Grist: Is the Food Bubble Bursting?

What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system

Posted 6:00 PM on 25 May 2009
by Tom Philpott


In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.

What were those people thinking? Turns out, Paumgarten relates that during the flush times, many in the world of finance had a “moment of clarity, an inkling of doom” about what was coming. “The sky was full of signs,” Paumgarten writes.

For many, the awakening came while driving through some overbuilt exurb in California or Florida, or watching a commercial for a subprime lender (“Mortgage consultants are standing by!”), or studying a chart depicting total debt to the gross domestic product.

Paumgarten’s tale is essentially about high-level fecklessness: people with degrees from the nation’s finest universities, rewarded with nine-figure annual salaries, knowingly driving the global economy right over a cliff. Paumgarten doesn’t go there, but the same analysis applies to financial policymakers and regulators; they, too, could gawk at obviously overbuilt exurbs, or wince at debt-to-GDP charts. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-22-financial-collapse-food/

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