Posted on 06/11/2008 6:56:59 AM PDT by Ron in Acreage
Growing suspicion that speculators are driving up the cost of oil has done at least one good thing: given federal regulators second thoughts about loopholes that can be exploited by the sort of financial geniuses who brought us the subprime debacle.
If $4-per-gallon gas is the result of a speculation-inflated bubble, consumers obviously want it to burst as quickly as possible. But those with pension funds and certain other investments could be shocked to find that savings at the pump could come out of their retirement incomes. The existing loopholes - the product of Bush administration disdain for any limits on private greed - already allowed investment banks, hedge funds and other institutions to ignore investment limits meant to restrain speculators.
(Excerpt) Read more at palmbeachpost.com ...
All of those gains are ill gotten in the first place. No pension funds should have been rolling the dice in oil futures.
All investment funds contain risk.
The PB Post Op Ed board are rabid anti-capitalist Marxist of the worst kind.
I am all for doing whatever it takes to get the price of oil down significantly.
Whatever it takes.
As polls of those considering this a “crisis” go up, and polls of those blaming the oil companies go down, the heat is starting to be turned up on the environmentalists. I see this as an attempt to steer the blame away from the commies that fight our attempts to explore and drill.
It's done very well for several years, obviously. But an ill-thought out regulation or new law from Congress could bust this thing pretty bad.
Gee, wonder where this article is going?
Exactly. The MSM will NEVER put the blame where it belongs. On the leftists and all of their comrades who despise this country and want it brought to her knees. They use the environment as a shield to push their Marxist agenda. Just as they also use “the children” for other causes.
You squeeze out speculators by SPOOKING them. Say “we’re drilling in ANWR, Bakkan, and all over the coastal shelf. We’re keeping tax incentives in place to all the big oil companies to develop domestic supplies. And we’re ending this ethanol crap.”
Boom. Instant drop in prices as speculators realize the game is over.
Very true. But we need to follow through on it. Drill here, drill now, pay less.
Devaluation of the US Dollar is the primarly cause of US inflation, and Dollar devaluation is caused by things like printing fiat US Dollars and wild US Government spending.
There is a mis-titled, but otherwise brilliant, opinion piece in the 10 June 2008 Wall Street Journal titled "The Fed and the Price of Rice." I say mis-titled because the title should be "Congress and the Price of Rice."
The last paragraph from that WSJ piece reads ...
Officials should stop wringing their hands over sky-high rice prices caused by alleged changes in rice's supply-demand fundamentals, and politicians should refrain from pointing accusative fingers at speculators and hoarders. The rice-price problem is a weak dollar problem. Until the dollar strengthens, the nominal dollar prices of rice and other commodities will remain elevated.
I’m referring to the outright buying of oil futures/EFP via the investment bank swap loophole.
So, pension funds should stay away from all profitable companies, or just the ones the left (and some on the right) deem to be evil??
See #12
Plus my post explicitly stated “oil futures”, so why would you expand that to “all profitable companies”??!
The Rats kept telling us we went to war for oil. Where in the hell is the oil?
What is being discussed is chasing pension funds and university endowments from speculating in futures mkts, indirectly, via a device usually called an ''index product''. And this is a good and necessary idea -- as one poster just put it (paraphrased), 'Why are pension funds messing around in oil futures anyway?'
Let the oil industry integrate vertically and speculation will disappear.
Vertical integration is the solution, not this drilling cargo cult.
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