Are speculators the innocent scapegoats they're so often made out to be?

[larsonstdoc]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/47837647

Are Speculators 'Attacking' Spain and Italy?


It may be hard to tell, but a subtle shift is going on behind the scenes in Europe.

Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have denounced “speculators” who are “unjustly attacking” Italy and Spain.

Of course, politicians raging against speculators is nothing new. The demonization of "the Speculator" has been a running political gag for at least a century.

But in context there seems to be something else going on: the center of Europe is laying the groundwork for rescuing the periphery, without imposing the kind of harsh controls put on Greece and Ireland.

[Geolibertarian]

Of course, politicians raging against speculators is nothing new. The demonization of "the Speculator" has been a running political gag for at least a century.

Sorry, but I must respectfully disagree. Speculators are not the innocent scapegoats that the privilege-worshiping Austrian School wants so desperately for everyone to blindly believe:

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The great German hyper-inflation of 1922-1923 is one of the most widely cited examples by those who insist that private bankers, not governments, should control the money system. What is practically unknown about that sordid affair is that it occurred under the auspices of a privately owned and controlled central bank.

Up to then the Reichsbank had a form of private ownership but with substantial public control; the President and Directors were officials of the German government, appointed by the Emperor for life. There was a sharing of the revenue of the central bank between the private shareholders and the government. But shareholders had no power to determine policy.

The Allies' plan for the reconstruction of Germany after WWI came to be known as the Dawes Plan, named after General Charles Gates Dawes, a Chicago banker. The foreign experts delegated by the League of Nations to guide the economic recovery of Germany wanted a more free market orientation for the German central bank.

[Hjalmar] Schacht relates how the Allies had insisted that the Reichsbank be made more independent from the government:

"On May 26, 1922, the law establishing the independence of the Reichsbank and withdrawing from the Chancellor of the Reich any influence on the conduct of the Bank's business was promulgated."

This granting of total private control over the German currency became a key factor in the worst inflation of modern times.

The stage had already been set by the immense reparations payments. That they were payable in foreign currency would place a great continuing pressure on the Reichsmark far into the future.

HOW IS A CURRENCY DESTROYED?

In a sentence, a currency is destroyed by issuing or creating tremendously excessive amounts of it. Not just too much of it but far too much. This excessive issue can happen in several ways, for example by British counterfeiting as occurred with the U.S. Continental Currency, and with the French Assignats. The central bank itself might print too much currency, or the central bank might allow speculators to destroy a currency through excessive short selling of it, similar to short selling a company's shares, in effect allowing speculators to "issue" the currency.

The destruction of an already pressured national currency through speculation is what concerns us in this case. A related process was recently allowed to destroy several Asian currencies, which dropped over 50% against the Dollar in a few months time, in 1997-98, threatening the livelihood of millions.

It works like this: First there is some obvious weakness involved in the currency. In Germany's case it was World War One, and the need for foreign currency for reparations payments. In the case of the Asian countries, they had a need for U.S. dollars in order to repay foreign debts coming due.

Such problems can be solved over time and usually require national contribution toward their solution, in the form of taxes or temporary lowering of living standards. However, because currency speculation on a scale large enough to affect the currency's value is still erroneously viewed as a legitimate activity, private currency speculators can make a weak situation immeasurably worse and take billions of dollars in "profits" out of the situation by selling short the currency in question. This doesn't just involve selling currency that they own but making contracts to sell currency that they don't own -- to sell it short.

If done in large amounts, in a weak situation, such short selling soon has self-fulfilling results, driving down the value of the currency faster and further than it otherwise would have fallen. Then at some point, panic strikes, which causes widespread flight from the currency by those who actually hold it. It drops precipitously. The short selling speculators are then able to buy back the currency that they sold short, and obtain tremendous profits, at the expense of the producers and working people whose lives and enterprises were dependent on that currency.

The free market gang claim that it's all the fault of the government that the currency was weak in the first place. But by what logic does it follow that speculators take this money from those already in trouble? Currency speculation in such large amounts should be viewed as a form of aggression, no less harmful than dropping bombs on the country in question.

Industrialists should realize that when they allow such activity to be included under the umbrella of "business activity," they are making a serious error. They should help isolate such speculation and educate the populace on how destructive it is, so that it can be stopped through law.

Limitations could easily be placed on speculative currency transactions without limiting those that are a normal part of business and trading, while stopping the kind of transactions that are thinly disguised attacks on the country involved. Placing a small tax on such transactions would be a healthy first move.

TOO MANY GERMAN MARKS ISSUED

By July 1922 the German Mark fell to 300 marks for $1; in November it was at 9,000 to $1; by January 1923 it was at 49,000 to $1; by July 1923 it was at 1,100,000 to $1. It reached 2.5 trillion marks to $1 in mid November, 1923, varying from city to city.

In the monetary chaos Hamburg, Bremen and Kiel established private banks to issue money backed by gold and foreign exchange. The private Reichsbank printing presses had been unable to keep up and other private parties were given the authority to issue money. Schacht estimated that about half the money in circulation was private money from other than Reichsbank sources.

CAUSE OF THE FIRST INFLATION: SCHACHT'S FIRST "EXPLANATION"

There is often a false assumption made that the government allowed the mark to fall, in order to more easily pay off the war indemnity. But since the Versailles Treaty required payment in U.S. Dollars and British Pounds, the inflationary disorder actually made it much harder to raise such foreign exchange.

Hjalmar Schacht's 1967 book, The Magic of Money, presents what appears to be a contradictory explanation of the private Reichsbank's role in the inflation disaster.

First, in the hackneyed tradition of economists, he is prepared to let the private Reichsbank off the hook very easily and blame the government's difficult reparations situation instead. He minimized the connection of the private control of the central bank with the inflation as mere co-incidence....

THEN SCHACHT GIVES THE REAL EXPLANATION

Schacht was a lifelong member of the banking fraternity, reaching its highest levels. He may have felt compelled to give his banker peers and their public relations corps something innocuous to quote. But Schacht also had a streak of German nationalism, and more than that, an almost sacred devotion to a stable mark. He had watched helplessly as the hyper-inflation destroyed "his mark."

For whatever reasons, after 44 years he proceeded to let the cat out of the bag, with some truly remarkable admissions, which shatter the "accepted wisdom" the Anglo-American financial community has promulgated on the German hyper-inflation....

SCHACHT'S REVELATION

It was in describing his 1924 battles in stabilizing the Rentenmarks that Schacht made his revelation, giving the private mechanism of the hyper-inflation. Schacht was obviously very upset when the speculators continued to attack the new Rentenmark currency. By the end of the November 1923:

"The dollar reached an exchange rate of 12 trillion Rentenmarks on the free market of the Cologne Bourse. This speculation was not only hostile to the country's economic interests, it was also stupid. In previous years such speculation had been carried on either with loans which the Reichsbank granted lavishly, or with emergency money which one printed oneself, and then exchanged for Reichsmarks.

"Now, however, three things had happened. The emergency money had lost its value. It was no longer possible to exchange it for Reichsmarks. The loans formerly easily obtained from the Reichsbank were no longer granted, and the Rentenmark could not be used abroad. For these reasons the speculators were unable to pay for the dollars they had bought when payment became due (and they) made considerable losses."

Schacht is telling us that the excessive speculation against the mark -- the short selling of the mark -- was financed by lavish loans from the private Reichsbank. The margin requirements that the anti-mark speculators needed and without which they could not have attacked the mark was provided by the private Reichsbank!

This contradicts Schacht's earlier explanation, for there is no way to interpret or justify "lavishly" loaning to anti-mark speculators as "helping to keep the government's head above water." Just the opposite. Schacht was a bright fellow, and he wanted this point to be understood. He waited until he wrote the Magic of Money in 1967. His earlier book, The Stabilization of the Mark (1927), discussed inflation profiteering but did not clearly identify the private Reichsbank itself as financing such speculation, making it so convenient to go short the mark.

Thus it was a privately owned and privately controlled central bank, that made loans to private speculators, enabling them to speculate against the nation's currency. Whatever other pressures the currency faced (and they were substantial), such speculation helped create a one way market down for the Reichsmark. Soon a continuous panic set in, and not just speculators, but everyone else had to do what they could to get out of their marks, further fueling the disaster. This private factor has been largely unknown in America.

-- Stephen Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money, pp. 579-87

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[Geolibertarian]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html

Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation

Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

independent.co.uk
2 July 2010

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache – but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch – and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand.

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened.

[Continued...]


http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22948

Food Speculation: 'People Die From Hunger While Banks Make a Killing on Food'

It's not just bad harvests and climate change, speculators are also behind record prices. And it's the planet's poorest who pay

by John Vidal



Global Research, January 25, 2011
Guardian - 2011-01-23

Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks.

Oddly, there had been no drought, the usual cause of malnutrition and hunger in southern Africa, and there was plenty of food in the markets. For no obvious reason the price of staple foods such as maize and rice nearly doubled in a few months. Unusually, too, there was no evidence that the local merchants were hoarding food. It was the same story in 100 other developing countries. There were food riots in more than 20 countries and governments had to ban food exports and subsidise staples heavily.

The explanation offered by the UN and food experts was that a "perfect storm" of natural and human factors had combined to hyper-inflate prices. US farmers, UN agencies said, had taken millions of acres of land out of production to grow biofuels for vehicles, oil and fertiliser prices had risen steeply, the Chinese were shifting to meat-eating from a vegetarian diet, and climate-change linked droughts were affecting major crop-growing areas. The UN said that an extra 75m people became malnourished because of the price rises.

But a new theory is emerging among traders and economists. The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world.

As food prices soar again to beyond 2008 levels, it becomes clear that everyone is now being affected. Food prices are now rising by up to 10% a year in Britain and Europe. What is more, says the UN, prices can be expected to rise at least 40% in the next decade.

There has always been modest, even welcome, speculation in food prices and it traditionally worked like this. Farmer X protected himself against climatic or other risks by "hedging", or agreeing to sell his crop in advance of the harvest to Trader Y. This guaranteed him a price, and allowed him to plan ahead and invest further, and it allowed Trader Y to profit, too. In a bad year, Farmer X got a good return but in a good year Trader Y did better.

When this process of "hedging" was tightly regulated, it worked well enough. The price of real food on the real world market was still set by the real forces of supply and demand.

But all that changed in the mid-1990s. Then, following heavy lobbying by banks, hedge funds and free market politicians in the US and Britain, the regulations on commodity markets were steadily abolished. Contracts to buy and sell foods were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. In effect a new, unreal market in "food speculation" was born. Cocoa, fruit juices, sugar, staples, meat and coffee are all now global commodities, along with oil, gold and metals. Then in 2006 came the US sub-prime disaster and banks and traders stampeded to move billions of dollars in pension funds and equities into safe commodities, and especially foods.

"We first became aware of this [food speculation] in 2006. It didn't seem like a big factor then. But in 2007/8 it really spiked up," said Mike Masters, fund manager at Masters Capital Management, who testified to the US Senate in 2008 that speculation [.pdf] was driving up global food prices. "When you looked at the flows there was strong evidence. I know a lot of traders and they confirmed what was happening. Most of the business is now speculation – I would say 70-80%."

Masters says the markets are now heavily distorted by investment banks: "Let's say news comes about bad crops and rain somewhere. Normally the price would rise about $1 [a bushel]. [But] when you have a 70-80% speculative market it goes up $2-3 to account for the extra costs. It adds to the volatility. It will end badly as all Wall Street fads do. It's going to blow up."

The speculative food market is truly vast, agrees Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, president of the Strategic Investment Group in New York. She estimates speculative demand for commodity futures has increased since 2008 by 40-80% in agricultural futures.

But the speculation is not just in staple foods. Last year, London hedge fund Armajaro bought 240,000 tonnes, or more than 7%, of the world's stocks of cocoa beans, helping to drive chocolate to its highest price in 33 years. Meanwhile, the price of coffee shot up 20% in just three days as a direct result of hedge funds betting on the price of coffee falling.

[Continued...]


http://stephenleahy.net/2011/02/28/rampant-speculation-inflated-food-price-bubble-wall-stgrain-traders-pushing-price-rises/

Rampant Speculation Inflated Food Price Bubble – Wall St./Grain Traders Pushing Price Rises

By Stephen Leahy
stephenleahy.net
Jan 28, 2011



Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative “food bubble” that’s created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude.

[This is the second of a multi-part series investigating what is driving food prices higher]

Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.

Now they’ve turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say.

“There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world’s poorest people,” said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada in reference to the estimated one billion people who go hungry.

“Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem,” Fox told IPS.

The conditions that created the 2007-08 price hike and food riots have not changed, he said. It is no surprise to see record-high food prices and riots again in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and elsewhere.

Weather used to be the big determinant of food prices, but not anymore. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into food commodities markets in the last few years thanks to deregulation of commodities trading in the U.S., reports Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.



In an analysis of the food price crisis of 2007-08, De Schutter documents how the U.S. government passed legislation in 2000 deregulating the food commodity markets and for the first time permitted speculation on speculation.

Here’s how it used to work. In January, Farmer Brown would sign a contract to sell his 2011 future crop to a grain trader like industry giant Cargill for 100 dollars a tonne. In the fall, Cargill would then sell Farmer Brown’s grain at whatever price they could get to a bakery or feedlot company for cattle. These “futures” contracts insulated both the farmer and the grain trader from wild price fluctuations.

Now, after the passage of the U.S. Commodity Futures Modernisation Act in 2000, Cargill could sell Farmer’s Brown “futures” contract to an investment bank on Wall Street for 120 dollars a tonne, who could in turn sell it to a European investment company for 150 dollars a tonne and then sell it to a U.S. public pension fund for 175 dollars a tonne and so on. Add in some complex financial instruments like ‘derivatives’, ‘index funds’, ‘hedges’, and ‘swaps’, and food become part of yet another highly-profitable speculative bubble.

A deeply-flawed global financial system was largely responsible for the 2007-08 food crisis, concluded De Schutter in a September 2010 briefing note.

“Speculators increasingly entered the market in order to profit from short-term changes in price,” wrote agricultural economist Jayati Ghosh, in a more recent analysis of the 2007-08 food price spike.

With the pending implosion of “the U.S. housing finance market, large investors, especially institutional investors such as hedge funds and pension funds and even banks, searched for other avenues of investment to find new sources of profit,” said Ghosh, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in the Journal of Agrarian Change.

Food commodity speculation became the “hot ticket” and unregulated trading zoomed from 0.77 trillion dollars in 2002 to seven trillion dollars in 2007. Food prices shot upwards until the speculators took their profits in the first half of 2008 to cover their losses in the U.S. housing and other markets, she concluded

[Continued...]

THE EGYPTIAN TINDERBOX: HOW BANKS AND INVESTORS ARE STARVING THE THIRD WORLD

Ellen Brown
February 2nd, 2011
www.webofdebt.com/articles/egyptian_tinderbox.php

     “What for a poor man is a crust, for a rich man is a securitized asset class.”--Futures trader Ann Berg, quoted in the UK Guardian

Underlying the sudden, volatile uprising in Egypt and Tunisia is a growing global crisis sparked by soaring food prices and unemployment. The Associated Press reports that roughly 40 percent of Egyptians struggle along at the World Bank-set poverty level of under $2 per day. Analysts estimate that food price inflation in Egypt is currently at an unsustainable 17 percent yearly. In poorer countries, as much as 60 to 80 percent of people's incomes go for food, compared to just 10 to 20 percent in industrial countries. An increase of a dollar or so in the cost of a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread for Americans can mean starvation for people in Egypt and other poor countries.

Follow the Money

The cause of the recent jump in global food prices remains a matter of debate. Some analysts blame the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” program (increasing the money supply with credit created with accounting entries), which they warn is sparking hyperinflation. Too much money chasing too few goods is the classic explanation for rising prices.

The problem with that theory is that the global money supply has actually shrunk since 2006, when food prices began their dramatic rise. Virtually all money today is created on the books of banks as “credit” or “debt,” and overall lending has shrunk. This has occurred in an accelerating process of deleveraging (paying down or writing off loans and not making new ones), as the subprime housing market has collapsed and bank capital requirements have been raised. Although it seems counterintuitive, the more debt there is, the more money there is in the system. As debt shrinks, the money supply shrinks in tandem.

That is why government debt today is not actually the bugaboo it is being made out to be by the deficit terrorists. The flipside of debt is credit, and businesses run on it. When credit collapses, trade collapses [.pdf]. When private debt shrinks, public debt must therefore step in to replace it. The “good” credit or debt is the kind used for building infrastructure and other productive capacity, increasing the Gross Domestic Product and wages; and this is the kind governments are in a position to employ. The parasitic forms of credit or debt are the gamblers’ money-making-money schemes, which add nothing to GDP.

Prices have been driven up by too much money chasing too few goods, but the money is chasing only certain selected goods. Food and fuel prices are up, but housing prices are down. The net result is that overall price inflation remains low.

While quantitative easing may not be the culprit, Fed action has driven the rush into commodities. In response to the banking crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve dropped the Fed funds rate (the rate at which banks borrow from each other) nearly to zero. This has allowed banks and their customers to borrow in the U.S. at very low rates and invest abroad for higher returns, creating a dollar “carry trade.”

Meanwhile, interest rates on federal securities were also driven to very low levels, leaving investors without that safe, stable option for funding their retirements. “Hot money” – investment seeking higher returns – fled from the collapsed housing market into anything but the dollar, which generally meant fleeing into commodities.

New Meaning to the Old Adage “Don’t Play with Your Food”

At one time food was considered a poor speculative investment, because it was too perishable to be stored until market conditions were right for resale. But that changed with the development of ETFs (exchange-traded funds) and other financial innovations.

As first devised, speculation in food futures was fairly innocuous, since when the contract expired, somebody actually had to buy the product at the “spot” or cash price. This forced the fanciful futures price and the more realistic spot price into alignment. But that changed in 1991. In a revealing July 2010 report in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with It,” Frederick Kaufman wrote:

The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment. . . .

Robber barons, gold bugs, and financiers of every stripe had long dreamed of controlling all of something everybody needed or desired, then holding back the supply as demand drove up prices.

As Kaufman explained this financial innovation in a July 16 interview on Democracy Now:

Goldman . . . came up with this idea of the commodity index fund, which really was a way for them to accumulate huge piles of cash for themselves. . . . Instead of a buy-and-sell order, like everybody does in these markets, they just started buying. It’s called "going long." They started going long on wheat futures. . . . And every time one of these contracts came due, they would do something called "rolling it over" into the next contract. . . . And they kept on buying and buying and buying and buying and accumulating this historically unprecedented pile of long-only wheat futures. And this accumulation created a very odd phenomenon in the market. It’s called a "demand shock." Usually prices go up because supply is low . . . . In this case, Goldman and the other banks had introduced this completely unnatural and artificial demand to buy wheat, and that then set the price up. . . . Hard red wheat generally trades between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel. It went up to $12, then $15, then $18. Then it broke $20. And on February 25th, 2008, hard red spring futures settled at $25 per bushel. . . . The irony here is that in 2008, it was the greatest wheat-producing year in world history.

. . . The other outrage . . . is that at the time that Goldman and these other banks are completely messing up the structure of this market, they’ve protected themselves outside the market, through this really almost diabolical idea called "replication" . . . . Let’s say, . . . you want me to invest for you in the wheat market. You give me a hundred bucks . . . . What I should be doing is putting a hundred bucks in the wheat markets. But I don’t have to do that. All I have to do is put $5 in. . . . And with that $5, I can hold your hundred-dollar position. Well, now I’ve got ninety-five of your dollars. . . . What Goldman did with hundreds of billions of dollars, and what all these banks did with hundreds of billions of dollars, is they put them in the most conservative investments conceivable. They put it in T-bills. . . . Now that you have hundreds of billions of dollars in T-bills, you can leverage that into trillions of dollars. . . . And then they take that trillion dollars, they give it to their day traders, and they say, "Go at it, guys. Do whatever is most lucrative today." And so, as billions of people starve, they use that money to make billions of dollars for themselves.

Other researchers have concurred in this explanation of the food crisis. In a July 2010 article called “How Goldman Sachs Gambled on Starving the World’s Poor – And Won,” journalist Johann Hari observed:

Beginning in late 2006, world food prices began rising. A year later, wheat price had gone up 80 percent, maize by 90 percent and rice by 320 percent. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries, and 200 million people faced malnutrition and starvation. Suddenly, in the spring of 2008, food prices fell to previous levels, as if by magic. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has called this "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions.”

Some economists said the hikes were caused by increased demand by Chinese and Indian middle class population booms and the growing use of corn for ethanol. But according to Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi, demand from those countries actually fell by 3 percent over the period; and the International Grain Council stated that global production of wheat had increased during the price spike.

According to a study by the now-defunct Lehman Brothers, index fund speculation jumped from $13 billion to $260 billion from 2003 to 2008. Not surprisingly, food prices rose in tandem, beginning in 2003. Hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that on the regulated exchanges in the U.S., 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely in anticipation of price inflation and resale. George Soros said it was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices."

An August 2009 paper by Jayati Ghosh [.pdf], professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, compared food staples traded on futures markets with staples that were not. She found that the price of food staples not traded on futures markets, such as millet, cassava and potatoes, rose only a fraction as much as staples subject to speculation, such as wheat.

Nomi Prins, writing in Mother Jones in 2008, also blamed the price hikes on speculation. She observed that agricultural futures and energy futures were being packaged and sold just like CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), but in this case they were called CCOs (collateralized commodity obligations). The higher the price of food, the more CCO investors profited. She warned:

[Continued...]


http://www.opednews.com/articles/Speculating-with-our-Food-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110705-853.html

Speculating with our Food

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
OpEdNews
July 5, 2011

In 2011, "food derivative" speculation has replaced financial derivatives as the hot new investment promoted by major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. According to new research from the World Development Movement, the same banks that caused the 2008 economic crash are also responsible for skyrocketing food prices (see this and this). They estimate that in 2010 Goldman Sachs made $1 billion in profits from speculating on food. The really scary news is that in addition to speculating heavily on food commodities, these same private equity funds are also buying up huge tracts of land in the third world.

Trading in Commodities Futures

Individual investors have always had the ability to trade in commodities futures (i.e. buy a 2012 bushel of corn at a fixed price before it's produced). However the commodities market has always been so unreliable that serious investors have viewed it in the same category as roulette and horse racing. Recently, however, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other investment banks have used factors that appear to threaten food security -- extreme weather events, water shortages and increasing demand due to the Asian economic boom -- to aggressively pitch "agri" funds in a big way to investors. The ultimate effect of massive trading in food futures is to drive up the current cost of food, in the same way the subprime mortgage bubble massively inflated the cost of real estate prior to the 2008 economic crash.

The difference here is that high food prices are a life or death issue for billions of people around the world. Yet, as usual, the issue is virtually invisible in the US media.

The Great Land Grab

A 2009 research project by the Oakland Institute (The Great Land Grab [.pdf]) reveals startling facts about the corporate land grab in the third world -- another major factor in skyrocketing food prices. The Spain-based non-governmental organization GRAIN first drew attention to the land grab issue in its October 2008 brief, Seized! The 2008 land grabbers for food and financial security. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IF PRI) has reported that foreign investors sought or secured between 37 million and 49 million acres of farmland in the developing world between 2006 and the middle of 2009. In addition to the role played by major investment banks, multilateral institutions like the International Financial Corporation (the private sector branch of the World Bank) are also major players in the "corporatization" of global agriculture. The IFC plays a dual role in increasing private investment in the third world -- via direct investment and by lobbying developing countries to create "business enabling environments." Another World Bank agency, The Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS ), also plays a role in pressuring third world governments to improve their "investment climate," by relaxing environmental, tenant rights and food security laws and abolishing tax and duties on foreign investments.

[Continued...]


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-real-hunger-games-how-banks-gamble-on-food-prices--and-the-poor-lose-out-7606263.html

The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out

In the last decade, financiers have speculated billions of pounds in food, helping to make prices dearer and more volatile

Grace Livingstone
The Independent
01 April 2012

Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world's poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations' leading expert on food.

Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers. Purely financial players, for example, account for 61 per cent of investment on the wheat futures market, according to the World Development Movement report Broken Markets.

Speculative investment in agricultural commodities in 2011 was 20 times the amount spent by all countries on agricultural aid. Goldman Sachs, the largest player in the agricultural commodities market, earned £600m from food speculation in 2009, and Barclays Capital, the world's third-largest player and largest British bank in this market, earned up to £340m in 2010, according to the report. Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital declined to comment.

Before it was deregulated in the year 2000, the agricultural commodities futures market was used mainly by farmers and food buyers seeking to insure themselves against changes in the prices of products such as wheat, maize and sugar. When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

He added: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell. The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.stopoilspeculationnow.com/Pages/problem.aspx

The Problem

Financial speculators have the ability to cause swings in oil prices at your expense. This speculation can increase the cost of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil and other energy products. Higher fuel prices make it more expensive to drive, travel, farm, pay utilities and ship goods. Government regulators must implement the recently passed Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to stop excessive speculation.

What is causing the high price of fuel?

Fuel prices remain at historically high levels despite a weakened economy. There is little justification for today’s inflated prices.

A leading explanation for this disconnect in supply and demand is the rise of excessive speculation on Wall Street, which we attribute to increases in oil prices by as much as $10 to $30 a barrel – raising the cost of nearly everything you purchase. High energy prices have forced many families to choose between paying their heating bills, filling up on gasoline or putting food on the table. Many businesses have struggled to stay afloat and keep workers on the job because of high shipping and transportation costs. Enough is enough.

How did they get away with that?

Wall Street players used their influence in Washington, D.C. to alter regulations on trading of energy futures and create loopholes for financial speculation and profiteering. For example, in 2000, Enron convinced Congress to overhaul 60-year-old commodities rules that had worked well, creating efficient markets with adequate capital. This overhaul encouraged excessive speculation that has distorted the energy markets and made them highly volatile.

[Continued...]


http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/1276-Stop-the-Oil-Speculators.html

Stop the Oil Speculators

Nader.org
May 27. 2008

What factors are causing the zooming price of crude oil, gasoline and heating products? What is going to be done about it?

Don’t rely on the White House—with Bush and Cheney marinated in oil—or the Congress—which has hearings that grill oil executives who know that nothing is going to happen on Capitol Hill either.

Last week the price of crude oil reached about $130 a barrel after spiking to $140 briefly. The immediate cause? Guesses by oil man T. Boone Pickens and Goldman Sachs that the price could go to $150 and $200 a barrel respectivly in the near future. They were referring to what can be called the hoopla pricing party on the New York Mercantile Exchange. (NYMEX)

Meanwhile, consumers, workers and small businesses are suffering with the price of gasoline at $4 a gallon and diesel at $4.50 a gallon. Suffering but not protesting, except for a few demonstrations by independent truckers.

A consumer and small business revolt could be politically powerful. But what would they revolt to achieve? Their government is paralyzed and is unable to indicate any action if oil goes up to $200 or $400 a barrel. Washington, D.C. is leaving people defenseless and drawing no marker for when it will take action.

Oil was at $50 a barrel in January 2007, then $75 a barrel in August 2007. Now at $130 or so a barrel, it is clear that oil pricing is speculative activity, having very little to do with physical supply and demand. An essential product—petroleum—is set by speculators operating on rumor, greed, and fear of wild predictions.

Over the time since early 2007, U.S. demand for petroleum has fallen by 1 percent and world demand has risen by 1.3 percent. Supplies of crude are so plentiful, according to the Wall Street Journal, “traders of physical crude oil say their market is suffering from too much supply, not too little.”

Iran, for instance, is storing 25 million barrels of heavy, sour crude oil because, in the words of Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, Iran’s oil governor, “there are simply no buyers because the market has more than enough oil.”

Mike Wittner, head of oil research at Societe Generale in London agrees. “There’s various signals out there saying for right now, the markets are well supplied with crude.”

Historically, oil has been afflicted with the control of monopolists. From the late nineteenth century days of John D. Rockefeller, and his Standard Oil monopoly, to the emergence of the “Seven Sisters” oligopoly, made up of Standard Oil, Shell, BP, Texaco, Mobil, Gulf and Socal, to the rise of OPEC representing the major producing countries, the “free market” price of oil has been a mirage. Despite the breakup of the Standard Oil company by the government’s trustbusters about 100 years ago, selling cartels and buying oligopolies kept reasserting themselves.

In an ironic twist, the major price determinant has moved from OPEC (having only 40% of the world production) and the oil companies to the speculators in the commodities markets. What goes on in the essentially unregulated New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX)—without Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforced margin requirements, and, unlike your personal purchases, untaxed—is now the place that leads to your skyrocketing gasoline bills. OPEC and the Big Oil companies reap the benefits and say that it’s not their doing, but that of the speculators. Gives new meaning to “passing the buck.”

Deborah Fineman, president of Mitchell Supreme Fuel Co. in Orange, New Jersey, summed up the scene: “Energy markets have been dictated for too long by hedge funds and speculators, who artificially manipulate the numbers for their own benefit. The current market isn’t based on the sound principles of supply and demand but it is being rigged by companies and speculators who are jacking up prices for their own greed.”

Harry C. Johnson, former banker who worked for many years inside Big Oil and ran his own small oil company in Oklahoma, blames the CFTC, the Department of Energy, the Administration, and Congress, as “asleep at the switch on an issue that is probably costing U.S. consumers $1 billion per day.”

He cites “some industry experts, who profit greatly from the high price of crude, and have stated openly that the worldwide economic price of crude, absent speculators, would be around $50 to $60 per barrel.

[Continued...]


http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2011/03/31/wall-street-wagers-pump-gas-prices/

How Wall Street Wagers Pump up Gas Prices

Think Moammar Khadafy’s behind the rise in gas prices? The true answer may be a lot closer to home. Here’s what really influences the price of oil, and how you can hedge against higher prices.

By Stacy Johnson
MoneyTalksNews
March 31, 2011



Many Americans seem mystified when it comes to what’s happening with oil. They wonder – quite reasonably – how American gas and oil can gush so far so fast based on political upheaval in a country from which we buy no oil. And rather than making it more clear, many news reports make it more confusing by laying the entire blame at the doorstep of some current news event. From a story at CNN Money…

Investors are keeping a close eye on commodities, after crude oil rose to more than $106 a barrel early Monday on continued tensions in Libya.

In short, the media would have you believe that Moammar Khadafy’s problem is your problem. And while that’s partly true, that’s not the full story. Because the only way problems in Libya should be able to influence the price of oil is if those problems resulted in a supply problem. And there’s no supply problem.

From this recent article at CNBC:

Youcef Yousfi, Algeria’s minister of energy and mines told CNBC that there is no supply panic, no shortage of oil and that part of the rise in oil prices is due to speculation.

So what the heck is going on here? To understand, let’s take a closer look at just how oil is priced.

Who’s not pushing up the price of oil

When you go to the store to buy a shirt, the wholesale price is established by the manufacturer, the retail price by the retailer. Simple. But when it comes to commodities like corn, wheat, soybeans, gold, copper, oil, gasoline and dozens of others, the story is entirely different.

The price of oil and gasoline aren’t set by Exxon, ConocoPhillips, or any other “manufacturer” – instead, they’re set in an auction market that takes place every weekday on a futures trading floor in New York, as well as other places around the world. As with an online auction like eBay or a live auction at Sotheby’s, buyers compete with one another, bidding up prices until the auction ends with a seller accepting the buyer’s offer – it’s called the “clearing price,” the price where supply and demand meet.

So the price you’re paying at the pump isn’t a reflection of what Exxon demands for the oil it has, nor is it related, at least directly, to the political stability of places like Libya. Instead, prices are tied to the number of buyers and sellers showing up at that day’s auction and the clearing price that results.

Who’s at the auction?

You would think that the auction for oil would have only two types of participants: companies that dig oil out of the ground and want to sell it, and companies that operate things like airlines and refineries and want to buy it. Since oil is auctioned in contracts of 1,000 barrels – 42,000 gallons – who else would go to an oil auction?

The answer is speculators. They have no oil to sell, and they certainly aren’t there to pick up 42,000 gallons of crude. They’re attending the auction simply to bet on the future price of oil. They’re hoping to buy (or sell) a bunch, wait for the price to rise (or fall), make money, and be out of their position long before the delivery date rolls around.

The problem is that if a bunch of well-heeled speculators hop on the buying bandwagon, they move prices – sometimes by a lot. That’s what’s been happening in recent weeks.

From another CNN Money story…

[Continued...]


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c39cf48a-607e-11e0-9fcb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1IsoGwIB9

The global oil casino benefits only its players

By Leah McGrath Goodman
FT.com
April 6 2011

Tensions in the Middle East and north Africa, we are told, lie behind the recent increase in global fuel prices, which Wednesday hit a 2 ½-year high. Yet while Brent crude this week stayed above $120 a barrel, in Tripoli petrol hovered at around 34p a gallon. And that is not a typo. The popular reason for why those closest to the fighting, in this case, suffer less than those farther afield, is Libya’s hefty subsidies. The less popular reason is that world energy markets have been carefully designed to profit from the slightest supply hiccup, even if there is little evidence of actual shortages.

The energy-trading fraternity has never let the facts get in the way of a good supply scare. True, this historically fragile market is vulnerable to price swings as demand threatens to climb faster than production. But there is more to it than that. Indeed, what President Barack Obama did not mention last week in his energy security speech about the faults of the global energy market could fill a Saudi oilfield.

Rising from the ashes of a failed potato exchange in downtown Manhattan, the modern-day oil market came to prominence in the 1980s. Its main architect was Michel Marks, the Paris-born son of a produce merchant, who to this day is none too happy with how his creation turned out. Over time, the market has mushroomed to include futures, options and swaps contracts traded on a handful of exchanges round the world. There is also a thriving private, over-the-counter market, where physical “wet” barrels change hands. Today, the oil market’s global daily value comes to about $600bn, even if limited transparency means exact figures remain elusive. The central market for oil is now part of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, although it is making inroads into London in an apparent effort to escape new US rules under the Dodd-Frank act.

[Continued...]


http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0427/Who-s-to-blame-for-rising-oil-prices-Speculators

Who's to blame for rising oil prices? Speculators

Many blame Middle East turmoil or a weak dollar for rising oil prices, but they provide only a partial explanation. The chief culprit is speculation in oil markets. Fortunately, it can be stemmed with several regulatory steps.

By Steve A. Yetiv
The Christian Science Monitor
April 27, 2011

People around the world are feeling the pain at the pump. President Obama, whose reelection in 2012 may depend on a rebounding American economy, has promised that his energy plan could temper oil prices. Adding to the stakes, minutes from the US Federal Reserve meeting in March 2011 revealed concern that high oil prices could hurt the American economy.

So why have oil prices risen from around $36 dollars per barrel in December 2008 to $110 dollars per barrel now? And what can be done to lower them? Speculation in oil markets, which has little to do with oil demand and supply, is a key part of the problem, and it can be stemmed with several regulatory steps.

Oil prices are determined mainly by the combined behavior of oil traders on markets, the most important one being the New York Mercantile Exchange. When traders believe that oil prices will rise, they buy oil futures in the hope of selling them down the road for a profit. Such buying increases oil prices, and, eventually, the price of gasoline, heating oil, and many other products.

Oil prices started to rise because traders saw clear signs that the US and global economy were rebounding after the Great Recession, creating more demand for oil. The weakening dollar and fears that Middle East turmoil would disrupt oil supplies have also pushed prices higher.

While popular opinion and media coverage often blame Middle East turmoil for higher oil prices, it’s only a partial explanation. After all, the Saudis are pumping extra oil to make up for lost oil from Libya. And while oil traders and many others thought that unrest in Bahrain could spread to oil-rich Saudi Arabia, this has not happened. We now have more oil in the markets than we need, pushing the Saudis to actually lower their oil production.

Enter speculation.

How speculation drives up oil prices

Only some traders are speculators. Speculators are those who do not produce or use oil, but buy oil futures solely to make a profit on price changes. Data released in March 2011 by Bart Chilton, commissioner of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, suggest that speculators have increased their positions in energy markets by 64 percent since June 2008. That’s the highest level on record.

Oil prices have continued to rise despite mixed news on oil supply and demand, a diminishing chance of Saudi oil disruptions, and Japan’s human and economic catastrophe. Such price movements were even more dramatic when oil prices rocketed from $50 in February 2007 to over $147 per barrel in July 2008. Rapid swings in price, which are hard to connect to traditional market forces, indicate the influence of speculation.

[Continued...]


How the Kochs' Shady Oil Speculation May Be Driving Up Gas Prices

Out-of-control speculation has doubled the current price of crude oil. The Kochs pioneered the risky speculation industry that dominates the world’s oil markets today.

by Lee Fang
AlterNet
June 13, 2011

In April, ThinkProgress caused a stir when we uncovered a series of Koch Industries corporate documents revealing the company’s role as an oil speculator. Like many oil companies, Koch uses legitimate hedging products to create price stability. However, the documents reveal that Koch is also participating in the unregulated derivatives markets as a financial player, ]stir[/url] when we uncovered a series of Koch Industries corporate documents revealing the company’s role as an oil speculator. Like many oil companies, Koch uses legitimate hedging products to create price stability. However, the documents reveal that Koch is also participating in the unregulated derivatives markets as a financial player, buying and selling speculative products that are increasingly contributing to the skyrocketing price of oil. Excessive energy speculation today is at its highest levels ever, and even Goldman Sachs now admits that at least $27 of the price of crude oil is a result from reckless speculation rather than market fundamentals of supply and demand. Many experts interviewed by ThinkProgress argue that the figure is far higher, and out of control speculation has doubled the current price of crude oil.

[Continued...]


http://www.uscatholic.org/news/2011/06/study-finds-financial-speculation-oil-led-higher-gasoline-prices

Study finds financial speculation in oil led to higher gasoline prices

By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service
June 30, 2011

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Excessive speculation in crude oil futures on the part of financial traders added 83 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline in May, two University of Massachusetts professors reported.

The finding by Robert Pollin and James Heintz of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst showed that the influx of billions of dollars chasing oil futures led the average price of a gallon of gasoline nationwide to rise to $3.96 in May.

Pollin said if normal market forces, traced over decades, were in play, a gallon of gas would have cost $3.13 in May.

The revelation raised concerns among faith-based and public interest advocates that poor families worldwide are being further pinched because they are faced with using a larger share of their limited income for food and basic necessities.

"The problem is through the investment in commodity derivatives, (the speculators) are directly contributing to the increase in prices of gas and food around the world," explained David Kane, a staff member at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington, which is part of the Americans for Financial Reform coalition.

"The price of gasoline in the U.S. affects poor people more than it does affect rich people," he told Catholic News Service. "But the travesty is for people living on $1 or $2 a day who are spending a huge percentage of their income on food. So when food and gas prices go up, they are much more directly affected ... much more than we probably feel it here in the U.S."

Pollin said the study, "How Wall Street Speculation Is Driving up Gasoline Prices Today," traced the rapid rise and fall of commodities in recent months to the lack of regulation of financial markets.

"Links between spikes in oil prices and food prices is very clear. Having a highly speculative oil market feeds into food prices," Pollin explained.

[Continued...]


http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/09/15/317330/leaked-cftc-oil-speculation-data/

Leaked Documents Reveal Major Speculators Behind 2008 Oil Price Shock: Hedge Funds, Koch, Big Banks, Oil Companies

By Lee Fang
ThinkProgress
9/15/11

Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) leaked confidential data about oil speculation to a number of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Ordinarily, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body that oversees futures trading, does not provide identities of speculators to the public. However, the data leaked by Sanders provides a rare snapshot into the trading volumes by major speculators right before the oil price spike in the summer of 2008.

As experts from Stanford University [.pdf], Rice University [.pdf], the University of Massachusetts [.pdf], and authorities have concluded, rampant oil speculation was the prime driver of the record high prices for crude oil three years ago.

(To view a copy of the data, click here for documents leaked by Sanders. To view an organized spreadsheet, click here.)

Notably, the top speculators are noncommercial players, meaning they are companies that simply and buy and sell crude contracts with no interest in actually refining and selling the product.

[Continued...]


http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/21/2653429/once-again-speculators-behind.html

Once again, speculators behind sharply rising oil prices

BY KEVIN G. HALL
The Miami Herald
Feb. 21, 2012

WASHINGTON -- U.S. demand for oil and refined products - including gasoline - is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.

Yet oil and gasoline prices are surging.

On Tuesday, oil rose past $106 a barrel and gasoline averaged $3.57 a gallon - thanks again in no small part to rampant financial speculation on top of fears of supply disruptions.

The ostensible reason for the climb of crude prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where contracts for future delivery of oil are traded, is growing fear of a military confrontation with Iran in the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes.

Other factors driving up prices include last month's bankruptcy of Petroplus, a big European refiner, and a recent BP refinery fire in Washington state that's temporarily crimped gasoline supply along the West Coast; gas now costs an average of $4.04 a gallon in California.

While tension over Iran has ratcheted up in the past few months, the price of oil and gasoline has leaped far beyond conventional supply and demand variables. Financial speculators are piling into the market, torquing the Iranian fear factor into ever-higher prices.

"Speculation is now part of the DNA of oil prices. You cannot separate the two anymore. There is no demarcation," said Fadel Gheit, a 30-year veteran of energy markets and an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. "I still remain convinced oil prices are inflated."

Consider that light, sweet crude trading on the NYMEX changed hands at $79.20 a barrel just four months ago, but soared past $105 a barrel Tuesday afternoon, partly on news that Iran would halt shipment of oil to Britain and France. But those countries already had stopped buying Iranian oil. And Didier Houssin, the International Energy Agency's director for energy markets and security, said that "there are alternative supplies that can make up for any loss of Iranian exports," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Still, oil's price shot up because it trades in financial markets, where Wall Street firms and other big financial players dominate the trading of oil, even though they have no intention of ever taking possession of the oil whose contracts they are trading.

Since oil prices are the biggest component in the price of gasoline, pump prices are soaring.

[Continued...]


http://www.thestreet.com/story/11433108/1/oil-speculators-cash-in-on-washingtons-lapse.html

Oil Speculators Cash in on Washington's Lapse

By Chris Markowski
TheStreet.com
2/25/12

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In 2008, then candidate Obama said gas prices were exorbitant because of failed policies. This week he said they were high because of increasing global demand combined with pockets of unrest.

I'm not going to dignify either contention with a reasoned response.

Here's the point to keep in mind: Neither the administration nor the Congress wants clarity on energy prices. The reason for this is simple. They are too indebted to the financial services industry that is capitalizing on the confusion to do anything about it.

Whether this is a sin of omission or commission is too scary to ponder. I'd like to think it's the former, but the gains made by the financial services industry in lobbying sometimes makes me think it could be the latter.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

Tying the previous two posts together is the following:

---------------------------

http://www.prisonplanet.com/is-there-a-financial-scam-behind-the-rise-in-oil-and-food-prices.html

Is There a Financial Scam Behind the Rise in Oil and Food Prices?

Danny Schechter
Global Research
April 19, 2011

The global economy and its recovery, and the living standards of millions of plain folks, are now at risk from the sudden rise in oil and commodity prices.

Gas at the pump is up, and going higher. Food prices are following.

The consequences are catastrophic for the global poor as their costs go up while their income doesn’t. It’s menacing American workers too, who in large part have not seen a meaningful raise since the days of Reagan (keeping it this way is clearly behind the current flurry of attacks on unions).

Already, unrest in the Middle East and many African countries is being blamed for these dramatic increases. It seems as if this threat to global stability is being largely ignored in our media, one that treats the oil business as just another mystical world of free market trading.

Why is it happening? Why all the volatility? Is oil getting scarcer, leading to price increases? Is the cost of food, similarly, a reflection of naturally increasing commodity prices?

While it’s true that natural disasters and droughts play some role in this unchecked price inflation, it also seems apparent that something else is attracting increasing attention, even if most of our media fails to explore what is a political time bomb while most political leaders shrug their shoulder and ignore it.

President Obama recently said there is nothing he can do about the hike in oil and food prices.

Critics say the problem is that government and media outlets alike refuse to recognize what’s really going on: unchecked speculation!

Not everyone buys into this suspicion. In fact, it is one of more intense subjects of debate in economics. Princeton University economist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the impact of speculation counter posing the traditional argument that oil prices are set by supply and demand.

The Economist Magazine agrees, summing up its views with a pithy phrase, “Speculation does not drive the oil price. Driving does.”

Others, like oil industry analyst Michael Klare of Hampshire College in the US see demand outdistancing supply:

“Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won’t disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition.”

Usually you hear this debate in scholarly circles or read it in political tracts where orthodox views collide with more alarmist projections about the oil supply “peaking.”

But officials in the Third World don’t see the subject as academic. Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao charges “Speculative movements in commodity derivative markets are also causing volatility in prices,” he said.

The World Bank is meeting on this issue this week because it is seen as a matter of “utmost urgency.”

“The price of food is a matter of life and death for the very poorest people in the world,” said Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern Worldwide, the international humanitarian agency, ahead of his participation at The Open Forum on Food at World Bank headquarters.

He adds, “…with many families spending up to 80% of their income on basic foods to survive, even the slightest increase in price can have devastating effects and become a crises for the poorest.”

Journalist Josh Clark argues on the website “How Stuff Works” that much of the oil speculation is rooted in the financial crisis, “The next time you drive to the gas station, only to find prices are still sky high compared to just a few years ago, take notice of the rows of foreclosed houses you’ll pass along the way. They may seem like two parts of a spell of economic bad luck, but high gas prices and home foreclosures are actually very much interrelated. Before most people were even aware there was an economic crisis, investment managers abandoned failing mortgage-backed securities and looked for other lucrative investments. What they settled on was oil futures.”

The debate within the industry is more subdued, perhaps to avoid a public fight between suppliers and distributors who don’t want to rock the boat. But some officials like Dan Gilligan, president of the Petroleum Marketers Association, representing 8,000 retail and wholesale suppliers has spoken out.

He argues, “Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors who profit money from their speculative positions.”

Now, a prominent and popular market analyst is throwing caution to the wind by blowing the whistle on speculators.

Finance expert Phil Davis runs a website and widely read newsletter to monitor stocks and options trades. He’s a professional’s professional, whose grandfather taught him to buy stocks when he was just ten years old.

His website is Phil’s Stock World, and stocks are his world. He’s subtitled the site, “High Finance for Real People.”

He is usually a sober and calm analyst, not known as maverick or dissenter.

When I met Phil the other night, he was on fire, enraged by what he believes is the scam of the century that no one wants to talk about, because so many powerful people armed with legions of lawyers want unquestioning allegiance, and will sue you into silence.

He studies the oil/food issue carefully and has concluded, “It’s a scam folks, it’s nothing but a huge scam and it’s destroying the US economy as well as the entire global economy but no one complains because they are ‘only’ stealing about $1.50 per gallon from each individual person in the industrialized world.”

[Continued...]

---------------------------

[Geolibertarian]

And then there's the speculation that Austrian School propagandists worship most of all:

------------------------------

http://www.henrygeorge.org/bust.htm



A theory of economic boom and crash is one of Henry George's two great purposes in Progress and Poverty. What is the root cause of the "paroxysms of industrial depression"?

The root cause, says Henry George, is the speculative rise of land prices, which cuts into the earnings of labor and capital. Land rents and prices rise at a faster rate than general economic growth, because of two unavoidable facts:

• Land is fixed in supply.
• Land is needed for all production.

When sufficient numbers of workers and capitalists cannot afford to produce at the higher rents brought about by growth and speculation, production begins to stop.

Let us examine some of the implications of this fact for modern economies:

New Construction is Limited. If builders must pay too much for building sites, it takes from their profit by raising their costs. Their profit on investing in the building itself is what stimulates investing, which in turn is what makes jobs and incomes.

Business Costs Go Up. Businesses that rent their premises also get squeezed by rising rents. Here's an example: A merchant goes into a new shopping center with a long term lease. His rent is often too high, but he pays it to hold his position for the later term when he hopes the rent will be a bargain. Landlords writing long-term leases get used to this, and hold out for high rentals.

Nonproductive Investments Become More Profitable than Productive Ones. Let’s say that you own some land, which you might decide to improve. But, you have the option of selling the land to a speculator. Why improve the land if the profits on your improvements would yield little more than merely collecting the speculation-hyped value of the vacant site? Landowners will "site-sit" and wait, if they believe future development will be much more gainful than development for the current market. When the workaday facts of today begin looking dull and prosaic next to the gleaming expectations of tomorrow, look out.

Banking and Credit is Destabilized. Builders needing land borrow to buy it, even though the price is too high, gambling that future rises in rents will let them repay the loan. If these rent rises fail to happen, they go bankrupt. Their buildings are not destroyed, but the capital they used to build on them was misdirected, so much of it is economically lost: the buildings lose their market value.

Unlike items of wealth, which are priced according to their cost of reproduction at the present time, land is not produced -- so it has no cost of production. Yet it is bought and sold, like articles of wealth. The selling price of land is determined by comparing its income potential with that of an equivalent value of wealth, through a process called capitalization. Here's how that works. However, the capitalization of current rent is only the beginning. With land, there is nearly always an added premium reflecting expected price increases in the future.

Speculation raises land prices beyond the sites' current use values. Credit is extended farther in order to accommodate this. That is, banks lend on overpriced land, counting on a further rise. When the rise slows, they extend the loans, sometimes even granting new loans for paying interest on old loans. They use political pressure to get governmental agencies (e.g. the World Bank) to extend or underwrite these risky loans (e.g. in Latin America). When the bubble bursts, the loans are not repaid. This destroys capital. The Savings & Loan fiasco of the 1980s is a case in point, but the basic dynamics are there in every recession.

This is not a new phenomenon. John Stuart Mill had written (before Henry George) of a tendency of lenders, when legitimate demand for loans dries up, to "lower the quality of credit" by accepting high-risk loans they would have spurned before. Because land value is such a large part of collateral on loans, and land values fluctuate wildly in business cycles, the tendency toward these volatile, high-risk lending practices is very strong.

Why don't capitalists needing land simply join in the speculative game? Couldn't they buy land at speculative prices and use it while it continues to rise in value? Actually, that's what they all do. No one can justify buying and holding land at today's prices without counting the future advance in price or rent as part of his or her gain. Thus everyone is hooked, forced by the market to participate in the speculative game, once it gets started. All become implicated and habituated, emotionally and politically, whether they like the principle or not. Eventually people forget that there could be any other way of doing business.

How do labor and capital resist advances in land value, when they must have land in order to produce? By ceasing production. What does this mean in real life? Labor and capital decline to buy or rent land at the high asking prices. Some will rent or buy less land, and use it more intensively. Some will sleep on the street, or sell from the sidewalk. Some will retreat to little patches of marginal land. Some will buy as much land as ever, but thus use up funds they otherwise would have used to improve it, becoming withholders themselves. Some will organize and pass counterproductive rent-control laws. The economy-wide net result will be less production, more unemployment.

The question that many modern-day economists fail to ask is this: How do investors react to a set of incentives where expected changes in land value are made part of the overall return on investment -- and land price is part of the investment on which return is figured?

This has several results:

• Many are screened out by the increased need for credit.
• Rising land value becomes part of the incentive to build. It can't go up forever. When it levels off at a high level, it becomes a serious drag. When it starts falling, it is worse.
• Land value becomes collateral; its wild swings destabilize credit and money.
• A lot of land is unused, (or run down in its present use), as the holder waits for a possible higher use that never materializes. In and after a crash, bid prices for land fall, but asking prices stay high, so sales drop like a stone. This behavior is inconsistent with the premises of the "rational expectations" theorists, but is good history: it has been extensively documented, over several giant cycles of boom and crash.

Land Speculation and Inflation?



There are as many different theories of the basic cause of inflation as there are for depressions. But since today's business cycle seems to involve a constant tension between periods of inflation and periods of unemployment/recession, the two phenomena clearly are linked.

George said almost nothing in Progress and Poverty about inflation; in his day industrial depression was a much more serious problem. However, inflation was not unheard-of in those days, and a strong connection is implied in George's reasoning. Consider the following statement regarding George's remedy (which this course is soon to consider): "Taxes may be imposed upon the value of land until all rent is taken by the state, without reducing the wages of labor or the reward of capital one iota; without increasing the price of a single commodity, or making production in any way more difficult."

What has this to do with inflation? George identifies land rent as an income that does not come from production; it is, in effect, a tax on production, the burden of which increases as production increases -- due to rising demand for the fixed supply of land. The tendency of this process is, as we have seen, to raise land rents beyond the marginal ability of labor and capital to pay them -- and depression is the result.

This process can be forestalled, temporarily at least, by increasing the money supply. Remember, the income of landowners increases as overall production increases, even though landowners make no contribution to production! The buying power that landowners gain, laborers and capitalists lose. But the effect of this can be blunted by increasing the money supply. When the supply of money increases faster than the supply of actual wealth, that's called inflation. An increase in the money supply can stimulate demand for goods, for a while -- if people have a certain amount of money to spend, they will try to spend it before it loses its value. Thus, an increase in the money supply, via lowered interest rates, can keep a period of economic growth alive -- at least until after the next election.

However, even this expediency is thwarted by the process of land speculation. As we explained here, land prices are arrived at via the process of capitalization. Essentially, the annual rent of a site is divided by the current rate of interest, and this capitalized rent is the basis for the selling price (most often a speculative premium will be added). Now, if the central bank lowers interest rates to free up the money supply, this means that the divisor, the capitalization rate, is a lower figure -- and therefore land prices will increase!

Many analysts, for example, note that the persistently low interest rates maintained by Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve in the early 2000s played a key role in the "housing boom" that followed. Of course, in the real world a great many factors influence financial markets, and particular market situations are extremely complex. However, this by no means denies the pivotal, fundamental role played by land rent and land speculation. Eventually, in a growing economy (even if the growth is only a short-term blip brought about by fiscal stimulus), increased rents will consume the extra buying power. Then, one of two things must happen: either the money supply must be increased further, risking runaway inflation -- or there must be a recession.

[Continued...]


http://www.progress.org/fold43.htm

Land Speculation: What Is It Bad For?

by Fred E. Foldvary
The Progress Report
1998

The cause of every major business-cycle depression is land speculation. This fact was discovered by the American economist Henry George 120 years ago.

Speculators buy land because they expect the price to go up in the future. While waiting for the price to go up, speculators do different things with land.

Some land speculators buy raw or underdeveloped land and just let it sit until they think the time is ripe for development. When many speculators are doing this in some area at the fringe of a city, often developers skip around them to areas further away from the city. That creates land-wasting urban sprawl, which then requires more roads and longer water pipers and makes it uneconomical to have public transportation. In other cases, when speculators are buying land within a city they expect to be developed soon, development instead shifts to other, less expensive, areas, and the speculators lose out. Society also loses, since that area can stay relatively undeveloped even though it is within the city.

Other land speculators buy land in order to develop, expecting the rise in land value to be a big chunk of their profits. That works out well for the first ones to do it, but at the end of the land boom, when many developers are building and hoping to cash in on the land bonanza, the land value stops rising. Those who bought near the top don't get the land gain profit, and even worse, when the real-estate market crashes, the developers end up with empty houses and office buildings, and shopping centers they where they built but folks aren't coming. The go broke, can't pay back their loans, and the banks fail, making the economy fall even more.

So the reason land speculation causes depressions is that it raises the land price too high for those wanting land for actual use. Speculation adds to the demand for land, making prices go even higher. Land becomes priced for future use, not present-day use. So those wanting sites for residences, offices, hotels, factories, and shopping centers, slow down their investing. Also, during the boom, interest rates that were low start going higher as the central bank (in the US, the Federal Reserve System) reduces the growth of the money supply, increasing interest rates. With costs rising and investment in machinery and construction down, the economy grinds to a halt. Workers get laid off, which then decreases demand, and the economy falls into a recession.

So what causes the depression is the reduction in investment in real estate and other capital goods, caused by rising interest rates and land prices. When the economy falls into the depression, real estate prices and interest rates fall, and now investment becomes profitable, and the recovery starts. For this to happen, the old bad debts have to be cleared, otherwise the financial system is clogged with bad debts, as it is now in Japan, and the new enterprises can't get the credit they need to get going. It also helps a lot if the barriers to new investment are taken down - that means eliminating restrictions and taxes on enterprise.

What makes land speculation dysfunctional - a cause of economic trouble - is not really the speculation itself, but the tax system in which it takes place. The tax systems in the world today mainly tax labor and profits. Some of the tax money goes to build public works, such as subways, freeways, streets, roads, public utilities, parks, security, fire protection, and schooling. These push up land values. So landowners get a government subsidy in the form of increased rent due to infrastructure that workers and businesses, not the landowners, are paying for. So land speculators profit from this forced transfer of wealth from workers to landowners, if they guess right on where new development will go.

[Continued...]

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Max Keiser: Now let's talk to the renegade economist, Fred Harrison. Fred, welcome to the Keiser Report.

Fred Harrison: Hi Max, good to be with you today.

Max Keiser: Thanks for joining us on the Keiser Report. Okay, let me kick this off by asking you: In 1997 you predicted that a global housing bubble would ensue in ten years -- the global depression of 2010 would happen. How did you do that?

Full interview at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrYA62Hheo