A load of hot air

Something needs to be done about governments' role in pushing up investment in commodities

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I wonder if we should all have a little laugh at the government's expense given how wrong things are going.

Let us look at the noise. Gordon Brown has told us all to cut down on food. That is a bit rich is it not? Not just for the meal they had at their recent food crisis summit - it included eight courses and the very finest champagne and wine costing hundreds of pounds in nearby restaurants. But rather it is for the excuse he used - we are eating too much and we need to reduce global demand. This comes along with the noise that we are using too much oil and also that we are heating the world up. The result of all of this is a cheeky little hand being dipped into our pockets through taxation.

So why is it all a load of twaddle? I covered the oil and gas supply and demand story three weeks back. Basically it showed the total amount of money invested in commodity index traded strategies was $13bn in 2003 - the highest ever - yet the total value in 2008 had topped $260bn with financial institutions and governments being responsible for most of the trades through buying on margins and swaps. Supply is uninterrupted and demand is falling, yet oil has risen from $30 to more than $140.

On the food front, the speculators have filled their boots. The current futures stockpile for wheat is enough to feed every American with all the bread, pasta and baked goods they can eat for the next two years.

And finally there is the old story of global warming or 'climate change' as you now see it called. You probably did not see it renamed climate change, this is because most people did not realise that the earth had stopped heating up in 1998. It has, in fact, fallen in temperature in every one of the last six years while CO2 emissions continued to rise, cutting the tie between the two unequivocally.

But how can the government not see that? From the early 1930s to the 1970s during three decades of post war boom there was a negative correlation between warming and CO2 emissions. There then began a positive correlation after the great pacific climate shift until 1998 when it broke again.

That was still enough time to use the soft targets of the rich gas-guzzlers to introduce taxes that would have been inconceivable had you read the facts.

Thankfully we have an educated readership in the world and the internet has made the access to this information much easier.

So with that in mind let us do a couple of things. Let us write to our leaders, who must be on their third course by now, and ask them all to declare what investments they have in commodities. Let us also ask what actions they are taking to ascertain how much the banks are investing. This commodity hoarding is crippling the poorer countries into starvation.

Another excellent plan is to point out to Mr Brown that we have indeed paid quite a lot of money in tax to assist in global warming when the planet is actually cooling.

Peter McGahan is managing director of Worldwide Financial Planning

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