{"id":1973,"date":"2011-05-10T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1973"},"modified":"2011-05-10T08:53:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T12:53:01","slug":"does-the-wsj-want-you-to-think-speculation-caused-rising-food-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1973","title":{"rendered":"Does the WSJ Want You to Think Speculation Caused Rising Food Prices?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“While prices of many agricultural commodities have soared, farmers received just 7.49 cents for a pound of onions in April, down from 29.9 cents a year ago, in part due to a big harvest. Futures trading in onions \u2014 unlike other farm goods \u2014 is banned, which prevents the pungent bulb from being used as an investment vehicle.”<\/p>\n

The syllogism<\/a> apparently goes:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The price of staple crops has risen sharply while the price of onions has plummeted over the past 12 months; and<\/li>\n
  2. Speculation is allowed for staple crops, but not for onions; so<\/li>\n
  3. The link from speculation to rising prices has got to be causal, right?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now hold on there, Aristotle.<\/p>\n

    Not only is the author of the above quoted paragraph wrong to mistake correlation for causation, I wonder if it has ever occurred to him to look up the definition of “complementary good<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

    Onions are complements to food staples, which means that they are typically consumed along with — and not instead of — staples.\u00a0Ultimately, this means that the price of onions will typically move in a direction that is opposite<\/em> to that of staples.\u00a0And that is a much credible explanation than the absence of speculation on onion markets.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Apparently: “While prices of many agricultural commodities have soared, farmers received just 7.49 cents for a pound of onions in April, down from 29.9 cents<\/p>\n

    Continue readingDoes the WSJ Want You to Think Speculation Caused Rising Food Prices?<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,55,26,34,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-economics","category-food","category-macro","category-micro","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-vP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1973"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1993,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973\/revisions\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}