Executive Summary
- How financialization facilitates wealth transfer
- How to escape the slow squeeze of financialization
- Understanding mannon
- How to prepare for the future
If you have not yet read Part 1: The Company Store , available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Financialization has degraded and in many cases destroyed the opportunities for those on the side of the equation that are being harvested.
For the farmers involved, what they experience is a near-constant battle against forces both seen and unseen. They know that mother nature will throw them a curve ball at some point, she always does. It will either rain too much, or not enough. Intense rainfall and droughts are equally damaging to farm productivity.
If the vagaries of weather were the only dangers they faced, then that would be one thing. But it’s quite another when their economic oxygen has been throttled by a system of financialization that sees nearly all of the profits go to other players in the system besides them.
Corn Flakes are mostly corn. At the current price of $3.68 per bushel, the farmer is receiving 7 cents for the input to an 18-ounce box of cornflakes. The rest of the markup goes to other players.
Would the world break if the farmers received 10 cents of that? What about half? Well, no, but then there would be less profits left for the rest of the system, which has decided, for some reason, that the primary producers of the wealth should receive the lowest fraction. Just enough to squeeze by, unless something goes wrong.
To show just how massively annoying this must be to farmers, note that this past March, right at the end of the month, a massive flood and intense rainfall struck the corn growing region. A million acres were lost to planting.
When the news came out the price of corn did not budge. Then a USDA crop forecast for the year came out and it said nothing that wasn’t expected by everybody and this was the result for corn prices:
Imagine being a farmer, hearing about or living through one of the most farming destructive floods, one that smacked the heart of the corn growing region, and then waking up on March 29th to discover that in a single hour’s time (that long red candle on the chart) ‘the market’ has decided that corn is worth 4% less.