77 comments on CFTC - Futures Position Limits on Energy?
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77 comments on CFTC - Futures Position Limits on Energy?
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Yes! When computer scientists create 'Artificial Stupidity'.
Indistinguishable from the real thing. The Singularity will look and sound just like Ronald Reagan.
"It's morning in America, again!"
"No, you jackass, it's 9:33 at night!'
It's going to be hard for the CFTC to distinguish 'Bad' speculators and 'Good' speculators. Good speculators are needed to take the opposite positions of physical trades - they provide the all important liquidity. The bad speculators simply buy the market and and use their size and transaction velocity to push up prices.
The problem is that one of the 'Bad' speculators is Goldman- Sachs, the fourth branch of the US government.
OUCH!
Another 'Bad' speculator is China, buying oil with some of its dollar reserves. Here, China would be 'screwing' America in the morning again ... but, what's new? I imagine all the producers are buying long- dated crude contracts - and some call it hedging! This would make the producers bad speculators. Why wouldn't producers manipulate the market? Easier to make cash on oil you DON'T have to deliver ... and if for some ungodly reason delivery is required ... they actually have crude oil to deliver!
Yeaaaay!
Also, shippers and refiners are selling crude back and forth to each other outside of the reach of CFTC. A tanker load of crude is represented by a receipt. How many times will that receipt change hands between the Gulf of Arabia and the Gulf of Mexico? Between the terminal and the the refinery?
I say, good luck CFTC! I really hope this is the 'singularity' thing can bring back Hope. You know, so we can 'move forward'.
Ronald Reagan, moving forward into morning in America, again ...
http://economic-undertow.blogspot.com/2009/07/defeating-evil-everywhere....
It's "the magic of the market" till the magic produces things we don't like. Then it's "those nasty speculators." It's been the same thing all along. But somehow we can't face that the system that creates huge amounts of apparent wealth for a few can also destabilize the entire system for all.
The main point of course is that the system goes nuts as real limits come into view. But TPTB, most economists, and most of the public cannot acknowledge such a possibility, so a scapegoat must be found. Not that I hold traders blameless. But to pin the problem on a few people rather than the blindness of the whole system is myopic at best.
From the main post, first sentence: "finite resources are being quantified by infinite money."
Blame it on Fibonacci for introducing the Arabic (really Indian) numerical system, complete with that handy cypher, that provided materialistic, piratical, spiritually backward European monkeys the ability to imagine and calculate limitless plunder in a limit world.