1) Fixed the link to include the four year gas chart. Up from $2.03 to $3.57 in four years. Doesn't bode well for your case. Short link due to ampersands:
2) You seem to grant that inflation contributed to the rise in food prices. A one off drought can't explain the persistence of the rise since 2008, or the fact that food inflation caused the riots which led to the Arab Spring in 2011.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8492078/How-the...
The first graph illustrates the correlation between the
prices of food and the Fed’s purchase of US Treasuries
(i.e. its quantitative easing programmes). (A widely-
discussed graph illustrating correlation between QE and
broader commodities indices can be seen here.) We see how
the food price index broadly stabilised through late 2009
and early 2010, then rose again from mid-2010 as
quantitative easing was re-started (QE2) following Ben
Bernanke’s Jackson Hole speech of August 27 – with prices
rising of about 40% over an eight month period. Similar
correlations can be observed between Fed purchases and
wider commodities indices, but let’s focus on food for now.
... But the reality is that a rise in commodity prices is
precisely what theory predicts would be a consequence of
QE2, and the data give the same picture – we aren’t
investigating a contentious mystery in the data; we are
seeing precisely what we ought to have expected.
Indeed. The amazing thing is how vehemently people insist that tripling the monetary base in a few years won't cause inflation. This is a simple matter of ratios. Bernanke, Obama, Bush, Greenspan, and Krugman have pursued a policy that enriches banks and shields them from risk by diluting dollar holders. If you understand the concept of dilution in a cap table, you should understand this much: the printed dollars are deposited in the accounts of large banks, enriching the very richest and making everyone else worse off.Krugman himself is a knowing accomplice, one who always pulls his punches with respect to the banks:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/failure-is-a-fai...
One thing that keeps coming up in comments, both here and
on my column, is the widespread belief that all we need to
do on the banking front is (a) break up the big banks, so
that none of them are too big to fail (b) promise not to
bail out any banks in the future. That way, the claim goes,
bankers will know that they will face dire consequences if
they misbehave, and market discipline will do the rest.
Dream on.
...
But just letting banks fail isn’t going to happen — nor
should it. In practice, talking about doing so is just an
excuse to avoid real reform.
At the end of the day Krugman is for the bailouts, for the banks, and against bank bankruptcy. No wonder he's against Bitcoin.