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Are you implying that you buy your food from the farmers or are you're telling me that the food industry/retailers can't estimate the consumer demand and make c
by moonchrome 14y ago
Are you implying that you buy your food from the farmers or are you're telling me that the food industry/retailers can't estimate the consumer demand and make contracts/futures on that ? And how exactly do futures not change the price swings from year to year ?
- btilly 14y agoThe latter. Futures do not change the supply or demand, and therefore do not change the overall results of a supply-demand curve. What they do is allow people to estimate where it will eventually land, and choose whether to lock in prices some distance in advance. This ignores a subtlety. If one consumer locks in a large fraction of the supply at a low price, then the supply is smaller than expected, you've made the supply-demand problem more extreme for everyone else. So futures allow entities to lessen their own volatility, but that increases everyone else's volatility.