Over the weekend one of the people in a listserv I belong to made what I thought were some genuinely vile complaints about commodities traders on the grounds that they were parasites and weren’t producing anything. Sometimes I’m amazed at how stupid smart people can be and how willing people are to comment about things they clearly know nothing about.
Commodities traders provide a vital service. They do price discovery and it’s essentially why our system, despite its manifest failings, will continue to trundle on while the Soviet system collapsed. It makes our system enormously more efficient and in all likelihood without it you’d starve do death.
