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This is an article that you should send to every single one of your friends. I'm serious, every single one.

"The oil price has gone up by about $10 in the last two days," says Jaeggi, adding that in the past it would have taken the market years to achieve the same price increase. Later on Friday, US crude would hit a record price of over $139, up $11 in the largest-ever single day increase.

Last August, the price of oil was $70 (€45) a barrel, in early March it surpassed the $100 (€64) mark, and then the new record high on June 6. What's next?

Ernst Tanner is asking himself the same question, but he is thinking about cocoa, not oil. Tanner is the CEO of Swiss fine chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli. He has had to look on as the price of cocoa beans jumped by 40 percent since early 2007, despite abundant supply. "It hardly has anything to do with supply and demand anymore," says Tanner.

The price increases that have affected oil and cocoa apply to almost all other commodities. A sack of rice now costs almost three times as much as it did in January, wheat, corn and soybeans have already reached record prices this year and gold has been on a wild rollercoaster ride recently.

Rice prices in Somalia had doubled within the space of a few weeks.

The cost of corn meal, a key ingredient in tortillas and thus a staple food in Mexico, has also shot up astronomically.

Last Friday, Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, drastically raised its inflation prognosis for the coming year, from 2.3 to 3 percent.

Consumers should already be bracing themselves -- and possibly setting money aside -- for hefty increases in heating costs later this year.

The cost of groceries is also on the rise. Pasta is 26 percent more expensive than it was a year ago, while the price of some dairy products has risen by 47 percent.

The question is whether price rises are inevitable, because demand exceeds supply, or whether other, less obvious forces are at work: speculators who are taking advantage of the growing scarcity of resources to make a lot of money fast.

This is about more than just economics. It is also an ethical and highly moral question. Much depends on the answer, including the credibility of our economic system.

"This is not about blame," US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson recently said. "It's about supply and demand." According to Paulson, "speculators have had very little impact."

But the people who are affected by rising commodity prices see it differently. "The flood of money from Wall Street and hedge funds is driving up prices -- and the effects are potentially destructive," says Tom Buis, president of the US National Farmers Union.

Can I just say that Paulson is an idiot?

The trend is clear, and yet it offers only a partial explanation for the steep rise in prices. Living habits don't change that quickly and, as a result, neither does demand. The only thing that changes that quickly is expectations -- which keep on driving up prices.

No one knows how expensive oil would be if there were no speculation, but it would certainly be cheaper.

But all of this is relatively harmless compared with the speculation over food products. Instead of affecting only the cost of living, speculation in food commodities can be a matter of life and death. When food prices rise, the poor can no longer afford food and are forced to go hungry.

In late 2003, they invested only $13 billion (€8.4 billion) in the food commodities business. By March 2008, that number had jumped to $260 billion (€168 billion), an increase of 1,900 percent.

At first they invested their money in the dot-com market, then in real estate, and now agriculture and the energy markets are the hot new investment opportunity.

"The traders use every excuse in the book to drive up prices."

The ritualized relationship between production volume and consumption, demand that has been growing for years in China, unrest in the Middle East or Nigeria, the threat of cold snaps -- none of this is enough to explain the current price explosion, says Gheit. In fact, he is convinced that speculators are completely responsible. "It's pure hysteria," he says.

Other analysts agree. "The market is reacting to the fact that we might not have enough oil in the market 13 years from now -- excuse me?," says Edward Morse, chief energy economist at the investment bank Lehman Brothers. "You never recognize it's a bubble until the bubble is over." he says.

Signs of unusual behavior abound across the commodities markets. Take cotton, for example. In late February, the price of cotton futures jumped by 50 percent within two weeks. But cotton farmers haven't even been able to sell half of their harvest from the previous year yet. Warehouses in the United States are fuller than they have been since 1966. Indeed, all signs point to a price decline.

In Chicago, the home of the world's largest commodities futures exchange, the volume of grain futures being traded is already 30 times as high as annual grain production in the United States. This trend is unlikely to be curtailed anytime soon. This year, brokers in Chicago have already entered into 20 percent more contracts than in the same period last year.

Damn Chicagoans! You're to blame!

[In 1637] The country plunged into a deep depression. As is so often the case after overheated speculation, the government had to step in and banned the use of futures contracts, which was already customary at the time.

Speculative bubbles of the past have included the run on the South Sea Company in 1720, the British railroad bubble in 1846, the stock rally leading up to the 1929 world economic crisis and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. The sheer folly of a bubble never becomes apparent until after it has burst.

Whenever a large amount of capital floods a market, it leaves behind a broad riverbed.

First there was the rally in the Asian Tiger nations in the mid-1990s. Billions of dollars in Western investment helped fuel the booming economies of Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. But then, in the autumn of 1997, came the crash.

The one party had hardly ended before the next one began. In Moscow, Western speculators gambled with short-term Russian government bonds until Russia became insolvent in 1998. This led to the spectacular collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a giant hedge fund, which almost dragged the international financial system down with it.

After the dot-com crash and Sept. 11, the Fed lowered the prime rate by five percentage points, thus ensuring that the market would be literally inundated with money. At the time Greenspan, who was worshipped and practically treated as a sorcerer, kept rates at only one percent for 12 months. His successor, Ben Bernanke, took exactly the same approach when the American subprime mortgage crisis struck last year. He has reduced interest rates seven times since last September.

Sometimes, of course, there is more at stake than investments in coal and iron ore. And in some cases speculators, with their lack of transparency, have bet on an entire economy. The drama currently unfolding in Iceland is a case in point.

A lack of regulation has allowed the financial industry "to become far too profitable and much too big," says George Soros. The legendary investment guru has been warning for years of the dangers of the global money business. In a hearing before the US Congress last week, Soros even spoke of a "super-bubble" that he believes has been building over the last 25 years.

"We must create a financial system in which there are no perverse incentives, the risks are properly recognized and managed, and there is less borrowing," says Mario Draghi, the head of Banca d'Italia and president of the Financial Stability Forum, a group founded by the seven leading industrialized countries 10 years ago, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

In keeping with the new trend, hedge funds and investment banks have started buying up farms worldwide. Morgan Stanley, for example, already owns several thousands of hectares of agricultural land in Ukraine. An agriculture fund operated by Blackrock, a New York investment group, acquired more than 1,100 hectares (2,717 acres) in Britain's Norfolk County. Others are combing the world, from Russia to South America, for investment opportunities. In Argentina, prices for the most productive fields have increased by 80 percent in recent years.

The British hedge fund Emergent Asset Management is currently collecting €1 billion ($1.55 billion) to buy up African farmland south of the Sahara Desert.

Well, before the oil bubble bursts (but not until we all get screwed first), we know already now the next hyper-inflationary bubble: food.

Prepare to be cold, and then lose weight people.