Yesterday, I wrote about going to a USDA event, but I didn't mention that I heard an economist talk a lot about unrest in the Middle East and commodity prices. The prices of necessary goods, especially food, have a huge effect on those countries because a huge proportion of their populations are poor, and that can lead to more unrest. More important to many commodity traders, of course, is what the unrest does to the price of oil.
This economists' answer was that oil prices probably won't be as high as they were in 2008, or that high at all, and inflation isn't a huge problem for the U.S. at all, because our economic fundamentals are still so bad. But it's a little hard to think about the economics of all this when Gadhafi is increasingly defiant, bombs his own people in his own capital, and yet the protests continue.
