Posted on 05/05/2011 9:06:51 AM PDT by bananaman22
The fate of the Obama presidency hangs not on a birth certificate or the red ink on the federal budget but by the hose nozzle of your local gas station.
Electoral discontent is measured by the price of a gallon of gasoline. Heading past $4 toward $5, that is a lethal trajectory for President Barack Obama.
Enter the demagogues, especially the clown-in-a-business-suit, Donald Trump. Unfettered by the gravity that goes with facts, Trump says that he would fix the oil price – now around $110 a barrel – by facing down the producers, particularly the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). He told an interviewer on television that he would call OPEC and tell them to pump more or face the consequences. The latter, he did not specify. War? Against whom?
In a compelling book by Leah McGrath Goodman, “The Asylum: The Renegades Who Highjacked the World's Oil Market,” the author lays out the ugly fact that often – in fact, as often as not – the price of oil is set not in Vienna at the headquarters of OPEC, but in downtown Manhattan at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).
Tens of thousands of future contracts are traded in nanoseconds at the NYMEX, and the price of oil is set. This price affects not only the price which will be paid when these contracts expire and delivery takes place, but also, according to Goodman, the all-important over-the-counter market, where sellers trade more directly with buyers without government oversight.
Goodman contends that there is little oversight of the NYMEX because the agency charged with the role is the weak and ineffectual Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where many staff and commissioners are busy burnishing their resumes so they can cash in later as market executives. Full article: Oil Markets
He is THE WORST president since Wilson. I fear for your great republic if he is reelected.
Not to sound like the arrogant Ugly American or anything, but when the U.S. goes down, and it will if OweBama gets reelected, a whole block of other nations will struggle mightily too.
Ummm, yeah, thanks, I’ve lived long enough to realize that.
LLS
We still have 2 summers and 2 hurricane seasons along with no end in sight to the mess in the middle east. Gas will be $6-7 by then and no amount of massaging or media tweaking will save the regime...
Idiocy. Far from distorting it, speculators keep the market in balance, frequently by taking short (hedged) positions contrary to current price trends. Traders do not control or influence macro-economic policy, and that is what is 100% responsible for the upward trajectory of oil prices. The Obama Administration is purposely devaluing the US dollar and using regulatory authority to prevent both oil exploration and an increase in refinery capacity.
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