Ahh, there you are. I wanted to link to your article on financial capitalism versus industrial capitalism, but could not find it on your site. And I could not find the email in which you gave me the URL, so I would like it again.

What I liked about that graph with 14 commodities in it is that it shows there is a general phenomena occurring. I left out mentioning that commodities are also being pushed up by investors seeking to profit on the rise. In the interests of brevity amd all that. That's why I included the link to Thomas Palley's Destabilizing Speculation and the Case for an International Currency Transactions Tax:

A third challenge comes from the literature on herd behavior (Banerjee 1992; Palley 1995), which posits that market investors may act as a herd. Each individual acts rationally from his or her own standpoint, but collectively they behave as a herd, each following the actions of others for no reason other than the fact that others are doing it. In this case, the "behavior of others" becomes the market fundamental, and the actions of speculators can trigger movements in market prices through random dealings that have no relation to underlying economic conditions.

I'm not a genius; I just read people like you and Palley and Jerome and Migeru and Chris Cook and hosts of others I can't all name at once.

Each of these damn diaries could easily turn into a book. The really annoying thing the past two months is when I have tried to write a book, I get writer's block and research dreary.