[P2P-F] Fw: Update: Commodities are Different

[robert searle]

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: John Fullerton <jfullerton at capitalinstitute.org>
To: Robert Searle <dharao4 at yahoo.co.uk> 
Sent: Tuesday, 6 March 2012, 4:45
Subject: Update: Commodities are Different

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Update: Commodities are Different (in a "Full World")
by John Fullerton
The concern I raised last June that we should enforce the Bank Holding Company Act and not allow the too often irresponsible, gigantic, TBTF and taxpayer-subsidized banks to engage in proprietary physical commodities trading has now been raised in a new article by Reuters. Abuse by large-scale, trading-driven firms, more so in physical commodity markets than in financial markets, can lead to drastic harm in the real economy as we learned from Enron's manipulation of the California electricity markets. But, as I detailed in my post, the issue is much bigger than banks driving price swings in commodities. A world with finite resources and planetary boundaries will have allocation problems that markets cannot handle effectively or fairly. Rising commodities prices, and the effects they have on the poor, are primarily due to the fundamentals of limits to growth we are beginning to bump up against. The confluence of allocation, pricing, equity, and limits
 questions when dealing with scarcity of critical resources where there are no easy substitutes is already posing real challenges, as we discussed in our “Big Choice” essay.
As a complement to the balanced Reuters article and rising gasoline prices (this time triggered by political tension in particular), I’ve updated my post on commodities from last summer which is even more important today.
Read more at the Future of Finance Blog. 
Oxfam's "A Safe and Just Space for Humanity"

A new paper out by Oxfam’s Senior Researcher Kate Raworth has had our attention and that of much of our network this week. In the piece, Raworth details a “safe and just space” that accepts the planetary boundaries from Rockstrom’s cornerstone paper "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," but extends the idea to include the 11 social thresholds beyond which our society is unjust.

The paper (A Safe and Just Space for Humanity) is only a first pass at a unified framework for setting social and ecological boundaries, but it is a much needed flag in the ground around which all groups working on the Capital Institute's goal of living equitably within our planetary means can position themselves. We are thankful for this strong effort by Oxfam to keep developing the conversation. What We're Reading 

Oxfam’s Senior Researcher Kate Raworth released a paper on February 13th that lays out a new visual framework for understanding where a just society fits within Rockstrom’s “safe operating space.”

"A Safe and Just Space for Humanity"

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Comment of the Week
"The answer to our present unsustainability is an economic system based on cooperation instead of competition."
-Walter Szykitka, Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism

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Quote of the Week
"The chief cause of problems is solutions."
-Eric Sevareid
    
   
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