"Yeah, so we're having a little food shortage here. About 100 units should do the trick. Halp, anyone?"
"HERE, HAVE 5,000!"
"Wow, thanks, good buddy! We'll totally buy fifty times more than we need at five times the normal price!"
Five minutes later...
"Hang on a minute, we're drowning in food here and we don't have any money left! It's totally that guy's fault, even though we knew how much we needed, how much he was selling, and the price he was asking, and we agreed to the terms. We should totally incriminate him for this!"
"IT'S NOT MY FAULT YOUR FOOD SHORTAGES ARE TOO SMALL FOR MY FLEET, DAMMIT!"
"Let's also add insult to injury by referring to him as a "her" in the report. That'll learn 'em!"
On a related note, anyone else found the best late-game trading strategy to be to simply ferry food from the Luddites to storage on Sindria while waiting for Sindria to have its its inevitable recurring food shortage, and once it hits just take the food out of storage and dump it on the market for massive profit?