Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sedohr Nod who wrote (125703)	3/7/2012 3:39:49 PM
From: TideGlider	3 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

There is plenty of shooting in Washington State. lol Amazing that Kenneth hasn't noticed it. Lots of weird stuff there too! Like serial killers!!

To: Sedohr Nod who wrote (125703)	3/7/2012 3:51:40 PM
From: TideGlider	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

(One of the very few times Bernie Sanders make sense. What they need to do is increase the margin requirement to reduce speculation.) Oil Speculators Must Be Stopped and the CFTC “Needs to Obey the Law”: Sen. Bernie Sanders The recent rise in gasoline prices has prompted Congressional hearings and a call to federal regulators to curb what many see as the cause for the spike: oil speculators. A House subcommittee held a hearing on "The American Energy Initiative" Wednesday morning that focused solely on rising pump prices. Seventy members of Congress signed a letter this week to regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), urging immediate action on oil speculation by enacting "strong position limits to eliminate excessive oil speculation" and to "utilize all authorities available to…make sure that the price of oil and gasoline reflects the fundamentals of supply and demand." The CFTC was given authority in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to impose position caps on oil traders beginning in January 2011. These limits have not yet been implemented by the CFTC. In an interview Wednesday with The Daily Ticker, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) says the CFTC doesn't "have the will" to enact these limits and "needs to obey the law." "What we need to do is…limit the amount of oil any one company can control on the oil futures market," says Sanders, who has long advocated limits on speculation. "The function of these speculators is not to use oil but to make profits from speculation, drive prices up and sell." The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has increased nearly 30 cents in one month according to the AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report. U.S. oil prices have jumped more than 6% since Feb. 1 even though oil demand in the U.S. is at its lowest level since April 2007. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that the world's oil supply rose by 1.3 million barrels a day in the last three months of 2011 while world demand increased just 0.7 million barrels per day during that same time period. This is not the first time oil speculators have been blamed for higher energy prices. In 2008 U.S. oil prices skyrocketed to $145 per barrel and gasoline prices averaged well above $4 per gallon. There were calls to increase domestic offshore drilling and legislation was proposed that would have required buyers of oil to physically own and store the oil barrels. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit causing oil and gasoline prices to plummet. Blaming the speculators may seem like scapegoating to some (namely, oil traders) but speculators control more than 80 percent of the energy futures market, up from 30 percent a decade ago, and there is mounting evidence speculation contributes to higher prices: At a Senate hearing last June, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, said speculation was driving up the price of a barrel of oil by as much as 40 percent. A study conducted by the nonpartisan consumer advocacy group Consumer Federation of America found that speculation caused the average American household to spend an additional $600 on gasoline expenditures in 2011. Moreover, the report concluded that excessive speculation (which the organization estimated added about $30 per barrel to the cost of oil in 2011) drained the U.S. economy of more than $200 billion in consumer spending in 2011. The St. Louis Federal Reserve has also recommended that the CFTC do more to prevent oil speculators from driving up the price of oil. Fed officials studied the effect of oil traders on the price oil over five years and determined that "speculation contributed to around 15 percent to oil prices increases." CFTC Chair Gary Gensler declared last year that "huge inflows of speculative money create a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives up commodity prices." There are many factors reflected in the current price of oil, including good old-fashioned supply and demand, as wells a geopolitical issues like fears of an attack on Iran. Rising gasoline prices are a huge pocketbook issue for many Americans, reason alone for politicians to focus on the role of the speculators.