Yup! Gaddafis' lost it!

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The driver for gas prices here in the US are complex but I find the administrations policy to be incomprehensible (like drilling in the Gulf still shut in, despite judges telling the administration to sh__ or get off the pot). 
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Libya has decent reserves of light-sweet but is only problematic in the margins. The rebels seem inclined to keep the money machinery intact.

It's hard to pick one thing as the most bizarre aspect of Gaddafi's behavior for some time now. His rambling speeches at the UN make Chavez and Ahmadinejad sound calm and collected.  :eek:

I'm not sure which wins the most ironic news report...  That Libya's seat on the UN human rights council is still safe,  ::)
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/news/article/no-threat-seen-libya-s-seat-top-un-human
or that Iran is critical of Libya's treatment of peaceful protestors.. (pot calling the kettle black much?)  :-[
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162213103292714.html

Just more evidence that nobody is paying attention to world events, and allowing this looney tunes circus to go on, and on, and on...

I just hope that the bad actors don't take advantage of the chaos to gain more influence. All people everywhere deserve some of the freedom we take for granted. 

JR
 
The driver of gas prices in America aren't complex considering the US DOE's website states we get the majority of our oil from Canada and Mexico. Libya's oil only accounts for only 2% of the global supply and nearly all of that goes to Europe. 

Secondly, the King of Saudia Arabia has increased production to match the 20% loss from Libya yesterday and has pledged to increase production to match losses from Libya.

Thirdly, the world is currently awash in oil and storage is at full capacity.

As two oil experts on FoxNews stated a few weeks ago: "With all the oil on the market and in reserves, oil should be $40/barrel and gasoline should be $1.49 a gallon; it's the oil speculators bidding it up."

So....I don't see the complexity here.  ???  ???  ???

 
damnyankee said:
The driver of gas prices in America aren't complex considering the US DOE's website states we get the majority of our oil from Canada and Mexico. Libya's oil only accounts for only 2% of the global supply and nearly all of that goes to Europe. 
I said it was complex... not that I didn't have a fair grasp.

You need to look a little past the gross numbers since east coast imports a lot of refined product and the south and west refines more of what we use. The US also produces a lot of our own oil domestically, but the price is whip sawed by marginal supply.

Libya is of concern partially because of the type of oil (light sweet) is easy to refine, some refiners can't handle the more viscous (sour) oil that the Saudis and others have (saudi oil is light for the middle east but not as light as Libya, or west texas sweet).
Secondly, the King of Saudia Arabia has increased production to match the 20% loss from Libya yesterday and has pledged to increase production to match losses from Libya.
Yup... the king also cut short his medical sabbatical outside the country (disc problems) to be home and calm down his peeps. He also handed out some $35B (in social, unemployment and housing benefits) to help smooth his welcome home.  He's no fool, but isn't home free yet, and he's old, so that is just a matter of time before we have to deal with succession there.

The Saudi's decline to let the world audit their oil reserves so we are left to take their word for it, but we are sitting on plenty of oil, and gas, and coal here.. so it would only be painful for a while, if we had to take care of business alone.
Thirdly, the world is currently awash in oil and storage is at full capacity.
Actually yes... In case nobody has noticed, we the biggest oil pig in the world still have near 10% unemployment and a barely growing economy. The rest of the world gets pnuemonia, when we catch the sniffles... because we are the super consumers, of energy and whatever. So world demand is off.. While the developing nations are trying to catch up we have a huge ass head start. 
As two oil experts on FoxNews stated a few weeks ago: "With all the oil on the market and in reserves, oil should be $40/barrel and gasoline should be $1.49 a gallon; it's the oil speculators bidding it up."

So....I don't see the complexity here.   ???  ???  ???

Once again I warn against too simple answers.  FOX has long been thumping on the oil companies as a convenient target for audience anger. Oil Speculators are another vague bogey man to blame... 

Another tidbit I might remind folks about there is a frigging oil cartel called OPEC who's day job is keeping prices high. There is surely also a fear premium in the price of oil because of the apparent instability in the middle east. Egypt is not a major oil exporter but there is the Suez pipeline in addition to the canal, and they export gas to Israel too, so lack of stable government there, and that little visit by two Iranian warships through the Suez canal last week was not calming to prices. Sure Libya is only 2% but it will be noticed, if it doesn't come back on line soon (but like I said the anti-government rebels there have no intent to kill their cash cow).

A third factor, that has a definite impact on oil prices is Bernanke's quantitative easing. This virtual printing of dollars makes oil (and all commodities) more expensive in dollars.

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If this was simple dumb money speculation, Obama could break their back overnight by announcing a release from the strategic reserve, but instead the government drags their feet, despite prodding by judges to re-open drilling in the Gulf, and there is all kinds of EPA arm waving about shutting down the very productive frac drilling, that is responsible for us having NG coming out of our ears and large new oil reserves. We are even building terminals to export LNG, instead of using it here to displace imported oil and coal.

Yes, there is a speculative fear trade influencing oil right now, and dueling experts are split between quotes of $150-200 on the high side if there is serious disruption say in Saudi Arabia, and a low side bet around $60-70 if this recent middle east heat passes with no major disruptions.

It is disappointing that we don't take advantage of all our local energy resources but instead put out eggs into a mostly symbolic basket of wind and solar power, and electric cars... give me a break. The electricity has to come from somewhere. Next they'll roll out fuel cells again... 

JR
 
Since the Great depression there were laws in place to keep outside speculators out of the commodities futures trading. Then in 1991 Goldman Sachs got a waiver thet allowed them access to that market, a few other firms followed. In the late 90s Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 into law, legislation that was pressured by Wall Street and the infamous Greenspan, finally getting rid of the depression-era legislation.

After that even sensitive long-term investments like pension funds were lured into the commodities market, exploding the prices. All this speculation made especially oil exporting countries so rich, they started souvereign wealth funds in the mid 00s, and now those funds are speculating in the commodies market, helping drive up the prices again. Quantitative easing supposedly plays a role, too.


There appear to be efforts now to build up new regulations to stop the bubble cylcles from happening again:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/18/cftc-commodity-speculation_n_810191.html
 
When did he ever have it?
Does anyone remember his big declaration in the 90's that Libya was going to build the worlds first production electric car?  There was big fanfare and the like, but, bupkis in reality.  Good thing his nuke mountain was closed.  Thank his son for that.
Mike
 
living sounds said:
Since the Great depression there were laws in place to keep outside speculators out of the commodities futures trading. Then in 1991 Goldman Sachs got a waiver thet allowed them access to that market, a few other firms followed. In the late 90s Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 into law, legislation that was pressured by Wall Street and the infamous Greenspan, finally getting rid of the depression-era legislation.

After that even sensitive long-term investments like pension funds were lured into the commodities market, exploding the prices. All this speculation made especially oil exporting countries so rich, they started souvereign wealth funds in the mid 00s, and now those funds are speculating in the commodies market, helping drive up the prices again. Quantitative easing supposedly plays a role, too.


There appear to be efforts now to build up new regulations to stop the bubble cylcles from happening again:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/18/cftc-commodity-speculation_n_810191.html

The Huffington post... not my idea of a balanced news source (she just got a nice pay day for selling, so lots of love from that side of the political spectrum).

You still don't accept the value in letting markets set prices. Speculators provide liquidity to the market and information about future expectations.  The price is high, because people think it will be higher in the future. If they thought it would be lower they would be dumb asses, to buy it when it's high. They only make a profit by selling it to somebody else for more... While the oil producing nations (like OPEC) do benefit from generally higher prices but that's a different animal.

The last time oil peaked close to $150, a lot of dumb asses lost their farms or whatever else they should have been doing instead of gambling on the price of oil.

Getting back to letting free markets allocate scarce resources, those of us old enough to remember the gas lines of the '70s saw first hand what happens when the government thinks they can mandate prices by caveat. The price is low, but there is no supply because the price is too low, no matter whether the last digit of your license plate was even or odd... 

I rather prefer to not wait in line when supplies get tight, but sure wish the government would stop preventing domestic supply from expanding. You want to knock down prices, add some more world supply. (Note: high prices also encourage more drilling and exploration.. simple math).

Another issue at play, not to get too exoteric about economic theory, but price volatility (rate of and amount of change) increases when the difference between supply and demand is very tight. This is why Libya with only 2% share can make an impact in pricing. OPEC works to modulate the marginal supply to keep it tight, and oil exporting nations that aren't friendly to the west (like Iran, Venezuela, etc), don't mind stirring it up, to increase fears of supply disruption, thus the Iranian activity in the straits of Hormuz and Suez canal.

If we controlled the marginal supply, and not the middle east, we could keep a downward bias on prices, with a slight over supply of oil, but between the developing country's increasing appetite for oil, and our lack of credible energy policy I think the more correct market price bet is for higher rather than lower prices.

I believe the recent short term oil spike is all about fears of a Saudi disruption, since they are the worlds major marginal supplier for now, and medium term pricing is driven upward by expanding third world demand. We could change it long term by expanding our supply, and diverting a fraction of our oil consumption to natural gas (fleet cars and large trucks) but instead we feel compelled to promote wind mills and electric cars...  At least Europe is smart enough to pursue higher efficiency diesel.

I think the market price is telling us our energy policy is off base. But I will also repeat my unpopular opinion that oil is still cheap at these prices. If oil creeps up to $100-$150 and stays there for any period of time, that would make all these gee whiz alternate energy projects almost make sense. A more cynical man would suggest the government is trying to make their science fair alternate energy projects work, by dragging their feet on development and exploration of fossil fuels. However this hurts us all by shipping tanker loads of dollars to nations that don't like us. OPEC in fact is smart enough to not want $150 oil, because they know it would both, cause demand destruction as consumers alter their behavior, and it would cause more investment in supply that would knock down their prices long term. So they want it high, but not too high. 

Draw your own opinions, not Ariana Huffington's or FOX News, and not mine either...  Do your own research, don't listen to the opinion merchants, promoting one agenda or another.

Who knows maybe I'm wrong,,,,  nah.

JR

PS: Yes Libya was a major source of world wide terrorism, but he got religion after seeing Saddam crawl out of his hidey hole. If the Iraq war was good for something this was surely one dividend, while the west should be embarrassed for releasing the Lockerbie bomber while he was still breathing (why, was it the Libyan light sweet? Perhaps.).

PPS: There is role for government to prevent price abuses during emergencies. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, there were fuel disruptions where I live and some merchants, tried to take unfair advantage of consumers... A  number of them were fined for price gouging by state regulators.  They don't regulate the actual price, just the bad behavior.

 
The real problem in the US is the government has had zero clue on economics for the last few years.  If they did then what they have been doing to our economy should be criminal!  Obama thinks he is the first trillioniare the way he had the congress had been spending.  Now we all have to dig our selves out of a huge hole he has dug deeper and still wants to dig even deeper.  Not to mention the way he only pays attention to the laws he feels like obeying and one of those is the no drilling for oil.  Hopefully we can make it through the end of his term and get someone who has a clue in his chair!

 
JohnRoberts said:
The Huffington post... not my idea of a balanced news source (she just got a nice pay day for selling, so lots of love from that side of the political spectrum).

It's a Reuters article which just happened to be mirrored at the HuffPo. I've seen way too much bullshit on her site to view it as a reliable news source. The liberal news source with good fact checking would be the Rachel Maddow show.


JohnRoberts said:
You still don't accept the value in letting markets set prices. Speculators provide liquidity to the market and information about future expectations.  The price is high, because people think it will be higher in the future. If they thought it would be lower they would be dumb asses, to buy it when it's high. They only make a profit by selling it to somebody else for more... While the oil producing nations (like OPEC) do benefit from generally higher prices but that's a different animal.

Nothing wrong with speculation per se. The original commodities trade as set up by the FDR administration explicitly relied on speculators for stabilizing the system. What was different since 91 and especially in the last decade was the access of outsiders to the commodities futures trade. That's where the problem lies, and that's where the bubbles came from. The legislation I quoted earlier opened the commodities trading casino with all the consequenses we see today. The imminent crash of the housing bubble in 2007 also led to investments being shifted to commodities, further fueling the commodities bubbles.

All of this is detrimental to the "real" economy, which relies very much on commodity availibility at affordable prices.
 
living sounds said:
JohnRoberts said:
The Huffington post... not my idea of a balanced news source (she just got a nice pay day for selling, so lots of love from that side of the political spectrum).

It's a Reuters article which just happened to be mirrored at the HuffPo. I've seen way too much bullSh*t on her site to view it as a reliable news source. The liberal news source with good fact checking would be the Rachel Maddow show.

I don't really want to want to go down this road, but...  I don't watch Maddow, and the only time I see clips is when they get repeated on another show pointing out something she said that stands out. About a week ago in the middle of the Wisconsin budget discussions, she claimed 'Wisc "is" on track to have a surplus...' 

Everybody makes mistakes, but she is too smart to not know (or not fact check) the actual budget situation. She was trying to make a specific partisan point, that had the Republican governor and legislature not awarded tax breads to business in a like amount, the budget "would project break even". 

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2011/02/talk-show-host-rachel-maddow-got-worked-up-thursday-over-a-politifact-ruling-that-said-this-feb-17-statement-of-hers-was-fal.html

Perhaps she misspoke in the heat of the moment, and conflated her "what would be hypothetical", with "what is reality", but she presented it as fact, and made the governor and legislature look like bad guys, to an audience more than willing to believe her rant. 
JohnRoberts said:
You still don't accept the value in letting markets set prices. Speculators provide liquidity to the market and information about future expectations.  The price is high, because people think it will be higher in the future. If they thought it would be lower they would be dumb asses, to buy it when it's high. They only make a profit by selling it to somebody else for more... While the oil producing nations (like OPEC) do benefit from generally higher prices but that's a different animal.

Nothing wrong with speculation per se. The original commodities trade as set up by the FDR administration explicitly relied on speculators for stabilizing the system. What was different since 91 and especially in the last decade was the access of outsiders to the commodities futures trade. That's where the problem lies, and that's where the bubbles came from. The legislation I quoted earlier opened the commodities trading casino with all the consequenses we see today. The imminent crash of the housing bubble in 2007 also led to investments being shifted to commodities, further fueling the commodities bubbles.

All of this is detrimental to the "real" economy, which relies very much on commodity availibility at affordable prices.

"Outsiders"? Please be more specific. Who are these mysterious outsiders buying oil futures? If there was some mysterious group buying oil, how does this make it only go up... Since they eventually have to take delivery of the oil, or settle out options contracts,  if it isn't worth what they paid, they lose their shirt....

The only way they can win speculating on oil going up, is if it actually does keep going up. Perhaps not a bad bet, with our present administration, and energy policy but like I said, Obama could really ruin their day with a few timely releases from the strategic reserve... but that isn't likely to happen, because as has already been noted, there isn't anywhere to put it.  To repeat, the current price spike is caused by fear, not actual supply disruption.

Bubbles are driven by human nature, greed, and to some extent magnified by easy availability of credit, as margin buying can add fuel to bubbles.  Commodities  (futures contracts) and housing (with long term mortgages) are two assets classes that are dominated by leveraged buying. We are still trying to recover from dumb money chasing the housing bubble, and multiple commodities are in near bubble modes. Within the last year or two I have seen pressure on cocoa, coffee, copper, silver (a pairs play with gold), cotton, and recently rare earth metals, with China trying to lock in long term supply of RE metals.

The commodities exchanges recently raised the margin requirement for one or more commodities, and China raised their commodities margins late last year to damp speculation and bubble formation there.

JR
 
JohnRoberts said:
"Outsiders"? Please be more specific. Who are these mysterious outsiders buying oil futures? If there was some mysterious group buying oil, how does this make it only go up... Since they eventually have to take delivery of the oil, or settle out options contracts,  if it isn't worth what they paid, they lose their shirt....

Institutional investors, which are usually long-term low-risk. They weren't able to buy commodities under the 1936 legislation, only the designated speculators and the people actually involved in the respective businesses could do that. So the price changes pre-2000 or so mostly reflected actual supply and demand. Then the investment banks got their way and made huge profits in fees and margins off the pension funds and similar sources investing in the commodities, buying and re-selling, and re-buying in what is actually a pretty complicated scheme. That's the insanity of it all, since once the bubble popped (which as you pointed out inevitably had to happen) those institutional investors lost huge amounts of money. By that time Goldman and others had made spectacular profits with their schemes. If you look at all the commodities together, the fact that 2005 commodity index funds were where the market turned to after the housing market in the US started to peak, in light of the actual supply and demand, it is obvious that speculation plays the central role. There is evidence that it may have significantly contributed to the recession, too.
What all this means is that laws should be changed back so that speculators who don't actually need or supply commodities stay out and don't drive up the prices beyond actual supply/demand.
 
living sounds said:
JohnRoberts said:
"Outsiders"? Please be more specific. Who are these mysterious outsiders buying oil futures? If there was some mysterious group buying oil, how does this make it only go up... Since they eventually have to take delivery of the oil, or settle out options contracts,  if it isn't worth what they paid, they lose their shirt....

Institutional investors, which are usually long-term low-risk. They weren't able to buy commodities under the 1936 legislation, only the designated speculators and the people actually involved in the respective businesses could do that. So the price changes pre-2000 or so mostly reflected actual supply and demand. Then the investment banks got their way and made huge profits in fees and margins off the pension funds and similar sources investing in the commodities, buying and re-selling, and re-buying in what is actually a pretty complicated scheme. That's the insanity of it all, since once the bubble popped (which as you pointed out inevitably had to happen) those institutional investors lost huge amounts of money. By that time Goldman and others had made spectacular profits with their schemes. If you look at all the commodities together, the fact that 2005 commodity index funds were where the market turned to after the housing market in the US started to peak, in light of the actual supply and demand, it is obvious that speculation plays the central role. There is evidence that it may have significantly contributed to the recession, too.
What all this means is that laws should be changed back so that speculators who don't actually need or supply commodities stay out and don't drive up the prices beyond actual supply/demand.

Once again, I don't see how (by your description, unsophisticated) institutional investors, have driven up the price of oil by speculation. In fact now it sounds like you are saying they shouldn't be allowed to invest in commodities because either they are too dangerous, or commodities  should only be bought by users approved by the government planners.

Guess what, ALL investments are dangerous... ALL investment can both go up and down...  For generations, buying a house used to be considered a safe, never go down investment, but our government, and investment banks, broke that wonderful relationship, by pumping so much credit into the business that everybody went loco, drunk off the easy profit of selling homes to people who shouldn't be buying homes... Some of them are still in those homes, waiting to be bailed out.

But getting back to investments, it is all pretty simple (in concept)..  Investments come in a continuum of risk/reward. The lower the risk, the lower the reward. professional managers, and greedy investors chase progressively riskier investments trying to get more return.  Then stuff happens.

People didn't realize that even buying a home, is a highly leveraged investment, where you can lose more than your down payment, and equity, if prices fall, and many have. I guess by your logic people should not be allowed to buy homes either.

I am getting a little weary of saying this, but the government can't make investing risk free. It can catch and prosecute the people who win because they cheat. I find it remarkable that people are still trying to trade on inside information... Thanks to computerized trading records, the regulators can now look at timing of trades and pretty much identify, trades that were too timely to be luck. However these regulators are still not that sharp.. If they were, they would have been able to see that Bernie Madhoof, couldn't have made the returns he claimed to for years.

The newest pattern of fraud that they are finally unwinding, is the networks of "expert" analysts, which was code for paid sources of inside information... About time.. who knows how much wealth these guys skimmed from the market over years.
=====

I am actually in favor of increased enforcement, not increased regulation... Fraud has been illegal for a long time, so just catch the weasels using flash computers to game the system or whatever... don't try to dictate how much credit card companies can charge or bank profits.

JR
 
Why did it get deregulated and why doesn't it get enforced? It's a Wall Street governernment. The people in charge of the treasuary in the past decades came directly from Goldmann Sachs. There's a revolving door between Wall Street and the regulating government agancies. In the case of the oil regulators they were literally in bed with each other. Snorting cocain. Also, the FBI has largely directed its resources to hunting terrorists. And, after all, these high finance innovations and structures are hugely complex, there just aren't many people outside New York that really understand them, and it takes massive efforts to legally prove criminal activity. The ones who do understand them rather use that knowledge to make money.
In the case of finance, the US is now operating like a third world country, with not the people via the government actually in charge, but a small group of fantastically wealthy bankers. It is not a conspiracy. The government is not able to raise taxes as it should (they stand at 19%, compared to 41 in the EU), because of the anti-tax sentiment created and fueled by the same people who profit from it (there also is hardly an independant economic research facility left, they're mostly in the pockets of big business), instead it's now the speculators who "tax" the population via financial scams, fees and extras via increased commodities prices.

Obama also had the Goldmann guys in his transition team, and put them directly into his administration. Not much change can be expected there.

As for commodities, trading historically was tightly regulated and restricted to physical hedgers as well as the designated speculators, whose trading ability was very limited. Only after the letters of exemptions and subsequent deregulation the vast majority of trades in commdities became speculative.

I reread the whole chapter, but it takes way too much space and time to write it all down. I'd really recommend you get that book, "Griftopia" by Matt Taibbi, as the commodities bubble (as well as the other recent bubbles) is explained chronologically and in depth.

Finally, injecting the idea here that investments are never risk free is a false dichotomy. The governenment cannot make investments risk free, but that is not the point. The point is to keep the risk at acceptable levels, and only where it makes sense economically, long-term. What culminated as the crisis of 2008 is at the end of a long chain of wrong decisions in the executive, judicial as well as legislative branch. It's not really poor people owning too much house, or pension funds deciding to buy commodities, but the long ongoing push, a concerted effort, for this to happen via deregulation and interference in government activity, by those who could (and did) profit from it. It resulted in a massive redistribution program from the bottom and middle to the top, and a huge burden of debt for generations.

The thing is, those people who shouldn't own a house often didn't buy it to live in it, but to profit from it by selling it again a few months down the road. The loan sharks at the end of the chain sold the people houses as safe investments - after all, if the bank was willing to lend them money for it, it must be save, musn't it? And government sanctioned it, class A A$$***le Greenspan explicitly encouraged people to buy homes in 2004 - argumenting that the rates had gone down for years - and then a few months later jacked up the rate himself 17 consecutive times.

I think what credit companies can charge to consumers should definitiely be regulated. Why? Because most of these consumers aren't economically, let alone mathematically savy. And they won't be. It may be hard to understand this for someone who has the ability, but numbers don't come natural to most people. And they certainly cannot read, let alone understand, 20 or more pages of small-print legalese. Over here every clause in a contract that puts a consumer at a significant disadvantage is automatically invalid. Not only in banking, but generally. And CC rates of 20% per month surely fall into this category. It's good practise, and the system works.
 
Good job... too large a pile for me to attack on a monday morning.

Yes, usury is already illegal here too.
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Regarding prosecutions for securities fraud, not the FBI's job per se. I just read about a $100k fine against one of the trading houses (Cantor Fitrzgerald IIRC) by CFTC (commodities regulator) for wash sales in petroleum futures market back in 2007. While it isn't immediately obvious how wash sales distort the market, they actually do in providing a false sense of liquidity, encouraging questionable trades.

The central point is that it is always illegal to manipulate markets up or down for personal advantage. Bubbles are not the result of fraud and market manipulation, but instead bad judgement by lots of people, a mass hysteria in effect. Often helped along by too much capital with no better use than chasing momentum, or what was hot yesterday. At the end of the day, the music always stops playing and bubbles burst. Event driven fear trades always pass, and the people on the wrong side of those trades who bought high and drove it up to those peak prices, end up selling lower.

Cocoa futures are at a 32 year high because of turmoil and an export ban in the Ivory Coast.  Speculators are surely adding to the price run up, as chocolate makers scramble for supply, but guess what, the Ivory Coast will start shipping again at some point, and the last people who bought in at so high a price will lose their ass...
====

You can't legislate against bad judgement, and central planners don't have superior information to freely traded public markets. Right now the price of oil is clearly out of whack... they are expanding storage capability in Oklahoma because we have too much there... But this is just another symptom, of future expectations, right or wrong about future prices. If the future expectation is for higher prices it is OK to actually own oil in storage. I see current energy pricing with the exception of the fear premium caused by middle east uncertainty a report card on the administration energy policy.  A more effective energy policy could do wonders for the future oil price expectations... 

Perhaps I'll bite of a few more later...

JR

PS: The glut of oil in Stillwell Oklahoma is not indicative of the entire market, but an idiosyncrasy of pipeline limitations to move lots of oil flexibly and quickly. The (still) restricted Gulf drilling, means we have refining capacity there that could benefit from the extra oil, but they can't easily access it.
 
Central planning did happen, but it happened at Goldmann and the other big firms. They put all their manpower behind the effort to make huge amounts money off the rest of the people while not getting procesecuted - and suceeded. Burning down the house for insurance mafia-style.

I just watched the documentary that won the Oscar yesterday, it shows some of the things Taibbi is outlining in his book very well, too. At this point I'm really glad I don't live in the United States, since I don't see a way out of the mess with the political system the way it is. It's a mystery to my why Obama put Summers, Geithner and all the other collaborators in charge. Probably because of campaign contributions? Anywhay, When the rest of the world tried to regulate some of the worst excesses, the Obama administration declined...

BTW, one reason why Greece got away with their financial fraud for so long is because they employed Goldman to fudge their papers. It sure is an interesting age we live in...
 
Does anyone else think it is strange that these rebellions all seem to have happened at much the same time and in much the same way all along the North African coast? Seems too much of a coincidence to me. Are there some external forces at work here?

Cheers

Ian
 
ruffrecords said:
Does anyone else think it is strange that these rebellions all seem to have happened at much the same time and in much the same way all along the North African coast? Seems too much of a coincidence to me. Are there some external forces at work here?

Cheers

Ian

It is not strange at all.. in fact it could be predicted from the increasing difficulty for totalitarian governments to restrict information flow to citizens.  There are millions oppressed in that region and they see successful overthrow in Tunisia and then Egypt on Al Jazera TV..

They are all asking themselves, why not us?

I wish we could take credit for this, but all we can claim is that elections in Iraq and Afghanistan (still questionable for vote irregularities) are setting a good example for the rest of the region.

While this is far from a done deal.. and sophisticated totalitarian regimes (like Iran) are even using the WWW to find protesters.

Note: Oman is heating up.. they may be next.

Note: anti-Qaddafi rebels are shipping oil...

JR

PS: I was wrong, the oil storage is in Cushing OK, not Stillwell.
 
living sounds said:
Central planning did happen, but it happened at Goldmann and the other big firms. They put all their manpower behind the effort to make huge amounts money off the rest of the people while not getting procesecuted - and suceeded. Burning down the house for insurance mafia-style.

I just watched the documentary that won the Oscar yesterday, it shows some of the things Taibbi is outlining in his book very well, too. At this point I'm really glad I don't live in the United States, since I don't see a way out of the mess with the political system the way it is. It's a mystery to my why Obama put Summers, Geithner and all the other collaborators in charge. Probably because of campaign contributions? Anywhay, When the rest of the world tried to regulate some of the worst excesses, the Obama administration declined...

BTW, one reason why Greece got away with their financial fraud for so long is because they employed Goldman to fudge their papers. It sure is an interesting age we live in...

The big investment banks also lost big... so the suggestion they engineered the disaster on purpose is nonsense. The bail-out, that kept them mostly intact is not going to change anything. If they are still too big to fail, they may be too big to regulate...  They need to be broken up, not regulated more, by incompetent government suits. 

Yes, the large investment banks helped Greece and many other questionable borrowers, but reality always catches up with irresponsible economic behavior, and Greece is solely responsible for Greece... 

JR
 
JohnRoberts said:
The big investment banks also lost big... so the suggestion they engineered the disaster on purpose is nonsense. The bail-out, that kept them mostly intact is not going to change anything. If they are still too big to fail, they may be too big to regulate...  They need to be broken up, not regulated more, by incompetent government suits. 

The banks as corporate bodys lost, but that doesn't matter, the people behind it is where the money went. There's more than one example of top managers of these institutions selling all personal stock in the company they worked for shortly before the collapse. The way the incentive structure went, it didn't matter if the whole system was at risk, the counterparties were at risk, your own company was at risk - you make the deal, you get the money, in bonuses and otherwise. And you get to keep it.
That's one of the general problem of legal persons in general: No personal acountability, for all practical purposes, in many cases. And especially in the past decades in the US. Without personal risk, certain people are bound to engage in otherwise prohibitly dangerous activity. And a certain kind of people accumulates at these institutitions. Interestingly enough, the one guy at AIG trying to audit and warn of collapse got no bonus, was barred from reviewing the numbers and subsequently fired.
 

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