6 ms·
Oh goody! Nothing like the financialization of life-necessities to warm the cockles of the heart of big capital.
by jonahbenton 6y ago
Oh goody! Nothing like the financialization of life-necessities to warm the cockles of the heart of big capital.
- kube-system 6y agoHunting and gathering is overrated.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoYes, hunting and gathering, the obvious result of not privatizing our water.
- kube-system 6y agoPublic or private, we still ascribe financial value to it.
- cashewchoo 6y agoThis might make it easier to quantify the effects of groundwater depletion and climate change. If we see that futures priced further out are more expensive, that says something. In general, by the time something gets to being turned into financial instruments like this, the actual step from whatever state it was in prior to a regulated, standardized, liquid, public contract is generally good. Light is an excellent disinfectant.
- Klinky 6y agoExcept the market will lack perfect information, likely not price in long-term environmental damage, and encourage wealth hoarding via the literal pooling of wealth. Then you'll get crazy speculation, with the markets experiencing adverse liquidity events resulting in spectacular splash crashes afterward. Markets quite often do not help usher in eras of rationale and logic. A lot of that goes out the window when "there's money to be made".
- dereg 6y agoI do not understand your point as these contracts are settled in cash. Do you care to elaborate?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- h2o_enron 6y agoI share the same concerns. Market economics did not prevent e.g. Enron from scalping millions of dollars out of CA energy markets while rolling blackouts resulted in powerless hospitals. Speculation - not actual supply or demand - in oil markets drove the price of gasoline from $1 to $4 a gallon (and now back to $2). Everyone else paid for the inefficient market finding a false equilibrium pumped up by perception of security. (Financial deregulation of Wall St in 1999 preceded the popping of the dotcom asset bubble by very little lag. And then CDS in 2005 and the Great Recession and now this whole mess: and the only solution is to pay cronies who didn't hoard enough cash?) Sugar water companies can afford to push the price of water higher while the external health and commodity costs are passed onto everyone else. Markets have thus far failed to solve for long-term environmental damage: their incentive is to externalize costs in order to maximize short-term profit.
- dnautics 6y ago> Markets have thus far failed to solve for long-term environmental damage: That's really not true in general. Market theory has been crucial in creating more sustainable resource usage in the US northeast fisheries, and the highly successful SOX and NOX emissions markets (acid rain really isn't an existential threat any longer). The US seems to be incapable of forming a sane CO2 market because of the rights intransigence and capture by fossil fuels, and the lefts reluctance to embrace a market solution/desire to overregulate (combining a methane/hfc greenhouse market with a CO2 greenhouse market is going to cause major arbitrage problems that could lead to greenhouse worsening)
- 6y ago
- fred_is_fred 6y agoWater has been financialized for years in the western US. Developers buy and sell water rights from farmers, farmers own farms where they don't grow crops because the water is going to condos. Water rights are bought and sold and traded all the time.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoWater rights have been finacialized for thousands of years. Qanats, which are underground sort of canals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat) were built in Persia to distribute water to agriculture and incentivized by government "It was an Achaemenid ruling that in case someone succeeded in constructing a qanat and bringing groundwater to the surface in order to cultivate land, or in renovating an abandoned qanat, the tax he was supposed to pay the government would be waived not only for him but also for his successors for up to 5 generations"
- fred_is_fred 6y agoThanks. I love hearing bits of interesting history like that. I'd never heard of Qanats.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoIt's a good scrabble word
- octoberfranklin 6y agoOr the farmers grow alfalfa once every five years simply to avoid losing their water rights.
- smileysteve 6y agoBecause (heating) Oil and Pork Belly weren't life necessities?
- wmf 6y agoThe previous situation where almond farmers got unlimited water for free and some cities couldn't get enough water at any price was worse.
- koolba 6y agoIt’s still like that, except now they’ll be able to sell futures contracts for it.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoImportant to note that CA almonds are mostly grown for global export. This ties in with GDP.
- User23 6y agoHydraulic despotism remains the best despotism.
- monkeycantype 6y agoImmortan knew his Wittfogel.