Demand
and supply certainly matter. But there's another reason why food across the
world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.
It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).
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For just under a decade, the GSCI remained a relatively static investment vehicle, as bankers remained more interested in risk and collateralized debt than in anything that could be literally sowed or reaped. Then, in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food.
Change was coming to the great grain exchanges of Chicago, Minneapolis, and
Kansas City -- which for 150 years
had helped to moderate the peaks and valleys of global food prices. Farming may
seem bucolic, but it is an inherently volatile industry, subject to the
vicissitudes of weather, disease, and disaster. The grain futures trading
system pioneered after the American Civil War by the founders of Archer Daniels
Midland, General Mills, and Pillsbury helped to establish America as a
financial juggernaut to rival and eventually surpass Europe. The grain markets also
insulated American farmers and millers from the inherent risks of their
profession. The basic idea was the "forward contract," an agreement between
sellers and buyers of wheat for a reasonable bushel price -- even before that bushel had been grown. Not only did a grain
"future" help to keep the price of a loaf of bread at the bakery -- or later, the supermarket -- stable, but the market allowed
farmers to hedge against lean times, and to invest in their farms and
businesses. The result: Over the course of the 20th century, the real price of
wheat decreased (despite a hiccup or two, particularly during the 1970s
inflationary spiral), spurring the development of American agribusiness. After
World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which
became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian
strategies -- not to mention the
fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world.
Futures
markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the
farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real,
physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or
wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut,
Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their
ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket
shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide"
hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals.
On the
other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn
or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he
might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money
through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling
high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule
welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of
buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide
hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they
pleased.
But Goldman's index perverted the symmetry of this system. The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was "long only," which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy. At the bottom of this "long-only" strategy lay an intent to transform an investment in commodities (previously the purview of specialists) into something that looked a great deal like an investment in a stock -- the kind of asset class wherein anyone could park their money and let it accrue for decades (along the lines of General Electric or Apple). Once the commodity market had been made to look more like the stock market, bankers could expect new influxes of ready cash. But the long-only strategy possessed a flaw, at least for those of us who eat. The GSCI did not include a mechanism to sell or "short" a commodity.
This imbalance undermined the innate structure of the commodities markets, requiring bankers to buy and keep buying -- no matter what the price. Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to "roll" their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line. And since the deflationary impact of shorting a position simply wasn't part of the GSCI, professional grain traders could make a killing by anticipating the market fluctuations these "rolls" would inevitably cause. "I make a living off the dumb money," commodity trader Emil van Essen told Businessweek last year. Commodity traders employed by the banks that had created the commodity index funds in the first place rode the tides of profit.
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