Bush’s Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, is against removing speculators from oil futures; is he correct?
March 8, 2010 by
Filed under business group activities
Says that it is purely a supply and demand issue to explain the doubling of prices in a year. By the way, this is from his Bio…
“From there, Secretary Bodman went to Fidelity Venture Associates, a division of the Fidelity Investments. In 1983 he was named President and Chief Operating Officer of Fidelity Investments and a Director of the Fidelity Group of Mutual Funds. In 1987, he joined Cabot Corporation, a Boston-based Fortune 300 company with global business activities in specialty chemicals and materials, where he served as Chairman, CEO, and a Director. Over the years, he has been a Director of many other publicly owned corporations.”
It would be illegal to remove them.
No he is not correct. The speculators have been a major reason for oil prices going through the roof.
I don’t think he is against removing them—but I think he’s against regulating speculative market trading (or closing the Enron Loophole—or for the development of alternative energy sources).
He’s correct from his personal perspective, since his speculator buddies would lose the farm if the Enron Loophole were closed. However from the perspective of us poor slobs paying $4 for a gallon of gas, it’s the right thing to do.
It is supply and demand at it’s worst, since a VERY tiny group of speculators hold all of the cards. They then get to set ANY price that they want on the secondary market and THAT is what has driven prices over the top.
The Saudi Oil Minister’s comments about the US needing to look to itself for the cause of the current manufactured “crisis” is dead on the mark. When the fox guards the hen-house, chickens will bleed profusely.
If the Enron Loophole is left intact, ANY new energy markets will be TOTALLY at the mercy of the unregulated speculators and NO progress towards lowering costs will be possible.
I don’t know about Sam Bodman, but I just read Obama released a plan to regulate oil futures. Sounds good to me. We are all experiencing what happened to the lending market when our administration relaxed its regulation. You seem like a smart person do you know if the Bush administration has relaxed regulation in the oil futures area as well.
Speculation is the very nature of the market. There are people speculating it will go down, others it will go up. There IS no removing them.
The US does not have the power or ability to remove oil speculators.
We can prevent them, from operating inside the US.
But we can do nothing about oil speculators in other countries
Or at other commoties exchanges.
So all we would accomplish, is to take american produced oil off the world market.
Sounds good right ?
Except most of the american oil exported, is not suitable to be refined into gasoline.
It is heavy crude, not light crude.
And we in america, do not have much use for heavy crude oil.
Thats why we export it.
MOst do not want to ‘remove’ the speculators. They only wish the FTC would use the laws they already have in place to help conitor and regulate the speculators. This administration seems reluctant to do that and it seems obvious that it is for personal reasons not what is in the best interests of the country.