单项选择题

In just a year, Shao Mingqing, a jobless man from Shandong province, saved enough money to buy a 180, O00-yuan Toyota. But he’s no real estate agent. The 23-year-old made his money by selling garlic.
Humble garlic has outperformed stocks, property and even gold to become the top-performing asset in China since last year. Shao was just one of the lucky businessmen who profited hugely from the garlic craze, according to an article in China Daily.
The National Bureau of Statistics said in May that the wholesale price of garlic had skyrocketed more than tenfold from a year earlier to about 12 yuan a kilogram. Garlic is now more expensive than lean meat in some places.
As a result, most restaurants in northern China no longer generously serve free garlic cloves when customers order dumplings.
How did garlic mania happen When the global economy tumbled in 2008, the garlic market collapsed. Nobody was buying. So, garlic farmers in China planted about 50 percent less garlic in 2009. That’s a lot less garlic for China, which produces more garlic than any country in the world.
Then, the H1N1 epidemic broke out. People were quite nervous about it. Garlic, a traditional Chinese herbal remedy, was said to be as good as a flu shot. Thus, the limited supply of garlic ran into unforeseen high demand, even though some medical experts later debunked its rumored health-protecting properties.
Not surprisingly, smart people saw a huge opportunity in the gap between supply and demand.
The price of garlic continued to grow because of the availability of capital for investment in the market. At the end of 2008, banks started to loan money to stimulate the falling economy. An increasing amount of hot money was thus injected into the market. When the housing and stock markets struggled, the booming garlic trade became popular among investors, according to an analysis by Yangcheng Evening News.
These investors started stocking tons of garlic into warehouses and waited for prices to rise. According to the newspaper, some businessmen in Shandong province bought whole garlic crops before they were even harvested.
And the rest is history. Many, like Shao, have struck gold, while families, restaurants and food companies have had to reduce their use of garlic.
Besides complaints from ordinary consumers, there’s a concern that the garlic bubble will burst, leaving many banks with bad loans, according to China Times. But the government is trying to curb rising garlic prices by regulating their cost and punishing profiteers.
Which of the following statements is NOT true