Institutionally, however, the financial industry doesn’t trust regulations proceeding from governments run by charming retired actors, burned-out drug and sex addicts, and professional bullshit artists. Go figure. So there is already a work-around: you can loan a producer money against the final product. The producer is then free to sell to whomever, assuming the risk of a price drop but gaining the benefit of a price hike, so long as they pay you back your money plus a premium. It sounds like small change compared to a market worth almost a trillion dollars, but you have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires. There’s a kind of penumbra of rich people—another few hundred thousand—and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is poor as hell. Which makes the poor, considered as a group and obviously only in brute numerical terms, pretty rich.