sutton038

So I haven’t managed to get a blog post out for a couple weeks. That’s partly because I’ve been having some cash-flow management problems, due to some crap planning on my part and some unfortunate payment delays. This is an ongoing issue in freelance life, to smile through gritted teeth when someone at an organisation tells you the admin guy went on holiday and forgot to process your invoice. In a situation when one’s reserves are marginal, small frictions in the system can wipe you out. Needless to say, when my landlord sent me an sms a few weeks ago saying ‘You haven’t paid your rent, and you have six months of bills to pay too,’ I got a deep down chill. My landlord is a cool guy. He only has one name, and our contract is informal at best, built on trust and belief in human nature rather than legal structures. That’s why he gave me some leeway, and that’s also why I didn’t want to abuse that trust. So I called up my friend George, and asked him what I should do. He wrote a song for m...

On Thursday I made my first appearance in the Ecologist , by all accounts one of the world’s leading environmental publications, founded in the 1970s. Yeah, airpunch! The subject of the article was food speculation . It sounds obscure, but concerns around speculation on agricultural futures have been seeping into the mainstream agenda over the last few months in the context of rising global food prices. There is rising suspicion that the activities of financial players in commodity futures markets could have a distorting effect on futures prices, and thus that food price increases might be linked to computer algorithms running in some hedge fund in Mayfair. WHEATBIX FUTURES Having had experience in the world of derivatives, I’m always prepared to accommodate the idea that irrational behaviour in financial markets could distort prices. That said, I’ve remained cautious about populist arguments about why speculation must necessarily be a negative force. Thus, in late 2010, I attended a ...

Do you know what a dirty dark spread is? To work it out you take the price of wholesale electricity, and you subtract from that the price of coal multiplied by an efficiency factor. What you’re left with is an indication of the profitability of a coal-fired power station. And we call that the dirty dark spread. HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR DARK SPREADS? But why ‘dirty’? We call it dirty because there’s a clean version of the dark spread, called the Clean Dark Spread. It's basically the same as the dirty one, except it adds the price of carbon dioxide to the equation. What you’re left with is an indication of the profitability of a coal-fired power station within a system that explicitly puts a price on carbon. It's lower, but the key question is 'how much lower?' The only reason we can make these distinctions is due to the existence of the carbon markets , brought into the fold through the Kyoto Protocol and the European Emissions Trading Scheme, perhaps the world’s most contro...