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POPSCommission Finds Oil Price Manipulationby
Wisco Yesterday 3:45 PM The article goes on to say "...overall, most experts say the incidents are so scattered, and the energy market so large, that it's unlikely a single trader or group of traders can have substantial sway over prices." Of course, if this turns out to be an even fairly common crime, then the cumulative effect could be much larger. After the big corporate crime wave of '04, I think it's foolish to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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POPSSpeculators Chase the Money not Make the Money
I have a couple concerns about this story. One, even though it's a very small incident that had a negligible impact on the markets, I have a feeling politicians are going to use it as an example to introduce laws prohibiting or reducing oil trading. This despite the fact that there's even more research out there that says trading has not artificially inflated prices. It's supply and demand people - demand is greatly increasing, while supply is staying flat - of course prices are going to skyrocket. Second, it uses the correlation between the increase in oil price and the amount of money going into oil futures. Yet another basic market principle people - investors are going to chase hot items. Oil starts to go up, people anticipate it continuing to go up due to supply/demand issues, investors invest in it to hopefully make a profit. Finally, don't forget the dollar - people use oil as a hedge against inflation, which his been going up due in part to the weakening dollar.
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POPSFood Stamp Use Soars In MA & Elsewhere “I think low-income families are faced and will be faced this winter with the difficult choice of eating or heating a home,” said Patricia Baker, senior policy analyst for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the poor. “We’re seeing prices escalating, and anything that a family can access to help them buy basic food for their families is critical.”
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POPSHey Pal, Can You Spare $100 Billion? Since then the shelves of many shops and supermarkets have been largely bare, except when owners are prepared to risk being caught charging prices that reflect the cost of importing goods from South Africa. Huge queues form outside any bakery selling bread at a controlled price, and demand far outstrips supply.
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POPSMagical Thinking vs. Reality amount to $1.05 to $1.38 per gallon, or 42 to 55 percent of ethanol's wholesale market price. Ethanol does not reduce gasoline prices. If you lived in urban areas that used reformulated gasoline last summer -- that's the environmentally "clean" gasoline required for areas with air pollution problems -- you might have paid up to 60 cents a gallon more for gasoline. That's because the federal government required oil refineries to use 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, regardless of price, and gas pump prices last summer reflected the fact that ethanol was twice as expensive as conventional gas in wholesale markets, and far more costly to deliver. The truth is that if ethanol has commercial merit, it doesn't need the subsidy. And if it doesn't, no amount of subsidy will bestow it.
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POPSNow Bush Is Appeasing Iran joined envoys from France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany in talks with Saeed Jalili -- Iran's nuclear negotiator and an Ahmadinejad confidant -- about incentives to give to Tehran. ven with record oil prices, mismanagement has driven the Iranian economy into the ground. On July 14, the Ministry of Housing reported an "historical" 125% rise in housing prices. The same day, Tabnak, a news Web site run by a former head of the IRGC, admitted foodstuff inflation had reached 50% annually. On July 8, 2008, a National Iranian Oil Company executive acknowledged in the Iranian press that, without significant investment in infrastructure, Iranian oil production would decline each year by 300,000 barrels a day. In the past month alone, Iranian workers have struck for unpaid wages at the Khodro automotive plant (which assembles Peugeots), the Alburz Tire Company, and the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane factory.
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