Thank you 1234 for a very well reasoned, data driven reply. I feel like if I were an analyst at a large reinsurer and came up with your strategy around August or September, I would be on the fast track to promotion right now. I would like to reiterate your caveat that I do not know if anyone manipulates the grain futures market right now, but my post was aimed at examining the incentives as the idea was kind of eating at me over the weekend.

From what I see, it looks relatively clear that:

- the current SRI and crop insurance system has the potential for some messed up incentives and conflicts of interest with market participants that play out in years like this one or 2009
- it would likely be worth a better economic analyst than I making a better model of the incentives to see if the real gain would be higher or lower than $2b
- if something like the strategy 1234 illustrates was followed by any set of economic actor(s), shorting corn could be an interesting play right now (Futures and options trading involve substantial risk. The valuation of futures and options may fluctuate, and as a result you may lose money - do not necessarily take my advice based on all this hoopla that kind of got out of control.)