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Stephen Maloney considers this and asks whether HFT is in fact quietly tilting the table to favour those with the technological advantage
Please read more here.
The official line from the United States and the European Union is that Tehran must be punished for continuing its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. The punishment: sanctions on Iran's oil exports, which are meant to isolate Iran and depress the value of its currency to such a point that the country crumbles.
But that line doesn't make sense, and the sanctions will not achieve their goals. Iran is far from isolated and its friends – like India – will stand by the oil-producing nation until the US either backs down or acknowledges the real matter at hand. That matter is the American dollar and its role as the global reserve currency.
Please read more here.
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From 1995 to 2007 BP and Goldman Sachs were joined at the head, having the same chairman – the Irish former head of the World Trade Organisation, Peter Sutherland. From 1999, until he fell from grace in 2007 through revelations about his private life, BP’s CEO Lord Browne was also on the Goldman Sachs board.
The outcome of the relationship was that BP were in a position, if they were so minded, to obtain interest-free funding via Goldman Sachs, from GSCI investors through the simple expedient of a sale and repurchase agreement.....
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The current MF Global scandal makes Enron look like a picnic!
So it seems we haven't learned anything from what happened 10 years ago! Sad!
There're some interesting things I could tell you about the place. However, if I do, I'd have to kill ya! LOL!
In spite of the summer driving season inventories of gasoline in the U.S. are rising. Supplies of oil at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the New York Mercantile Exchange futures contract are less than 1% from their all time high reached in May of this year.
Inventories in a 15 state region that includes Illinois rose to 97.7 million bbls/oil earlier this month, the highest ever since data was recorded, beginning in 1980 according to a USDOE report. The price of crude taken together with the country's jobless rate of 9.6% makes no sense at all. Clearly the price of oil has lost all ballast to the dynamic of supply and demand.
The situation of distorted trading on the commodity exchanges could be contained in large measure if Congress stepped in to restrict participation by computer-based traders. The oil industry would harness their "K" Street lobbying teams, the best that oil money can buy, and combine forces with the Wall Street speculators in order to squelch any effort to bring some rationale, some sanity, some semblance of fair play back to the oil trading pits.
The oil interests have the money to do it, and we have a Congress whose election campaigns yearn for the money they can provide and are therefore happily doing their bidding. We, in turn as consumers, have no alternative but to pay, pay, pay while the oil interests and the oil speculators gorge themselves with billions of undeserved margins and profits while great swaths of our population are suffering massive economic turmoil.
Read more in the Huffington Post.
