As far as separating effects, with data you could isolate the extent to
which prices
diverge from the pedestrian demand and supply factors.
What nobody has explained is how the speculators are able to jam the
inflated
prices down the throats of the downstream buyers without colluding. I'm not
saying there isn't collusion, if there is that would be a great
political/economic story.
The price jump does not seem explicable by growth in demand.
As for populism and 'bad capitalism,' the 'system' terminology implies a
unitary
thing that can't be partly this and partly that. But if instead you
have an array of actors
and activities, some can be constructive and others not so much.
Jim Devine wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
My point is that you couldn't really separate speculative price increases
from the other kind. How do you do it? And just what is the other kind?
it's true that no-one knows when a bubble is going to end, but after
the fact, can't you say that the bubble represents an upward deviation
past the trend in the price? and that bubbles reflect speculation,
though maybe not the nefarious activities of an elite cabal of
"speculators"? So even without speculators, there was a lot of
speculation going on in the housing market until very recently. You
can do the same with other items, perhaps even oil, at least as a
first approximation.
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