skippy the bush kangaroo: greed covered in chocolate

Saturday, July 24, 2010

greed covered in chocolate

forget james bond's arch rival "goldfinger"...the newest evil creature in the world is nicknamed "chocolate finger." any one person who can "corner the market" on cocoa (and thereby chocolate) to drive up prices because "he can" is pure evil.

...in a stroke, a hedge fund manager here named anthony ward has all but cornered the market in cocoa. By one estimate, he has bought enough to make more than five billion chocolate bars.
chocolate lovers here are crying into their cadbury wrappers — and rival traders are crying foul, saying mr. ward is stockpiling cocoa in a bid to drive up already high prices so he can sell later at a big profit. his activities have helped drive cocoa prices on the london market to a 30-year high.
mr. ward, 50, is not some rabid chocoholic, former employees say. he simply has a head for cocoa. and, through his private investment firm, armajaro, he now controls a cache equal to 7 percent of annual cocoa production worldwide, a big enough chunk to sway prices.
...now, traders here are buzzing that mr. ward has placed an audacious $1 billion bet in the london market for cocoa futures. this month, he bought 241,100 metric tons of beans, they say.
his play has some people up in arms. while some see it as a simple bet that cocoa prices will rise on falling supply, others say mr. ward has created a shortage of cocoa simply to drive up the price himself.
the german cocoa trade association and others wrote an angry letter to the london exchange on which cocoa is traded, demanding that it take action against what the association characterized as a “manipulation.” - nytimes

Labels: chocolate, financial markets, greed

posted by Cookie Jill at 5:21 PM |

4 Comments:

Cocoa.

Oh, yeah, the old "cornering the market" bit. Because the Hunt brothers were so successful.

commented by

D., 5:37 PM PDT

he better have good security. Doing that kind of shit with a key ingredient for chocolate, fer crying out loud, will piss off a LOT of people! Especially when he becomes really well-known for this gambit.

commented by

lea-p, 6:08 PM PDT

Time to read Jorge Amado's _The Golden Harvest_ again. It's how the cacao exporters in Bahia engineered a boom and bust to force out the original growers.

commented by

gmoke, 9:35 PM PDT

Free market war on holloween.

commented by

Anonymous, 3:57 PM PDT

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