Rice, Wheat, Fear and Why Globalized Markets are Quaking–Someone Tell My Sushi Chef
I know about as much about financial and economic markets as my sushi chef apparently. Judging by the over abundance of rice rolled into my sushi rolls last night–a little more fish would have been really nice– he apparently has no idea that there’s a shortage (or fright) over rice in Asia. According to the NY Times this morning in a frontpage story, Asian "markets" and even those rice producers in India are hoarding supplies of rice amidst spiking prices and some perhaps imagined shortage.
From my armchair economic window on the world I have this to ask: What’s happening to the world’s staples?
Wheat in America, rice in Asia, soybeans elsewhere and it seems to me we are dealing in a New World wampum. "I trade you fistful of wheat flour for fistful of rice….." A few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, mainstream media (as only the network can) beat us about the head over the sharp upshot in wheat flour prices and today all our fave flour-based foods are exponentially pricier. From the scuttle of newsrooms I get the underlying feeling that we’re not really dealing with "looming fear" but I’m supposed to be downright scared at this point.
But what exactly is boiling up out of the rice paddy? Given the incontinence of the financial market big wigs,–if you didn’t know who or what a Bear Stearns was before last week you surely do now, even in some of the more remote areas–it would seem that the clash of Wall Street tectonic plates generates enough energy to send economic tsunamis into even the most rural rice paddy, real or imagined. I would bet my bottom dollar that the name Bear Stearns rolled off tongues clothed in a hundred different accents this past week, over cappuccino, spaetzle, Guinness or ouzo. Could it be that finally here is as brightly colored an illustration of globalization as ever there could be?
Economic infrastructures the world over have been steadfastly committed to sewing together a one-for-all-and-all-for-one world structure over the last decade or so. Well, now we have it. In the next decade a couple of things may happen: first world markets may adjust to read and respond to the Drama Queens in the bunch, or second, maybe we’ll all just plant our own small plots of land in a return to a critical master-of-my-domain model that may be lately eluding us.
Thanks to the Big Rice Scare, for this morning I now realize that I should be thanking my sushi chef last night for the unacceptable amount of rice in my sushi–who needs all that worthless fish?
