Links yo
Posted by Rich Sweeney on May 15, 2008
- Ajay Shah has a nice, thorough post on what’s going on with food prices, debunking several common explanations and putting forth a reasonable, if unsexy, story of his own.
- Paul Kedrosky challenges the conventional wisdom that OPEC always prefers high oil prices. Persistent, predictably high oil prices would encourage people to switch to alternatives. Instead, he argues that what OPEC prefers is a series of high prices, unpredictably interspersed with periods of very low prices. Saudi Arabia’s role in curbing excessively high OPEC prices has been pretty well documented. It’d be interesting to see any evidence that the Saudi’s actually undercut price with the deliberate intention of warding off substitutes.
- Finally last week’s Economist has a briefing on energy efficiency. Overall I found the piece a bit elementary and far too dependent on the McKinsey report. Nevertheless, it’s a good intro for readers who are new to the topic.
H/T to Thom for the first two links.
