Research Zeitgeist: Top Posts Of The Week
Fallout from the subprime meltdown continued to be a major area of focus for visitors to Research Recap last week. Is Commercial the Next Subprime? again led the pack, with its more sanguine followup from CreditSights, Commercial Real Estate Risks Less Severe Than Subprime, coming in at number three.
Subprime Woes May Benefit Public Finance Bond Insurers, from Standard & Poors, filled the number 2 slot.
McKinsey’s analysis “New Power Brokers” Gaining Clout in Financial Markets came in at number 4.
Interest in alternative energy was evident in the multi-sourced Shift To Corn-Based Ethanol Under Attack, which made the top five despite being posted late in the week.
This post coincided with the release of the documentary King Corn that takes a creative approach to tracking the changes in farm policies over the last 30 years. Along with techonological and other advances these changes lie behind the dramatic increase in corn output and the ubiquity of corn-based products in the food system. Among other points, the filmmakers suggest that the growth in production of corn-based ethanol has been driven in part by the need to dispose of surplus corn.
Two former East Coast college buddies with family roots in Greene, Iowa lease an acre of land there to grow their own corn and track its progress through the food system. Humorous as well as educational, the movie is refreshingly short on polemic. It persusively makes its points about the unintended negative consequences of the country’s addiction to cheap corn without denigrating the farmers who produce it.
The National Corn Growers Association did not see it that way and issued a statement highlighting the many accomplishments of the industry. The movie is worth checking out just for the stop-animation corn-kernel graphics it uses to illustrate its points instead of “An Incovenient Truth”-style PowerPoint slides.
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