$4 Gas: Brought to You by Wall Street

$4 Gas: Brought to You by Wall Street

By Donal on Thu, 09/08/2011 - 2:39pm |

... last month, ... someone leaked confidential documents detailing the positions of Wall Street speculators—including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Barclays—from a single day that fateful summer, June 30, 2008. More than 200 companies held investments in millions of barrels of oil that day, many of them companies that neither produce nor use oil.

The documents laid bare the extent to which big banks' speculating has begun to affect oil prices: Traditionally, those who produce and buy oil have been the big players in the futures market, making calculations about how much oil will cost in the future and drafting contracts to provide that oil at a set price down the line. But now financial players are also in the game, bidding on oil that they'll never make or use—a development that many say is artificially raising the price of crude.

URL:

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/09/oil-speculators-goldman-sachs

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At first glance, I suspect the old Need vs. Greed axiom at play here. I believe the same is true with crop futures too ... hold back basic, raw food supplies to see prices rise as demand is literally fed by hunger.

by Beetlejuice on Fri, 09/09/2011 - 6:32am

All those trillions 0% dollars Bernanke has been giving to the big Wall Street firms for years has to be put to use somewhere where they can 'game the system', and its not gonna be used to create jobs, or used in reducing mortgages or putting people into the millions of empty homes in the country.

by NCD on Fri, 09/09/2011 - 10:15am

Exactly, NCD.

Been a long time (or was it ever?) since Wall Street was all about efficiently distributing capital to the most productive enterprises.

Our best and brightest these days flock to the street to learn how to game the system.

Once they aspired to be engineers, now they wallow in hedge fund slime.

by Red Planet on Fri, 09/09/2011 - 10:27am

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