2010 - Time to Arrest the Oil Extortionists?

by Phil - December 30th, 2009 4:58 am

Is "extortion" too strong a word for what’s being done to us?

Extortion is a criminal offense which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion.  Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation, trickery, or some other form of pressure or force. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way. Coercion may involve the actual infliction of physical pain/injury or psychological harm in order to enhance the credibility of a threat. The threat of further harm may lead to the cooperation or obedience of the person being coerced.

Perhaps there is not much we can do to stop the criminal cartel known as OPEC from withholding the supply of oil (they have cut production by 5M barrels a day globally in the past 18 months) or the US Energy cartel that has taken 32.4% of the US rigs off-line in the past 12 months - EVEN though oil prices are UP 100% over the same time period.  I’m sure, if called to testify before Congress, T Boone and company will do some song and dance to pretend the economics of $80 oil justify 32.4% less drilling than $40 oil did last December rather than the very obvious fact that, by cutting off 32% of our supply, they were able to EXTORT us, to force us to pay through trickery and the pressure of witholding a vital commodity - an extra $40 per barrel. 

$40 a barrel is costing the US consumer $760M a day - and that’s without the refining mark-up.  $760M a day is $277Bn a year stolen from US citizens alone and over $1Tn globally - that’s 20 Madoff scams a year!  If the oil companies were witholding water or air from us and demanding more money for something they were able to readily produce more of, then we would KNOW it was torture, right?  Why should oil be different?   It’s not a choice - for good or ill, we need energy to survive in this modern world every bit as much as we need air and water yet we allow both the blatant cartel of OPEC as well as the private cartel of US petroleum producers to manipulate the supply of energy and FORCE us to pay far more than the market rate could possibly be if the supply were not ARTIFICIALLY constrained.

Last…

Tags: BP, GE, ICE, JPM, MRO, Oil, OPEC, RDSA, XOM

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Goldman’s Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark!

by Phil - November 11th, 2009 6:18 am

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of of the global oil scam.

It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in "Madoff Units" ($50Bn rip-offs).  That’s right - $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil. 

Where is the outrage?  Where are the investigations? 

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000.  ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.  The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets.  Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se.  They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades.  Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company.  This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.

"Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate." - Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE. 

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading…

Tags: BP, DB, Enron, GLE, ICE, Madoff, MS, Oil, Oil Scam, OPEC, RDSA, TOT

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Testy Tuesday Morning

by Phil - October 27th, 2009 8:17 am

Well yesterday went pretty much as planned.

It’s nice to see the market behave normally for a change, going down on big volume and actually staying down as we get mixed economic news.  Volume was at the highest levels since Sept 17th where, sadly, we dropped another 5% over the next two weeks.  Watching our levels kept us from making stupid mistakes yesterday and by 10:28 we had lost faith in the "rally" and we went for SRS as a long and sold the $9 puts for .60, now .40.  This is a fun way to play the volatile ultra-ETFs as we don’t mind owning SRS at net $8.40 (would be all-time low) if it went the wrong way and was put to us.

We lowered our bar on the Dow to 9,920  (green zone on Tim Knight’s chart) to make some bullish plays but that line held at 1pm and 1:45 and, by 3:50, the most they could manage on a spike was a few seconds over 9,900 and a big surge of volume into the close didn’t move the markets up a bit.  These are all bad signs for today’s open regardless of the nonsense you see in the futures market. 

Today we can use the 9,900 line to initiate some upside plays but the real line of concern will be our first major index failure, which will be NYSE 6,900.  That’s today’s big test, followed (if they fail) by Russell 575.  As we expected, the Russell blew 595 yesterday and that is now their critical recovery point for the day.  The Russell and NYSE led us up in this rally, it should be no surprise if they are to lead us down.

BIDU (who we were short on!) shows you just how ridiculous values have become and even Mr. BUYBUYBUY himself has finally changed his tune and actually made a very good point last night, noting that many earnings reports use the caveat "albeit at lowe levels:" 

While these statements may have been permissible at Dow 8,000, Cramer said, they are not at Dow 10,000. At this level, investors want to hear, “After stabilizing, we are now seeing sales accelerate” to levels at or above those before the downturn. But, again, the only firms saying that are GOOG, AAPL and AMZN. There are a few other tech companies touting stability at pre-downturn figures – Microsoft, Intel, Marvell Tech and SanDisk – but they’re not seeing sales growth beyond that point.  Outside…

Tags: AAPL, AMZN, BIDU, BP, SRS

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Friday - The Good, the Bad and the GDP

by Phil - May 29th, 2009 7:03 am

Clearly there are people who will do anything for money.

In the classic movie, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," the characters all lie, cheat, steal and kill as they chase after a chache of government gold.  They all kill, they all try to kill each other and the only character trait they all share is they will all do anything for money.   We are lucky enough to have a modern version of that, with our own government supplying GOLDman Sachs and other bad market manipulators with TARP money, which they are using to, not to lend money to the good citizens of the US but rather to prop up the commodities market, stealing Billions of dollars from the very people they claimed they were going to help.

Since the November bail-out, consumer lending had gone down, home foreclosures have gone up, unemployment has gone up, housing has gone down yet the CRB has gone up 25%, led by oil, which is up 88% at $66 this morning.  $66 oil is a noose around the neck of this economy as the it was cheaper oil that helped us begin to recover as it stayed around $40 from November through the beginning of March.  On a per barrel basis alone, that was $500M a day LESS than we are paying now but, despite the fact that oil is still 54% in price from this time last year, gasoline has gone up so fast that it’s only down 23% from the prices that knocked the wheels out from our economy.  Including refined products, that extra $26 a barrel is costing US consumers $1Bn a day, $365Bn a year or 1/2 of the TARP money going straight out of our economy and back to the countries that fund terrorism through the very ugly hands of GS (who are partners in ICE) and other TARP recipients who have funded and coordinated this commodity "rally," screwing the American people over with our own tax dollars.

Aside from the very obvious upgrades by the TARP-sponsored Financial houses of anything and everything that even smells like oil and the GE-sponsored 24/7 pump-fest on CNBC, we now have Goldman Sachs this morning telling the sheeple specifically to: "sell Petrobras October $34 put options for $1.95 because a U.S. economic recovery and lower petrochemical supplies will limit declines in the price of oil."  What Goldman does not mention is that they were one of the "large speculators"  that increased…

Tags: BP, Dollar, Euro, GDP, Goldman Sachs, GS, ICE, MRO, Oil, OPEC, TARP, VLO

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