From Jesse’s Café Americain:

Crony capitalists are never interested in the risk and rigor of "free markets," only in the surety of monopolies and obtaining a license from the authorities for extracting rents from them. They alternately create artificial abundance and scarcity to influence prices, with the objective of lining their pockets.

This move by JPMorgan to enlarge their warehouses and stockpile key commodities helps to demonstrate the growing scramble for resources which is a recurrent theme, and at the same time, it shows the pernicious influence of mingling government-guaranteed customer money and subsidized Federal Reserve funds with what is essentially private speculation.

JPMorgan is a bank that was rescued by public funds, and that exists at the sufferance of the U.S. government and their money. Some of the pampered princes of the Republic would like to turn the financial sector into a new House of Lords.

Still, there may be a mutual interest between the government and their bankers in influencing the world's flow of key commodities. And if a few friends become wealthy in the process, well, so much the better...

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