Foros de Aporrea.org

[Jose009]

Cita:

Ask yourself who benefits from high oil prices? It’s the producers, stupid. From 2005 onwards a market bubble in crude oil has been deliberately created. This has been achieved opaquely through use of the Prepay funding used by Enron to sell commodities at a discount for cash now, and deliver them later. Creditors and investors who were unaware of Enron’s ‘off-balance sheet’ liabilities were misled as to the true financial position and were thereby defrauded. Most oil market participants have been similarly misled as to the true position in the oil market through the use of prepays by producers, funded by passive investors. In simple terms, risk averse investors have lent dollars to producers, and producers have lent oil to investors. None of the resulting changes of ownership of oil in the physical market were visible to other market participants, and the price has become a completely distorted and financialised bubble as a result. The bubble first collapsed during the second half of 2008 from $147 to $35 per barrel and it was then re-inflated in 2009 through the use of prepays, facilitated by US investment banks to the benefit of producers. Oil prices have since been kept pegged as far as possible between levels which: (a) do not endanger US presidential re-election; and (b) enable producer populations to be financially anaesthetised. A key element in the evolution of this macro manipulation has been that banks as financial intermediaries are no longer capitalised to take risks in the way that they could and did prior to the collapse of the banking system. The outcome has been that market risk – ie the risk that the oil price will fall – is no longer held by the banks but has been transferred to passive and risk averse investors. The motive of passive investors is not the speculative desire of active investors to make a transaction profit, but its very opposite: the desire to avoid loss. So they invest in oil funds in order to offload the risk that the dollar will depreciate in value relative to oil. Unfortunately, they are blithely unaware that they have a massive market risk if the oil price falls in a market ‘bust’, as it did in 2008; has recently been doing; and will continue to do at least until the end of the year. This is a regulatory accident waiting to happen. Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/chris-cook-libor-and-oil-market-manipulation-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light.html#I1Z2yd37HitzRz6M.99