Goldman’s Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark!
by ilene - November 11th, 2009 12:47 pm
Goldman’s Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark!
By Phil
$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.
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.
Oil Manipulations Exposed
by phil - May 26th, 2008 10:08 am
Oil Manipulations Exposed
By Phil
As it’s Memorial Day, let’s try to remember what our troops are fighting and dying for – Oil. But, not oil itself, they are fighting and dying for oil profits and that is not the same thing at all!
The first Gulf War was clearly about oil, Saddam invaded Kuwait because he wanted their oil and we went to war and pushed him back. Even though Saddam’s troops lit Kuwait’s oil fields on fire, and even though there was a tremendous disruption in global supply, oil prices only briefly went from $20 to $30 (inflation adjusted dollars) before falling all the way back to $12 between 1990 and 1998. There has been no major supply disruption during the Bush II War. What is the difference? Manipulation!
This chart [currently not available] only runs through August of last year, when a barrel of oil could still be had for $75, not far from HALF of last week’s peak at $135.09. Did demand double since last August? No, it actually declined over 2%. Did global stockpiles decrease? No they are flat. In that case, the real question is – What kind of idiots do the MSM and our very own government (yes you Sam Bodman!) take us for when they say there is no speculation in the energy markets???
The consumer group, Public Citizen, put out reports warning us in 2001, and 2004, and then testified before Congress in May 2004 that the mergers of US oil companies were, in and of themselves, driving up prices by forming a de facto US cartel. These findings were backed up the findings in a 240-page report to a still-Republican Congress. The Q1 profits of the 5 companies that now control close to 70% of all US gasoline – BP, COP, CVX, MRO and XOM – has gone up from $8.7Bn in Q1 2000 to $26.4Bn in Q1 2008, a 203% increase, outpacing the S&P 500 by 140%.
You will hear a lie repeated over and over and over again in the media and parroted by oil apologists all the way up to Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and Vice President Dick Cheney (and I’ll have more to say about him later this week!) that there is no manipulation in the energy markets. It is an absolute lie!
Santana Energy and others out…