part of the response Harper's will run . . .

No one denies there was a shortage in global wheat markets from 2005-2008. Unfortunately, Steve Strongin brings us no closer to understanding why hunger ruled the planet in 2008, as his defense of Goldman's Commodity Index Fund mixes misrepresentation with outright mendacity. While the goal of the GSCI was to transform the nature of commodity markets while allowing bankers to amass huge pools of capital, the CRB index has been from its inception in 1934 a market indicator that not only included the prices of tradable commodities, but of butter and lard. To equate the two indices because they are "investable" is to deliberately twist the historical contexts and goals of each. Similarly, Strongin quotes the CFTS, the USDA, the DOE, the US Treasury, the SEC Commission and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that "current oil prices and the increase in oil prices between January 2003 and June 2008 " are largely due to "fundamental supply and demand factors."

.....

I'm gonna stop here because it's just so damn funny. Goldman quotes the captured portions of our government? They're actually going to use their buddies as evidence? The ^%#!@! SEC? The effin' CFTS? The same people that are responsible for the deregulation mess that caused the derivatives explosion that will destroy America? Hahahahahahaha. Gimme a break! See this related story.

Anyway, read the rest here

Here's a link to a NPR story on the subject.