Unpublished Letter to the Editor of Financial Times - on speculation

from Mr. Prabhu S. Guptara

Sir, How interesting that the Center for Public Integrity has now documented what we all knew anyway ("Subprime explosion: who isn't guilty?", May 6).

What is widely overlooked is that the subprime crisis was the result of the inability of a mass of people to pay their mortgage premiums. However, those people had been paying their mortgage premiums regularly till something caused them to start being unable to pay. What was that something? Skyrocketing oil and commomdity prices.

So who is going to stand up to provide an investigation into the role of speculation in driving those prices to the levels they reached? And into the role of lobbying to prevent even the registration of speculative activity?

Prabhu Guptara Sphere: Related Content