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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (137846)	6/28/2008 1:42:46 AM
From: Sr K	Respond to of 362667

Easy Target, but Not the Right One nytimes.com By JOE NOCERA Published: June 28, 2008 So now we know: it’s all the fault of those damnable speculators. They’re the ones to blame as the price of oil tops $140 a barrel. It’s not our government’s fault for failing to come up with a credible energy policy — that can’t be it. Nor is the problem the weak dollar, or the voracious energy appetite of the Chinese, or those pesky rebels in Nigeria who are trying to blow up their country’s oil pipelines. And it’s certainly not the fault of you and me for driving gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s. It has to be those speculators. They are the only villains in sight. This was “first let’s kill all the speculators” week on Capitol Hill, and it was not a pretty sight. On Monday, the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee held an eight-hour hearing (!), the sole purpose of which was to decry “excessive speculation.” “Have speculators hijacked trading on the futures exchange?” asked the Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak. His answer throughout the day — as he “grilled” an array of sympathetic academics and futures market critics — was a resounding yes. ... Yes, it was wonderful theater, and great blood sport. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the price of oil. ... Then there’s the fact that the commodities markets don’t work like equity markets, where a small amount of trading can lift every share of a company’s stock. In commodities trading, every contract has a buyer and a seller, meaning that for every bet that prices are going up, somebody else is betting they are going down. Why doesn’t that short interest depress prices?