thank you for that sharing, haim, and i do not have much of a game plan for speculation since too busy saving money from desert that is blown to bits in a different desert
i do wish to re-engage with short gdx puts, but not at this level
i am engaged with usd by proxy hkd, but wish to swing the other way when/if usd is judged to be punishingly toppy, which it is not
euro is way high even after all this greece fretting
imo, the trouble with debt deflation is that all debts suffer, but at different times, and so the currencies are just taking turns to do their dive
in the mean time, just in in-tray
Reform is surely needed - but not in the form of even more regulation. The thing that needs to be reformed first and foremost is the monetary system, but not by regulating it more, but by returning it to free market principles.
Adopting Hayek's proposal of competing private currencies would be a good first step (i.e., take away the money issuing monopoly from the State and its banking cartel).
In short, the focus is on entirely the wrong thing here. Let us recapitulate what actually led to the CFTC hearings on position limits (leaving aside for a moment the fact that introducing them would be utterly futile and do far more harm than good).
It was the politically unpopular rise in energy prices that brought the discussion forth. Whenever something happens in the markets that politicians don't like, a hue and cry goes up against 'speculators' (when something like oil is going up) or 'naked short sellers' (when something like the stocks of Merril, Goldman Sachs, etc. goes down).
This is nothing but a distraction from the true elephant in the room - the Federal Reserve with its unlimited backstop guarantee for the perpetually de facto insolvent banking system and its creation of oodles of money from thin air.
Oil prices went up when speculators bought oil, but why did speculators buy oil? Did they all sit down one day and decide 'now would be a good time to antagonize Washington politicians by driving up the oil price'? Or could it have something to do with US money AMS growth exploding to 20% annualized in 2001-2002, China's money growth reaching 25% p.a., Europe's 16% p.a. (and so forth) and the lagged effect of all this money printing then affecting the commodity markets in the following years?
It is testament to eight decades of successful statist propaganda that seemingly no-one stops to actually ask the right questions.
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