The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of the global oil scam.

It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in "Madoff Units" ($50Bn rip-offs). $2.5Tn is 50 times the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, but it is less than the monthly excess price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.

Where is the outrage? Where are the investigations?

Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. Round-trip trades occur when one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.

"Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate." - Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.

How widespread are round-trip trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported:

This pattern of trading suggests a market environment in which a significant volume of fictitious trading could have taken place. Yet since most of the trading is unregulated by the government, we have only a slim idea of the illusion being perpetrated in the energy sector.

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. That means 80 percent of all of their trades that year were bogus trades where no commodity changed hands, and yet the balance sheets reflect added revenue. Remember, these trades are sham deals where nothing was exchanged. Duke Energy (DUK) disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were round-trip since 1999. Roughly two-thirds of these were done on the InterContinental Exchange; that is, the online, nonregulated, nonaudited, nonoversight for manipulation and fraud entity run by banks in this country. That means thousands of subscribers would see false pricing. Under investigation, a lawyer for JPMorgan Chase (JPM) admitted the bank engineered a series of “round-trip” trades with Enron.

You can chart the damage done by Goldman Sachs and their gang of thieves by looking at commodity pricing pre- and post-ICE. Before ICE, commodities followed a more or less normal growth path that matched global GDP and was always limited in price appreciation by the fact that, ultimately, someone had to take delivery of a physical commodity at a set price.

ICE threw that concept out the window and turned commodity trading into a speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced. And in just 5 years after commencing operations, Goldman Sachs and their partners managed to TRIPLE the price of commodities.

Goldman Sachs Commodity Index funds accounted for $60Bn out of $100Bn of all formula-managed funds in 2007 and investors in the GSCI lost 15% in 2006 while Goldman had a record year. John Dizard, of the Financial Times, calls this process "date rape" by Goldman Sachs as the funds index rolls cost investors 150 basis points of return annually ($9Bn on the Goldman funds) but GS, under the prospectus, is able to "manage our corresponding position," which means that it has to deliver a price at the end of the roll period. If Goldman can cover that obligation at a better price, they will, and GS pockets the difference. This is why we see such wild moves in the days before rollover, since there are billions riding on GS hitting their target every month.

It is not surprising that a commodity scam would be the cornerstone of Goldman Sachs’s strategy. CEO Lloyd Blankfein rose to the top through Goldman’s commodity trading arm J Aron, starting his career at J Aron before Goldman Sachs bought them over 25 years ago. With his colleague Gary Cohn, Blankfein oversaw the key energy trading portfolio. According to Chris Cook: "It appears clear that BP and Goldman Sachs have been working collaboratively – at least at a strategic level - for maybe 15 years now. Their trading strategy has evolved over time as the global market has developed and become ever more financialised. Moreover, they have been well placed to steer the development of the key global energy market trading platform, and the legal and regulatory framework within which it operates." Cook adds:

It appears to me that what has been occurring in the oil market may have been that – through the intermediation of the likes of J Aron in the Brent complex – long term funds have been lending money to producers – effectively interest-free - and in return the producers have been lending oil to the funds. This works well for as long as funds flow into the market, or do not withdraw in quantity, but once funds withdraw money from the market, there is a sudden collapse in price.

A combination of market hype, the opacity of the Brent Complex and the relatively small scale of trading of the benchmark BFOE crude oil contract enabled the long run up in prices, and several observers believe that the dramatic spike to $147.00 per barrel was the specific outcome of the collapse of SemGroup, which that company’s management subsequently blamed mainly on Goldman Sachs.

Mike Riess issued a study called "Modern Market Manipulation" in which he describes how GS, MS, DB et al have systematically created an environment that rewards those who manipulate the system, robbing the poor to send the money up they company ladder in exchange for record bonus payouts, which (by design) are the majority of their traders’ salaries:

Before the ‘80’s, there were just us traders. "Rogue" traders arrived on the scene with the large institutional participants, both private and public. Today’s companies and government marketing boards are large enough for senior management to distance itself from controversy, including market manipulation.

In a competitive, amoral environment, middle managers in these mega-organizations have the authority to hijack an institution’s reputation and the financial clout to manipulate the market—and they do. As long as they succeed, they enjoy promotions and perks and, sometimes, the fruits of embezzlement. If the manipulation unravels, the company denies any knowledge and hangs the rogue out to dry. We’ve seen this over and over again, most recently with D’Avila and Codelco, Hamanaka and Sumitomo, Leeson and Barings and Tsuda and Daiwa Bank.

The CFTC’s definition of manipulation is:

• A planned operation that causes or maintains an artificial price
• Unusually large purchases or sales in a short period of time in order to distort prices
• Putting out false information in order to distort prices.

In mid-2008 it was estimated that some $260 billion was invested in the Brent energy markets on the ICE, while the value of the oil actually coming out of the North Sea each month, at maybe $4 to $5 billion at most. NYMEX trading follows a similar path with 258,000, 1,000-barrel contracts open for December delivery (258M barrels), which were traded 327,000 times yesterday alone yet, at the end of the period, less than 40M barrels of oil will actually be delivered as that is the total capacity at Cushing, Okla. - where NYMEX contract deliveries are settled. Every single one of those traders know it is not even possible for 80% of the contracts they are trading to be fulfilled - it's a joke, but the joke is on you.

Over the course of an average month at the NYMEX, 5 billion barrels of oil will be traded, with a fee collected on every single transaction. That is ultimately passed down to US consumers, yet less than 40M barrels will actually be delivered. That is just 8 tenths of 1 percent of actual demand for the product that is being traded - ie. 99.2% of the oil transaction fees being paid by the American people do nothing more than create fees for the traders and record profits and bonuses for the trading firms.

Index speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years. Today, in many commodities futures markets, they are the single largest force. The huge growth in their demand has gone virtually undetected by classically trained economists who almost never analyze demand in futures markets. As money pours into the markets, two things happen concurrently: The markets expand and prices rise. One particularly troubling aspect of index speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. This explains the accelerating rate at which commodity futures prices (and actual commodity prices) are increasing.

Before ICE, the average American family spent 7% of their income on food and fuel. Last year, that number topped 20%. That’s 13% of the incomes of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, over $1Tn EVERY SINGLE YEAR, stolen through market manipulation. On a global scale, that number is over $4Tn per year - 80 Madoffs! Why is there no outrage, why are there no investigations? Well, the answer is the same - $4Tn per year buys you a lot of political clout. It pays to have politicians all over the world look the other way while GS and their merry men rob from the poor and give to the rich on such a vast scale that it’s hard to grasp the damage they have done and continue to do to the global economy.

CIBC Chief Economist Jeff Rubin issued a report last year that blames the current recession on high oil prices, saying defaulting mortgages are only a symptom. According to Rubin, these higher oil prices caused Japan and the Eurozone to enter into a recession even before the most recent financial problems hit. Higher oil prices started four of the last five world recessions; we shouldn’t be too surprised if they started this one also:

Oil shocks create global recessions by transferring billions of dollars of income from economies where consumers spend every cent they have, and then some, to economies that sport the highest savings rates in the world. While those petro-dollars may get recycled back to Wall Street by sovereign wealth fund investments, they don’t all get recycled back into world demand. The leakage, as income is transferred to countries with savings rates as high as 50%, is what makes this income transfer far from demand neutral.

There is no shortage of oil. OPEC alone has 6-7 million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset. Additionaly, ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers. That’s 15 days of US imports that have been "ordered" but never delivered, so they show up as an extra 1Mbd of global demand, though nobody actually wants them. Land-based storage is also bursting at the seams, with global supplies up to 61 days of total consumption (84Mbd) up from 52 days last year.

That’s 5 billion barrels of oil already out of the ground, in barrels and ready to go AND THEY KEEP MAKING 86M MORE EVERY DAY! Where is the shortage? Mainly, it is media hype pushed by "analysts" at the very firms that profit the most from high oil prices. Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in offshore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price. Of course they have their media hounds as well, most notably the Drudge Report. As noted by Goldmansachsrules:

Type in the word "OIL" inside the "Drudge Report" search engine. It returns 1,965 headlines with the word "OIL." Over the last couple years, The Drudge Report has ran 1,965 headlines with the word "OIL." Most of these articles were hosted by the worthless organizations of Yahoo, Breibart, APNews, and Reuters. The Drudge Report just creates the headline, and links it the article hosted by who ever is doing the "hyping."

Search on the word "credit crisis" and you only get 12 archived headlines. The word "bailout" yields only 268. The word "bank" returns only 568. So you have the Drudge Report hyping the oil market, because they bring it up almost 2,000 times. Unlike the "credit crisis" or "Wall Street Bailout" that actual did happen, the oil market and what did/didn’t happen between Israel/Iran is plugged 10 times more!

Of all the 1,965 articles that the Drudge Report ran with the word "OIL" in the title, most were hyping the oil market. The most notorious cases, a few times a week, were hosted by Yahoo, Breibart, and AP News. Most of these articles were plugged with the same paragraph that stated if "Israel were to attack Iran, Iran would retaliate by taking over the straits of Hormuz, the largest pathway for oil and we all know what that would do to the price of oil.

It truly takes a global village of manipulators and their lackeys to pull off a con on the scale of oil, but it’s also the most profitable scam ever perpetrated on the people of this planet, as they take control of a vital resource and then create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge you an extra dollar per gallon of gas. You don’t complain because it’s "only" $15-$20 every time you fill up your tank, but that’s what they count on and that’s where you’re wrong - it’s $20 from you and $20 from every single one of your customers once or twice a week, and $20 more your employees need just to get to work. It’s money that could be going into your business instead of a new gold bathtub for a Saudi Prince or a Goldman trader.

Global drivers consume 1.7Bn gallons of gas every single day. That $1 is $50Bn a month, a Madoff per month that is being taken away from you and your business and the non-energy/financial businesses you invest in. Of course we can give up and invest in those sectors (we do) but that doesn’t do much for the global economy and, even as you sit here now, not doing anything, those oil profits have been plowed into the copper and gold markets and now the same Goldman energy cartel is bidding to take over your clean air (through Carbon Credit trading) and your clean water.

Maybe when they are charging you $80 a gallon for water and ten cents a breath you’ll want to do something about it. I think I’ll start right now and you can too! Here are the Email addresses and fax numbers for all of your Senators, Congresspeople and Governors. Send this article to them and let them know you’d like to see an investigation. Take a few minutes of your time to save a few bucks on your next gallon of water!

Editor's note: ICE has a web site www.globalmarketfacts.com that seeks to set the record straight on the exchange and the changes it has made to attempt to rein in problematic trading practices.

Comments

[User 499041:]

You miss the point -- either by oversight or misdirection -- light oil or heavy oil, there is still plenty of it.

Moreover, you agree "100%" that the day to day price of oil is being manipulated or outright controlled by big oil and big banks.

Additionally and incredibly, your response, while containing an educated and interesting discussion of the difficulty extracting heavy vs. light crude, fails to address the issue as to the effect that the artificial price manipulation by banks and big oil has had, continues to have and will in the future have, not only on ther price of oil, but on all secretly and artificially controlled and manipulated commodity prices.

The main article points out that the U.S. economy is crumbling, in part, due to the manipulated prices of an essential commodity, of which there is plenty, albeit in tankers offshore or in more expensive to reach places. If a fair market price were to be charged for the hard to reach oil, I surmise that the price still would not approach the obscene levels manipulated by the banks and big oil.

Excellent article.


On Nov 11 01:32 PM ryanclarke wrote:

> Sir, while I agree 100% with your assertion oil prices are controlled
> ... or manipulated ... on a short term basis by both big oil and
> big banks ... I DISAGREE 100% with your assertion that there is no
> shortage of oil. I'll go as far to say only someone who has absolutely
> no understanding of world economics or history would say ... "there
> is no shortage of oil." There is a shortage of oil in the U.S. for
> a very simple reason. The resource has been "depleted" within U.S.
> boundaries and even if a huge NEW oil field was found underneath
> Oklahoma ... cities would have to be destroyed in the process to
> "dig up the oil." The fact is the "easy oil to extract" which is
> "easy to make into gasoline" is MOSTLY GONE. By "easy oil to extract"
> I mean oil which is a few hundred feet ... at the most ... under
> the ground as well as under a great deal of pressure so that it flows
> to the surface with little effort. Such oil is LIGHT and pours with
> ease unlike the gooey syrup the Saudis are currently attempting to
> extract from beneath the desert within the confines of their country.
> Such HEAVY oil is extremely expensive to extract ... which is why
> the LIGHT oil in Saudi land was extracted first. The same goes with
> the heavy black sludge Chavez owns ... most big oil players have
> given up on Chavez oil as an "economical" choice of extraction. The
> fact is what LIGHT oil is left to be extracted is 10,000 feet under
> the sea ... and if you've ever tried to work on an oil rig in the
> middle of the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane you might
> understand why extraction costs would be EXPENSIVE. As the U.S. does
> not currently own the land the Saudis do, nor does the U.S. own the
> sea the Brazilians do, nor does the U.S. own the land the Russians
> do ... which is where what remains of the LARGE LIGHT OIL fields
> which have not been depleted ... those countries can charge whatever
> they like for the product you need in order to drive in a car to
> get a sandwich at the 7-11 when you are hungry. In summary, if you
> don't like the price of oil ... perhaps you should move to Iraq and
> help them get it out of the ground ... or perhaps you should tell
> the U.S. tech companies to double or triple the price of computing
> equipment sent to Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc. to make up for the increase
> in oil EXTRACTION costs.

Nov 20 12:36 PM

[Chase88:]

You can round-trip sell any futures contract yourself - please do it, you will lose money. Just set a simultaneous limit order to buy and sell at the same price. There is 0 profit in it and you get double charged commissions. There is 0 net pricing effect on the market. In fact these type of round trip trades are practiced consistently in every single market from equities to currency. It provides liquidity and velocity to the market and insures better pricing of the assets.

What this can manipulate is a company's balance sheet as it pumps up revenues while also increasing expenses - there is no change in net income but they can inflate themselves to look like they do much more business than is actually done. Enron used to be one big practitioner of this and while it is questionable it is hardly a worthwhile pursuit when there is so much more blatantly wrong with the capital markets.

Nothing really to see here. There are plenty of real scams out there that do a lot more damage than this one. Put this one in the same category as naked shorting and speculation. The reason oil is going up is, before Lehman and now, is because the market is expecting another crisis and they are transferring capital from liquidity into harder assets in anticipation.

Nov 20 02:02 PM

[Dragoman:]

Nice idea:
"Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for Goldman Sachs.." to paraphrase JKF, though Churchill words might also be tangled to nicely describe the situation:
"Never in the field of financial misadventure, have so many paid so much to so few.."


On Nov 12 03:25 AM chris coonan wrote:

> Goldman Sachs doesn't seem to be doing America any favors lately....but
> America has been doing a lot for them.

Nov 20 03:26 PM

[The Greates...:]

This oil saga began in 1996, combining with the closing of 26 refineries on the west coast alone. Then the re-writing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act as listed below. That 262 page bill gave way too much of a free hand in pricing to the big money in financing and big oil and those who own and produce the product. Your government did this with full knowledge of the coming decade and the damage it would cause, that is why most of Congress members are millionaires today. We, as Americans need to get term limits in our congress, with no exceptions.
We can all blame Phil Graham with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act passed in 2001. That 262-page bill led to the Enron mess, the sub-prime lending disaster, and opened the door to the “Dark Energy” speculation trading.
For some good reading on this subject check out this site.
Global Research.
www.globalresearch.ca/...

Also read more about it at this site:
losangeles.injuryboard...

I urge Americans everywhere to call, write, email and fax your representative and tell them we want off oil today. Stop sending $25 to 35 Billion a month to countries that are not our friends.
Term limits for our Congress will result in change for America.

Nov 20 07:55 PM

[The Greates...:]

Yet, if you want proof, to see what is the truth, just take notice of how oil and the price of fuel is never mentioned by one, single member in Congress, or anywhere in our government today.

Nov 20 08:01 PM

[The Greates...:]

Term limits in Congress are a must if America is going to survive as a nation.
Congress needs a total reform with no more then two terms just like the president. Lobbyist should be banned from the Halls of Congress forever.
They (Congress) are wrangling a Health Bill reform today, but you can be sure it does not come anyway near the health package they receive. If we as Americans could stop sending $25-35 Billion a month to oil producing countries that are not our friends, then we could rebuild out economy. The cost of fuel is choking our country and the world. And we are not in a recession, we at the doors of another Great Depression.

Last Friday’s unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics is anything but a green shoot. The official U-3 unemployment number is 10.2%. The broader and more comprehensive official unemployment number, the U-6, is at 17.5%. The U-6 counts all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, and all the people who dropped off unemployment benefits because their unemployment benefits ran out. John Williams at Shadowstats.com suggests that real unemployment is actually running at 22%, which, by our calculation, is approaching Great Depression unemployment numbers...

Nov 20 08:11 PM

[The Greates...:]

If you had something that everyone wanted, needed and almost could not live without, what would you tell everyone. That we are running out of it, of course, and then you would through mergers, limit the amount of players involved, then through legislation, monopolize it legally, and then control the supply limiting the ability to supply the demand. If it walks like a duck, quack like a duck, then it probably is a duck. All of the sake of greed, we need term limits in government ASAP.
Call, write, email and fax your representative today, tell them we want off oil.

Nov 20 08:20 PM

[The Greates...:]

I still believe this is a great article and should be sent to every member in Congress today.

Nov 21 01:21 PM

[boisterousbob:]

You completely miss the point. There is absolutely no need to go to all the trouble and expense of actually producing oil, in order to benefit from the schemes the author outlines.


On Nov 19 03:47 PM GhostOfSpec wrote:

> There is a bit of paranoia going on here. If oil prices really were
> massively manipulated to much higher than they "should" be then new
> companies would enter the market, produce oil, and collect big profits.
> Granted, this takes time but it would happen.
>
> The oil markets do have strange nonlinearities. However, as the
> first post pointed out, oil prices will continue to go up, up, and
> up in the long term since there is a finite quantity of oil and the
> demand for oil increases almost every year. (Oil demand has dropped
> but that is only because of massive recession and an oil price that
> hit $140/barrel).
>
> Most of the easy to extract oil has been found and is being pumped
> out. Newer oil discoveries tend to cost much more to extract since
> they are deep underwater or in difficult forms such as tar sands.
>
>
> So, a paranoid conspiracy theory cannot account for high oil prices.
> It can merely account for temporary bubbles & nonlinearities.

Nov 21 07:16 PM

[The Greates...:]

If we had gone with Thomas Edison, we would all be driving electric cars today, we would not have global warming. The oil industry as a whole has manipulated their product by shutting down refineries, thereby controlling a product that every, single American has to use. It is a monopoly, pure and simple and should be treated by our legislature side of our government as monopoly and investigated to the full extent of our anti trust laws! Call your representative today and tell them we want off oil now. We need term limits in congress.

Nov 22 09:32 AM

[The Greates...:]

Oil is a relic that needs to go the way of the dinosaur, and the fact that this industry has misrepresented numbers is a lot like the “Peak Oil” theory.

10 oil tankers being held off the shore of the BK for two months waiting for the price of oil to go up is not a sign of a monopoly.
bigpondnews.com/articl...

The practices have been used by the oil industry in years past in a effort to drive up the world price of crude oil. It is costing around $75,000 a day to store the oil in tankers, but when your making the money this industry is, that’s just pocket change.

Nov 23 09:34 AM

[User 131973:]

There may be a future shortage of conventional oil, but there is no energy shortage. We need to adapt our energy use to natural gas for commercial vehicles and large personal vehicles, also to producing electricity . We also need to fully exploit shale oil, conventional oil, methyl hydrates, biofuels, and all other forms of alternative energy. This monomania around conventional oil is the problem. The solution is multiple types of energy which will reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. We must make it harder to manipulate prices, and jail those who do it.


On Nov 11 01:32 PM ryanclarke wrote:

> Sir, while I agree 100% with your assertion oil prices are controlled
> ... or manipulated ... on a short term basis by both big oil and
> big banks ... I DISAGREE 100% with your assertion that there is no
> shortage of oil. I'll go as far to say only someone who has absolutely
> no understanding of world economics or history would say ... "there
> is no shortage of oil." There is a shortage of oil in the U.S. for
> a very simple reason. The resource has been "depleted" within U.S.
> boundaries and even if a huge NEW oil field was found underneath
> Oklahoma ... cities would have to be destroyed in the process to
> "dig up the oil." The fact is the "easy oil to extract" which is
> "easy to make into gasoline" is MOSTLY GONE. By "easy oil to extract"
> I mean oil which is a few hundred feet ... at the most ... under
> the ground as well as under a great deal of pressure so that it flows
> to the surface with little effort. Such oil is LIGHT and pours with
> ease unlike the gooey syrup the Saudis are currently attempting to
> extract from beneath the desert within the confines of their country.
> Such HEAVY oil is extremely expensive to extract ... which is why
> the LIGHT oil in Saudi land was extracted first. The same goes with
> the heavy black sludge Chavez owns ... most big oil players have
> given up on Chavez oil as an "economical" choice of extraction. The
> fact is what LIGHT oil is left to be extracted is 10,000 feet under
> the sea ... and if you've ever tried to work on an oil rig in the
> middle of the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of a hurricane you might
> understand why extraction costs would be EXPENSIVE. As the U.S. does
> not currently own the land the Saudis do, nor does the U.S. own the
> sea the Brazilians do, nor does the U.S. own the land the Russians
> do ... which is where what remains of the LARGE LIGHT OIL fields
> which have not been depleted ... those countries can charge whatever
> they like for the product you need in order to drive in a car to
> get a sandwich at the 7-11 when you are hungry. In summary, if you
> don't like the price of oil ... perhaps you should move to Iraq and
> help them get it out of the ground ... or perhaps you should tell
> the U.S. tech companies to double or triple the price of computing
> equipment sent to Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc. to make up for the increase
> in oil EXTRACTION costs.

Nov 27 04:57 PM

[john s. gordon:]

'monomania around conventional oil' is created & maintained by the houston oil millionaires who have profited from it since 1953.
> jack

Nov 28 01:38 PM

[john s. gordon:]

greates' -
i like electric cars too but don;t forget as long as you have to charge em up with juice from a coal-fired power plant you haven't solved the CO2 buildup global-warming problem.
use nuke/wind/solar instead but you have to build the necessary transmission grid first.
> jack

Nov 28 01:42 PM

[The Greates...:]

Jack,
Until we take greed out of this equation and make companies accountable for creating monpolies, get rid of lobbiest, and have congress seats available only for term limits, they will run the worlds economy completly into the ground. Gas is around $2.50 a gallon, that has always beem their target price, even at the risk of world wide economic collapes. I like nuclear power, have worked inside the industry, clean and safe. Solar should be utlized to the max as well as wind for more clean source energy.

Nov 28 02:22 PM

[The Greates...:]

Jack,
Until we take greed out of this equation and make companies accountable for creating monpolies, get rid of lobbiest, and have congress seats available only for term limits, they will run the worlds economy completly into the ground. Gas is around $2.50 a gallon, that has always beem their target price, even at the risk of world wide economic collapes. I like nuclear power, have worked inside the industry, clean and safe. Solar should be utlized to the max as well as wind for more clean source energy.

Nov 28 02:22 PM

[The Greates...:]

The power of a few elite companies, persons and countries to control such a worldwide commodity is beyond comprehension for most average people. This scenario was vigorously planned and hatched well into the late 1990’s. The very wars being staged today is a direct result in the control of this product, it is nice to see at least a few schools and hospitals coming out of the deal. It would be wise to press for tax deductions for the average American to install solar panels, wind turbines for residential use as well as commercial. The plug in parking meters could be a reality if our government would take this current crisis seriously. So many options, so little time, greed may be the undoing of us all.

Nov 28 02:39 PM

[The Greates...:]

The Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest, expanded its anchorage area to accommodate increasing demand from oil traders storing fuel at sea and more idling ships awaiting cargoes.
Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch waterways authority, designated an area 15 kilometers (9 miles) northwest off the North Sea resort of Scheveningen as a new anchoring zone, the port authority said in a statement on its Web site today.
“Many tankers are lying at anchor here to wait for orders or for speculative considerations,” the port said in the statement. “The popularity of North Sea anchoring spots has increased considerably.”
The combined capacity of ships hired to store oil products expanded more than fivefold since April, according to data from Simpson Spence & Young Ltd., the world’s second-largest shipbroker. About two-thirds of those cargoes are in Europe, and additional carriers are also holding crude. Some merchant ships are also anchoring because they can’t find cargoes.
Traders can buy cargoes, store them and sell them at higher prices through derivatives contracts to lock in profit. In Europe, vessels are also parked off the U.K. coast at locations including Southwold, to the east.
The number of waiting vessels off Rotterdam has risen to an average of 50 to 60 with peaks of 90, compared with 40 before the economic crisis, Dutch news agency ANP reported. The new area lies along the shipping route to Scandinavia and the Baltic countries and can anchor about 15 vessels, the port said.

Nov 28 02:47 PM

[swimmer11:]

Why did oil fall by $110 per barrel last year?


On Nov 14 09:05 AM The Greatest Rip Off of our Time wrote:

> Reasons for the run up in crude oil pricing given by the industry
> in 08.
> Rebel attacks in Nigeria.
> Unprecedented maintenance issues at the refineries.
> Rough seas at the Mexican ports.
> Fog at the Houston port.
> Pipeline interruption’s ANYWHERE in the oil producing countries.
>
> Problems getting the right summer mix in gasoline.
> Problems getting the right winter mix in gasoline.
> Instability in Iran.
> Rogue Traders
> Demand is running ahead of supply.
> Hurricane season.
> This list just keep growing and growing.
> China’s growing car population and government backed stimulus economy.
>
> India producing 50,000 cars a year, and using the lottery to give
> them out.
> Hurricane Bill came close to off-shore platforms off the Canadian
> coast.
> Hurricane Ida threatens gulf coast.
> The Peak Oil Theory.
> The dollar is down seems to be the only reason they have left for
> oil rising today.

Nov 29 10:54 PM

[swimmer11:]

How many companies are in this monopoly, and who are they?


On Nov 22 09:32 AM The Greatest Rip Off of our Time wrote:

> If we had gone with Thomas Edison, we would all be driving electric
> cars today, we would not have global warming. The oil industry as
> a whole has manipulated their product by shutting down refineries,
> thereby controlling a product that every, single American has to
> use. It is a monopoly, pure and simple and should be treated by our
> legislature side of our government as monopoly and investigated to
> the full extent of our anti trust laws! Call your representative
> today and tell them we want off oil now. We need term limits in
> congress.

Nov 29 11:29 PM