Posted on 10/18/2006 9:03:11 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1720277/posts
Why Gas Prices Dropped money.cnn.com ^ | October 16 2006 | Nelson D. Schwartz
Posted on 10/16/2006 10:31:49 AM CDT by kellynla
(Fortune Magazine) -- If the recent plunge in gas prices is the result of a conspiracy by President George W. Bush to help the Republicans retain control of Congress, as 42 percent of Americans believe, according to one Gallup poll, a lot of Wall Streeters wish they'd been in on the plot.
So what really drove prices down - if not an Oliver Stone-worthy scenario involving the Commander-in-Chief, the House of Saud and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson cajoling his cronies at Goldman Sachs to sink the crude market?
By late summer, hedge funds and other investors had poured billions into long positions in oil, gasoline, natural gas and the rest of what traders call the "energy complex," all betting on a replay of the severe 2005 hurricane season that sent prices soaring in the wake of Katrina and Rita. But one day after oil reached a monthly high of $76.98 a barrel on Aug. 7, government meteorologists downgraded their hurricane forecast and cautioned that a repeat of 2005 was "unlikely."
That announcement, combined with the end of the summer driving season and a recalibration of the Goldman Sachs (Charts) commodity index that reduced the weighting of gasoline, prompted speculators to head for the exits even faster than they'd piled in.
The switch in Goldman's basket of commodities had been previously announced by the firm, but that didn't stop the conspiracy theorists.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Moron is too nice a word to describe her (I guess). I think she may be a FReeper just posting that stuff to stir up trouble.
Yes. My big strong husband was even tearing up.
A meathead.
I think she is FR pet lib.
Wow, I hadn't heard that. If either or both retires in the next two years I'll be doing a happy dance all over the house. Assuming, of course, that we still have control of congress and can replace them with conservative justices. More reason to vote Republican!
After enduring your counterproductive insults of conservatives for most of this thread, I'm very glad to see we do have an area of common ground. I agree wholeheartedly on Allen.
McCowswill believes that GWB and Rove manipulated the price of gas.....hmmmmmmmm
Yep, she sounds like Senator material to me! /s
Miers never got the chance, so you will never know that I was right at the time.
BTW, I'm not beating the horse. I responded to a question, and frankly, I'd like to forget it, but the split in the base was seriously widened by the Miers issue, and it has continued since.
The Rats are taking advantage of it, and I would too, if I were them.
The reason it is connected is that it is part of the process that has buggered the party base. Other than that, it is irrelevant.
FOTFLOL!
My response to MurryMoan
How many companies from the 90s 'boom' no longer exist. As someone who was very close to the road in investing in the 90s, I can tell you a large portion of the 'boom' was fueled by IPOs of companies with what we call 'infinite' PE ratios- these are companies created solely for the purpose of producing an IPO without having any book revenue. Many Internet companies and BioTech fell into this category. They had 0 earnings but had IPOs with valuations of billions of dollars based solely on 'potential' of their ideas.
Billions of dollars of phantom money traded hands during this time.
It is one of the reasons why the bubble began to burst in 99. One cannot continue to trade phantom dollars without it eventually leveling out.
And for the record, both the bubble and the popping had nothing to do with any single party or president. The Bubble nor the Burst can be attributed to Clinton just as it cannot be attributed to President Bush.. It was a financial anomaly of a completely new emerging market (Internet) along with new emerging customers of that market (the so called day traders and other Internet venues of trade.)
I checked the archives here and on Limbaugh's site and I cannot find any 'Bush Bashes' during that time that stood out.. some complaints but nothing like what is implied..
That McCaskell babe is a real moron. If she actually thinks that Bush has power to tinker with gas prices, and OPEC kicking up production has nothing to do with it, then she's too stupid to be voting herself, much less to be running for election. When prices stopped dropping it was a day after OPEC said they would lower production so prices didn't drop too much. That's proof positive that OPEC, NOT Bush and NOT big oil controls the price at the pump. Period. When OPEC increases production, price at the pump drops. When OPEC reduces production, price at the pump goes up. Which is why we'd be better not buying Muslim arab oil, using our own, building 200 more nuclear and clean coal power plants, drilling in ANWR and the new massive Gulf reserves found last month, and building 20 new refinaries. That would reduce our need for foreign oil to 10% or less of our total consumption, and free up about 80% of the oil we use for power production for automobile fuel, using nuclear and clean coal for energy production. It's just that simple, and the Democrats are the ones blocking ALL of that.
Bwahahaha...lord I love Ron White!
She won't listen.
I agree with you that the party base is currently split, but personally I don't think the Miers debacle is even among the top 10 reasons why.
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