M Welsh

Maps for the Park

Heading to the state park outside of Hanover for the weekend. Should be a blast.

Kayaking and bike riding as well as camping with the girls and their cousins.

More later….

Pictures

Cordorus State Park

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/18/business/oil.php

This will not have a huge impact yet, but it will soon as regualtion and awareness on capitol hill of the actual loophole.

CSPAN link: Energy Security Hearing CSPAN

• ICE Futures are adding 30 50% to Barrel and Pump Prices
• Futures Traders are driving to failure like a Tick engorging itself the price of oil
• Traders are screwing with the price and they don’t care about the oil bubble

Quote:

“U.S. regulators are feeling pressure from Senate lawmakers to rein in what they see as excessive speculation in commodities markets, which they believe is the culprit behind record prices for crude oil that have risen nearly 40 percent since January.”

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/0502.html

This is an excerpt from the article i found interesting.

All this is well and official. But how today’s oil prices are really determined is done by a process so opaque only a handful of major oil trading banks such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley have any idea who is buying and who selling oil futures or derivative contracts that set physical oil prices in this strange new world of “paper oil.”

With the development of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past decade or more, the way has opened for the present speculative bubble in oil prices.

Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the “tail that wags the dog.”

A June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices,” noted, “…there is substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.”

What the Senate committee staff documented in the report was a gaping loophole in US Government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge a herd of elephants could walk through it. That seems precisely what they have been doing in ramping oil prices through the roof in recent months.

The Senate report was ignored in the media and in the Congress.