Water markets and conspiracy economics

Frederick Kaufman claims in an opinion article in Nature that Wall Street financiers are creating a speculative market in global water that will make themselves wealthier and the rest us thirstier. Kaufman says that these financiers make money by destroying a resource and by "manipulating ethereal concepts like risk and collateralized debt" instead of creating something of value. But, as in a previous article on food commodities, he never explains exactly how they manage to do so. And he never explains why would markets and speculators make food and water scarce and expensive while they make all other tradable goods abundant and cheap. Magic?

In the same issue of Nature David Morrison writes that "[f]rom creationism and climate-change denial to cold fusion, pseudoscience pervades the media, often drowning out real science." Indeed.