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51 comments on Aren't a lot of people's lives changing for the worse?

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wadosy on September 26, 2005 - 3:33am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
the main flaw with your argument, mw, is that you think the govt is expecting to make a profit by selling short. they are not. they are only trying to stave off panic. they will take a short term loss to calm the markets.

see charles' that comment that i quoted lower in this thread.

the govt is willing to risk exposure of its control of markets to calm the markets. they expect that most traders have already figured out that the whole lashup is a pig-in-a-poke, and will play along.

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mw on September 26, 2005 - 5:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Actually I never assume the government is in anything for a direct profit motive. ;-)

I suppose the govt could lean on the sell button and drive prices down for awhile, but I don't suspect them of it at this time. The IEA and releases from SPR and various noises from OPEC and -egads- a friendly word from Hugo Chavez or two could do more to bring down price in a lasting way.

Leaning on the sell key for a day or two merely gets others in the hert short too, and unless a seller with no profit motive (to use your thesis) stays in there selling, forever, eventually price will stop going down and those who tagged along for the ride start to cover... et voila, a move up is born. Eventually all things that go down, come up and vice versa.

This is not to say that an organized scheme to sell short the market could not be done, but it would leave a paper trail that eventually would become noticable. 1.5 billion in crude oil is consumed each and every day in the US - it wouldn't be long before a large hole in the "ESF" or other such funds were noted.

It would be nice if we could rely upon the government of the day to live up to its ideological underpinnings, all of the time, for then they'd be predictable - but lets just, for now at least, assume that the free-marketeers are still in control (Energy Secy Bodman certainly fits the mold by all appearances) -- mucking about with the price of oil here goes quite contrary to such folks.

The other not so small consideration we should make here is how oil companies, a well represented lobby group in every national capital, would react to such manipulation.

Nope, I'm not a big fan of price manipulation theories, not at present. I do believe there is a concerted effort to talk up the situation, and suspect its only because the reality is about what we expect - its even worse than it appears.

A couple days up or down is irrelevant in the big picture.

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louGrinzo on September 26, 2005 - 9:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"the govt is willing to risk exposure of its control of markets to calm the markets. they expect that most traders have already figured out that the whole lashup is a pig-in-a-poke, and will play along."

Proof, please.

(I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm not saying you're right.  But extraordinary claims require extrordinary proof.  I am a strict empiricist; show me proof and I'll agree with you 100%.)

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wadosy on September 26, 2005 - 11:21am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
yeah, i dont have any proof, but it fits in with the moral climate of the day and it makes sense.

look, i'm just as hopeful as anyone that we can get out of this mess without killing millions of people, using ethical, truthful means to do so. but the deeper i dig, the more ugliness i find. sometimes i have a hunch, and have to quit digging for a couple days to drink beer and let the confirmation of that hunch settle in before i can go back to digging.

i suppose i am being naive to expect there are any rules left at all when an empire is fighting for its life.

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Prof. Goose on September 26, 2005 - 11:51am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
that doesn't fly here wadosy.
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Charles Mackay on September 26, 2005 - 12:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thanks all for considering my roughly outlined hypothetical situation concerning the possible manipulation of energy futures by the government.  Some good points above, even from those I do not entirely agree with.

Kunstler, in today's missive, also suspects government intervention:
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary15.html

Like I previously implied, the energy markets won't be fooled my short term manipulation.  Let's see how these October energy contracts settle in the next few days.  No I don't have nay proof, but wild last minute fluctuations in the closing days of a contract may indirectly reveal what can not be proved.
Regards.

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mw on September 26, 2005 - 1:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If they intervened on Friday and Sunday, where then, pray tell, are they today?

NG, CL both rallying quite strongly, setting up the stage for what is known as the "piercing line" candle reversal pattern at a point where price could be said to have found "support" (thus implying the ability to rally higher).

Sometimes Occam's law makes sense.

Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simplest.

In this case, the simplest is that regular traders are the principle drivers of energy markets whether energy markets go up or down.

I've mentioned a number of times over the weekend that my expectation was for a short covering rally if not a "common sense" rally ... and here it is.

Long energy, short broader markets I remain.

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Charles Mackay on September 29, 2005 - 12:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Guess what?  There were wild last minute price changes as October natural gas contracts expired today.  What changed from yesterday?  The NYMEX did extend its force majeure to October contracts.  So you may want to believe today's skyrocketing NG prices reacted to that news, but its seems more like short covering of a very big trader to me.

If we don't hear of any major trading firm with losses, then who has the deep pockets to lose so much???

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coffee17 on September 26, 2005 - 4:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
How about instead of getting a hunch, stopping digging, and then going on with (self) confirmation, maybe dig to try and see if the hunch is likely to be right with available evidence (someone else having the hunch isn't evidence). Some hunches might not be able to be confirmed right, or confirmed wrong, and those you can hang on to. But hang on to them as hunches; don't let them become confirmed in your head, and don't talk about them without specifically labeling to the world that this isn't fact based.
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wadosy on September 26, 2005 - 6:36pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
so far, coffee17, you have given no indication you are able to refute any of the hunches i've confirmed.

in my short time in this forum, i have posted maybe a billion urls. nobody has been able to refute them. if you object to a position of mine, you are certainly encouraged to post urls that contradict mine.

maybe we'd both learn something, on the off chance that anybody wants to learn anything that gores an ox or two, or threatens a sacred cow, or mentions a prominent but ignored elephant in the room.

that's the biggest problem with this whole operation: it was conceived by armchair warriors whose arrogance and hubris are much greater than their wisdom. they figured they could pull it off, and they figured they could cover it all up, and they figured they had enough juice to bull on through no matter what. the official conspiracy theory will hold, by the grace of god, the washington post and the new york times.

the problem i have to think about is this: what caused such desperate, reckless, foolhardy behavior? is peak oil much closer than we think? or can we simply write the whole thing off to egomania...?

i wish i knew. but the bones of it are out there, all you have to do is dig.

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Fire Temple on September 26, 2005 - 11:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Right on!  Those who are capable of lying to the U.N. to  start a war, are capable of manipulating the markets to keep it going.  

The least we can do in an open forum is to question, and to respect those who ask.

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51 comments on Aren't a lot of people's lives changing for the worse?

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