Tag Archives: Business News

The Smoking Gun of Higher Oil Prices

As featured on The Huffington Post: There, in plain sight for all to read, the highly influential New York Times, in an article about the manipulative speculation in ethanol markets and the obscure but phenomenally profitable ethanol credits (having skyrocketed more than 20 times in the last six months) and in turn its impact on the price for gasoline…
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Syria as Russia’s Oil Price Tool

As featured on The Huffington Post: The opening paragraph in the Financial Times‘ May 31, 2013 review of Thane Gustafson’s history of the Russian oil industry, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia, says it all: In no other big economy do oil and gas play such a vital role as in Russia. They account…
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Blatant Distortion and Manipulation of Oil Prices Laid Bare

Friday was a red letter day for the oil producers. In the space of three hours, from 9:00 a.m. to noon, the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil as traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange leapt from $104.30/barrel to $106.94/bbl., finally closing the day at $106.42/bbl. A staggering range for a commodity…
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JPMorgan Chase’s Culture as Economic Parasite

As featured on The Huffington Post: The culture of what we expect from banks is not overly complex. They are institutions meant to safeguard our deposits and are meant to anchor and enhance our economy by lending to viable businesses, finance trade and receivables, finance business expansion, help people purchase their homes, and where their…
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Banker Lies and Misrepresentation — The Present and Lessons From the Past

As featured on The Huffington Post: Yesterday U.S. prosecutors accused two low-level JPMorgan executives with criminal charges of wire fraud and falsifying regulatory filings of risky and complex credit derivatives that led to the bank’s massive loses in the ‘London Whale’ scandal. JPMorgan, as do all banks, had the obligation to honestly report its assets…
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The Cost of Nearly Everything Is Rigged, Enriching the Bank Fixers

As featured on The Huffington Post: That banks are able to manipulate became clear as a bell with the findings of the Libor interest rate fixing scandal (“Everything is Rigged: The Biggest Price Fixing Scandal Ever” Rolling Stone 04.25.13) whereby some sixteen too big to fail banks were accused of colluding to manipulate interest rates…
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The Price of Oil Is Rigged

As posted on The Huffington Post: The U.S. oil market is well supplied, with U.S. commercial crude oil inventories near all time highs, with production of U.S. oil increasing by some million barrels/day from a year ago, with weekly inventory of gasoline jumping by 800,00bbls equivalent last week alone, while Chinese demand is flat to…
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JPMorgan Exits Physical Commodity Trading

As featured on The Huffington Post: Quite dramatically, being the biggest bull in the China shop, JPMorgan Chase made the striking announcement this past week that it would quit trading in physical commodities. This in a week during which a Senate panel held hearings on whether banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are manipulating commodity/material…
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After Costing Americans Billions, Federal Reserve Reexamines Banks’ Commodity Speculation

As featured on The Huffington Post: “The Fed regularly monitors the commodity activities of supervised firms and is reviewing the 2003 determination that certain commodity activities are complimentary to financial activities and thus permissible to bank holding companies” comments from Fed spokeswoman and reported by Bloomberg (“Fed Reviews Rule On Big Banks’ Commodity Trading after…
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JP Morgan Accused of Rigging Energy Markets. A Feather Duster Anyone?

As featured on The Huffington Post: There they go again. First there was Enron rigging energy markets. Now the sights are set on JP Morgan Chase, where the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, “JP Morgan, Energy Regulator Near Record Settlement.” Record settlement, really? The number bandied about is $1 billion, or one sixth of the…
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