New Lows

December 14, 1968 that "as long as the market economy is allowed to function, even with the types of social controls as they have been currently applied or envisaged as a part of planning, both the futures markets and the speculation incidental to it would contribute to the orderly marketing of commodities, particularly agricultural commodities with seasonal production". It had even gone a step further to put forward the dangerous and highly questionable view that "in times of shortages futures markets through their device of short sales, could act as safety valves for the prevailing speculative tendencies in the economy" and that "in their absence, such tendencies may assume a more serious and threatening form of hoarding of physical commodities, escalating in the process the rising trend in commodity prices".