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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (841)	7/23/2008 8:42:56 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

Oh, and here's more information. Did you know that alot of the oil futures trades are transacted through the Dubai Mercantile Exchange? So we have an unregulated oil futures market being transacted on the Dubai exchange. When Enron was still in existence, they used these same unregulated markets and their own exchange Enron online to manipulate California electricity prices. When we all found out that they were stealing from the public blind, they were prosecuted and Enron went out of business. Now we have a situation where we are allowing Arabs to set the price of oil futures. And guess what? They are stealing us blind. At $135 per barrel, we send $1 trillion per year out of this country. That represents 15% of American citizens annual take home pay. We're going broke and the Arabs are stealing us blind. I say close the Enron Loophole asap. washingtontimes.com

To: RetiredNow who wrote (841)	7/23/2008 11:53:33 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

Changes in regulation, or even lack of regulation isn't the real point here. The world oil market is too big to manipulate consistently in one direction over time, by Exxon Mobil, or company like Enron, or futures traders even if there wasn't a single regulation covering it. If the Saudis really are sitting on oil and refusing to deliver it below a certain price that is above the market clearing rate than they (or OPEC generally) could be considered to be in a certain way, manipulating the market, and they, in certain scenarios, do have the ability to control supply enough to seriously raise the price, but that has nothing to do with regulation (US regulations wouldn't really be effective against OPEC anyway), but simply keeping supply off the market. That isn't what is normally talked about when people talk about market manipulation, and if that is what's happening cracking down on speculators won't help at all.