Posted on 03/20/2011 5:55:18 PM PDT by Jim 726
(Reuters) - Oil jumped by more than $2 on Monday, sending Brent to $116 after western forces launched a military campaign against Libya, raising the stakes in a civil war that has nearly paralyzed crude exports from the north African nation.
Brent crude for May rose as much as $2.26 to $116.19 a barrel and was up almost 1.7 percent at $115.82 by 0026 GMT. U.S. crude for April rose as much as $2.12 to $103.19 and was up $1.93 at $103.
President Barack Obama has ordered U.S. forces into the biggest military intervention in the Arab world since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi vowed to fight to the death.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
This almost makes one wonder if the people ordering these attacks went long on oil futures.
Honestly...I could care less...$2.00 is nothing...lets just get it done...let’s get the price of a gallon of gas to $8.00...that will motive home drilled oil big time!!!
What’s the big deal? Zero announced today we are going to start buying oil from Soro through Brazil. do i really need a sarc tag?
all part of the plan world governace
Did you say “FUTURES”?
Hillary Clinton Futures Trades Detailed
By Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 27, 1994; Page A01
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader.
The new records also raise the possibility that some of her profits — as much as $40,000 – came from larger trades ordered by someone else and then shifted to her account, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Merc who reviewed the records for the White House, said in an interview. He said the discrepancies in Clinton’s records also could have been caused by human error.
Even allocated trades would not necessarily have benefited Clinton, Melamed added. “I have no reason to change my original assessment. Mrs. Clinton violated no rules in the course of her transactions,” he said.
Lisa Caputo, Clinton’s spokeswoman, said the documents were released yesterday “to give as complete a picture as possible” of her trades. She said Clinton had never before seen them.
Blair, who urged Clinton to enter the high-risk futures market and ordered most of her trades, said in a recent interview that he “talked her into” her first futures trade in October 1978 before paperwork on her account was completed. It was liquidated quickly, he recalled, because “it was bigger than she wanted and required more money.”
A close examination of her individual trades underscores Blair’s pivotal role. It also shows that Robert L. “Red” Bone, who ran the Springdale, Ark., office of Ray E. Friedman and Co. (Refco), allowed Clinton to initiate and maintain many trading positions – besides the first – when she did not have enough money in her account to cover them.
Why would Bone do so? Bone could not be reached for comment, but Blair said he thought he knew why. “I was a very good customer,” he said, noting he paid Bone $800,000 in commissions over the years. “They weren’t going to hassle me. If I brought them somebody, they weren’t going to hassle them.”
Besides, he added, Bone would not worry if he agreed with his clients’ bet on which way the price of a given contract would go.
Blair, who at the time was outside counsel to Tyson Foods Inc., Arkansas’ largest employer, says he was advising Clinton out of friendship, not to seek political gain for his state-regulated client. At the time of many of the trades, Bill Clinton was governor.
Hillary Clinton has said she made all the trading decisions herself and has tried to play down Blair’s role. But she acknowledged in April, three weeks after her trades were first disclosed, that Blair actually placed most of the trades.
Blair advised Clinton again on July 17, 1979. He recalled that she started that trading day by losing $26,460 on 10 cattle contracts she had held for more than a month, by far her worst loss as a futures player. On his recommendation, he said, she immediately went back into the market. She acquired 50 new cattle contracts – worth $1.4 million — and when the price moved in her favor, unloaded them around noon for a quick gain of $10,550. This recouped part of her loss.
Blair said Clinton and other friends he suggested trades for had lost money that spring on feeder cattle. Those trades “caused everyone some grief,” he said. “I’m sure I was pressing to get everyone back above water” in recommending the quick and bold day trade.
The White House defense of Hillary Clinton’s preferential treatment was that other customers in the same office also were allowed to trade without having enough cash in their accounts.
While Clinton’s account was wildly successful to an outsider, it was small compared to what others were making in the cattle futures market in the 1978-79 period. An investigation of the cattle futures market at that time by Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa) found that in one 16-month period 32 traders made more than $110 million in profits from large trades — those of 50 contracts or more. Clinton traded positions of 50 or more contracts only three times.
The records the White House released yesterday were part of an investigative file from 1979, when the exchange charged Bone and Refco with violations of its record keeping and margin requirement rules. Bone was suspended for three years; Refco paid a $250,000 fine, then the largest in the exchange’s history. Internal memos from that investigation cover transactions from the same period in June in which Clinton was trading, but not the same trades. In one instance, the Merc found Bone and a fellow broker were ordering 1,000 cattle contracts at a time – far over the limit allowed at the time – and then allocating them to other customers.
One internal Merc memo said “there is reason to believe” that a majority of Bone’s accounts were traded without the clients’ permission. Blair said that Bone at times traded his personal account without permission.
Blair said he doubted Bone traded Clinton’s account without her permission.
Melamed said it was “impossible” to determine the exact cause for the discrepancies between the Merc computer record of Clinton’s trades and the trading records she received from Refco, which the White House released earlier.
She said that for six trades, her initial trading position in the Refco records were not reflected in the Merc documents. On one other trade neither her purchase nor sale was included. On that trade she netted $12,150 on 15 cattle contracts she held for four days.
Clinton reported a loss of $2,480 on one of the trades in question, Melamed noted.
One was a “day trade” on hog contracts that netted $2,553. Melamed said “day trades” are the only way to assure profit even if favorable trading positions are allocated to a customer’s account. Any position held overnight would be subject to the rise and fall in prices in the volatile futures market, he added.
Staff researcher Barbara J. Saffir contributed to this report.
In commodities futures trading, an account that falls below the “maintenance margin” typically triggers a “margin call,” where the trader must put up sufficient cash to cover the contracts. Although Hillary Rodham Clinton’s account was under-margined for nearly all of July 1979, no margin calls were made, no additional cash was put up, and she eventually reaped a $60,000 profit.
June 29 ......... $56,466 (Margin: Value account should have had to continue trading.)
July 12 ........ -$24,243
July 17 ......... $22,537 (Account value: Total cash on hand plus (or minus) paper value of contracts.)
July 20 ......... $61,537
July 23, 1979: She withdrew $60,000 and never traded again, closing the account in October.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940527.htm
Gotta get that oil price up a lot more. We sheeple are not flocking to buy those Government Motors Chevy Volts. Who cares they only go around the block before needing a charge, the gubmint has decreed the sheeple shall all drive one whether said sheeple want to do so or not.
“Honestly...I could care less...$2.00 is nothing...lets just get it done...let’s get the price of a gallon of gas to $8.00”
BITE YOUR TOUNGE! Please don’t wish for that! I’ll need my entire paycheck to pay for diesel just to get to work and back!
Yikes!
“According to a June 2008 article in Kiplinger Magazine, the United States has enough oil reserves to power the nation for upwards of three centuries. That’s three hundred years, Mr. President. We are not running out of oil reserves — it’s just that those oil reserves have been declared off-limits due to decades of environmental lobbying of our politicians, especially those on the Left. This lobbying has driven the likes of BP and others out deep into the Gulf of Mexico to extract the nation’s needed oil.
Note the following statement from the article:
… untapped reserves are estimated at about 2.3 trillion barrels, nearly three times more than the reserves held by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Counties (OPEC) and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand-at today’s levels-for auto, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil.
You can read more here.
What Obama, Soros, Gore, and the rest of Crime Inc. are up to is not only criminal, it’s immoral. Oil is the lifeblood of any economy. Remember, petroleum is used in more than just motor fuels and lubricants. Petroleum is used to manufacture plastics, medicines, literally thousands of products.
It’s also an issue of national security. We send somewhere between $700 billion and $1 trillion out of the country annually to buy crude oil. A good amount of that money goes to countries that hate us, and use this money to actively work against us. It’s insane.
Sarah Palin wrote about this recently, which we talk about here.
To sum this up, Barack Obama, George Soros, and others look to get incredibly rich off of these two schemes, and as a bonus, they get to completely and totally destroy the United States economy, in hopes of rebuilding America as a communist utopia.”
“These are the top 5 holdings of George Soros
1.Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.Petrobras (PBR) – 9,818,323 shares, 15.42% of the total portfolio
2.Hess Corp. (HES) – 5,123,198 shares, 10.56% of the total portfolio
3.Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.Petrobras (PBR-A) – 5,884,700 shares, 7.53% of the total portfolio
4.Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. (POT) – 1,978,053 shares, 7.06% of the total portfolio
5.Plains Exploration & Production Company (PXP) – 6,526,400 shares, 6.84% of the total portfolio
Note that there are two Petrobas stock numbers (PBR and PBR-A, numbers 1
& 3 listed above).
This looks interesting to me considering the Soros-Obama connections.”
Yeah, this is the first President in my lifetime that went to war for higher oil prices. What’s his goal again... $5 / gal for gasoline?
I’m not wishing for that...but all this doom and gloom needs to stop...if the prices were to get that high we would have a force out there that would overwhelm the government and the “Greenies” to get us independent of those Muslim sicko’s. Think about it...who’s controlling us now...look at the airports, gas prices, wars...they (Islamic radicals) are winning...we are sitting on numerous opportunities but politics and political correctness are robbing us of our fundamental rights and freedom of expression and creativity that this country was founded on...
I certainly don’t want to see you spend your whole paycheck going to work each week because of a dictatorship that decides what you pay for fuel but lets wake up...
If fuel cost made it economically unfeasible to go work then you wouldn’t work...no work no taxes...no taxes then the government would sink due to income...
You and others would also take some serious action to get that corrected...on and on
My point it that we need something to wake the dead beats up and get these damn politicians out of office...we need to replace them with statesmen. Our current “leader” is nothing but as joke...play game, beer conferences, million dollar vacations...he’s a big joke.
OK, I’ve vented...I’ll stand by my statement...I’ve been on this earth 60 years and am willing to sacrifice whatever it take to bring the Lords Prayer, Pledge of Allegiance (to the United States) and the paddle back into schools...
Not to worry, the price will return to a more normal level, say, around $250 a bbl, once Zero has unilaterally and illegally signed away the rights of US citizens to earn a living in the petroleum industry. Thanks Jim 726.
Gold is at about 1428, up $8 since the 6 PM EDT opening.
This is what obama wants. Oil prices to skyrocket in order to push thru his green agenda.
Obama chose Steven Chu as energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner as White House energy adviser.
Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work.
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September 2008 .
No worry, Hillary is in charge. Idiot can take years off.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.