The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is looking into the effects of speculators — or, as we will call them from now on, “the devils in their gambling hells” — on the prices of commodities.
With oil approaching $130 a barrel and a global food crisis looming, the panel heard testimony from experts about how speculative investment by institutional investors and hedge funds may be contributing to food and energy price inflation.
One angry American reports:
“The gambling in food products utterly destroys anything that could be called a market. What business has a man (or a devil) selling or pretending to sell, a food product which he does not possess? These men who ‘operate’ on the boards of trade (more appropriately called gambling hells) have no more right to the consideration of honest men than the devil has to a seat in heaven.”
That last American was speaking in 1892, and is quoted in Ann Fabian’s Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in the Nineteenth Century. Her chapter on the rampant speculation in commodities at the end of the nineteenth century is remarkably current, with a little more devil talk than we get these days.
