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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary H who wrote (85990)	5/28/2002 6:44:34 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116830

So if "round-trip" trading drives up price through an increased number of trades, forward sales of a commodity(gold?) resulting in a lower number of trades would necessarily drive prices lower. Why isn't Gray Davis (Gov. -CA) looking into rumor bullion banks were forcing miners into forward sales? Round-Trip Trading of Calif. Power Probed Tue May 21, 4:57 PM ET By Chris Baltimore WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. energy regulators trying to get to the bottom of California's electricity crisis on Tuesday ordered 150 energy firms to file sworn statements disclosing whether they made sham trades to inflate revenue. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (news - web sites) pinpointed the practice of so-called "wash" trades or "round-trip" trades, used by companies to falsely boost sales volumes without risk by simultaneously buying and reselling wholesale electricity. The trading strategy is not explicitly illegal for off-exchange transactions. The Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) has launched a probe of the impact of wash trading on corporate balance sheets. Energy firms Reliant Resources Inc., CMS Energy Corp and Williams Cos. Inc have already admitted to using wash trades. The three companies are among scores of power suppliers California accuses of deliberately inflating wholesale electricity prices during the state's crisis in late 2000 and early 2001. The state has demanded refunds of about $9 billion in a case pending before FERC. The companies have denied wrongdoing in California, which was rocked by a series of blackouts, a tenfold rise in wholesale power prices and the bankruptcy of California's largest utility. SWORN STATEMENT REQUIRED Donald Gelinas, FERC's associate director of markets, said the agency wants to know whether all power suppliers involved in the Western market in 2000 and 2001 executed wash trades. Companies must file a sworn statement by May 31 indicating whether they did. "If you so admit, provide transaction by transaction details for all such transactions your company engaged in," Gelinas said in the order. Names of traders who executed them as well as copies of e-mails, memos and telephone logs must also be submitted. FERC's new, sweeping order covers all electricity sellers that did business in Western markets in 2000 and 2001. Among the 150 companies told to provide information were Calpine Corp , Cinergy , Duke Energy , Constellation Energy , Royal Dutch/Shell Group's Coral Energy, PacifiCorp , and Powerex, a unit of Canada's BC Hydro. FERC also threatened to revoke a firm's right to buy and sell power in the wholesale market if it failed to cooperate. The same companies must also respond by Wednesday to a separate FERC request issued earlier this month for information about other questionable trading strategies used by giant Enron Corp. to boost its California profits. The recent disclosures of wash trades by Reliant, CMS and Williams were a blow to share prices in a sector already hit hard by the collapse of Enron. Reliant's wash trades artificially boosted its revenues by 10 percent over three years, and at CMS by $4.4 billion over 18 months. Williams said its trades had no effect on revenues. TRADES USED STRATEGY TO SET PRICES? Experts said it was unclear if wash trades were widespread or directly contributed to California's power crisis. Some companies may have used the strategy to try to make prices rise, said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California's Energy Institute. For example, two firms might agree to sell each other power in a wash trade at $170 per megawatt. "Well, then I may be able to go somebody else and say: 'Look, there are all these trades taking place at $170, that's what the price is'," he said. Steve Fetter, president of the energy advisory firm Regulation UnFettered, based in Rumson, New Jersey, said the wash trades were probably "gamesmanship" between firms in the highly competitive power market. "Now that it's public, it won't happen any more," Fetter said. "The trading volumes we see going forward will have a certain amount of validity that clearly they did not have based on past information." The FERC, which reluctantly imposed price caps on wholesale power in 10 Western states last summer, has been under pressure from California lawmakers for a year to take tough action. Two Senate committees last week held hearings into Enron's role in the energy shortages of a year ago. Sen. Byron Dorgan, head of a Senate Commerce panel, urged the Bush administration to appoint a special counsel to probe West Coast power trades. In three internal Enron documents released by the FERC on May 6, the company out complex trading schemes with names like "Death Star" and "Fat Boy" that were intended to exploit the electricity grid and create phantom demand in California. Last week, California Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites) urged FERC to expand its probe of sham trades to include Dynegy and Reliant. Davis, a Democrat who is running for re-election in November, has long blamed energy firms for exacerbating the state's power crisis. story.news.yahoo.com

To: Gary H who wrote (85990)	5/28/2002 8:59:55 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116830

What you want to do is sell all your stocks and their absolute all time high. There are two ways to do that and you can take advantage of these methods by buying our products. The first way is to observe the price of the stock as it rises then falls for its entire life cycle, then record the peak price. Sell the stock short on the market at is all time most-future low and then jump in the Mark-9 Universal Retro-Time Machine and go back to the all time past-high and borrow the stock. (You do not have to returnm it in this case). This is so you have it to short. The Mark-9 is a cheap easy to afford time machine. It is sized to hold a million shares and the occupant plus weekend luggage. It may return in time up to 200 years. Of course people who thought time machines can go forward are stupid. The future is under construction and there are obvious hazards. The past has already happened so it is safe to return. You should avoid time-anomalies or contradictions, It is not as some people believe, paradoxical that one could kill your father before you were conceived, but it may cause a time discontinuity or fork in time. Or you may find that it is impossible to do, as it has already been factored by the continual flow of the past into the future and back. Since reverse time is infinite as well as forward, everthing possible has already happened and is being recycled by the cosmic time replicator, which reuses past events with least energy. The Mark-9 taps into the cosmic replicator and recreates past events exactly as they happened. Critics of this method call it counterfeit time, or plastic time, but it occurs in the same space and time as real time so it is possible to interfere with the time-energy wave. Some think it may be possible to build a future jumping machine, but what happens is a worse paradox than the past. You create the future in part out of a vacuum. Nothing actually exists or moves then. When the present catches up, it may collide with uncertain results. (Imagine running into a future car from the past on the hiway while it is doing a U-turn after time-landing.) Of course there is no way of knowing if we aren't already doing that i.e. colliding with past events in the future. On the other hand, the future is appearing out of nowhere, already formed as if it knew about the past. Perhaps the time replicator is playing a trick on us, and building the future out of the past and feeding it backwards to us. After all, I can safely say that nothing in a particular spot in the future has any right to be there, as it has not happened yet. So that it appears as time moves forward must mean it has been placed there at a future time. There is a second method that involves the law of certain things or perceived impending doom. People who are causing things to happen cause them subliminally so to speak without conscious effort. So company presidents, with a will to fail grandly are unconsciously causing their companies to go bankrupt as they think they should. They cannot help it. Their subconscious has been programmed. They know in advance how much money they are going to lose. This will-to-fail and accompanying stress can be detected by contacting them and three other executives, and the secretaries of them and listening to their answers about questions on their happiness with production and the future of their share price and probability of company success with our Mark-IV voice stress analyser. The signal response of their answers are graphed and psychologically analysed as well with our Mark-17 Execu-Psyche software package for content and truthfullness. Bear in mind that a liar's test has to be administered as well. This tests the degree of pathological lying ability or psychopathia creditum. This must be factored, as very good executive have the infinite capacity to lie undetectably as they view themselves as irresponsible anyway. As stress rises and deceitfullness rises over time, this is compared to the number of offshore companies selling the stock with on-balance volume software.(Mark-16 package). A high-stress bunch of liars signals a sell condition. EC<:-}