Reply #13: Can You Refute The Airline & Trucking Industry Claims About Speculation?

[Better Believe It]

I would expect that a serious effort to stop the wild speculation which threatens ALL nations would be international in scope. If the United States were to lead on this, that could encourage other ruling governments to quickly follow suit. It's a world-wide crisis which requires world-wide action by the major capitalist nations. The major transportation companies have not claimed that it is only market speculation that is fueling the oil increases. It certainly is a major or the major reason. Do you think otherwise?

You haven't provided any evidence to back up your assertion that supply and demand is largely responsible for oil price increases. There is no serious oil shortage that I'm aware of, even though George W. Bush makes that false claim to justify his off-shore, ANWR and other drilling proposals.

The airline and trucking industry are blaming the Wall Street oil speculators. Do you have information they don't have or understand something they don't? Here's what the leaders of capital in transportation have to say at their website:

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The Problem
What is causing the high price of fuel?

The oil price bubble is unfairly taxing American families and restricting our nation’s economic potential. While everyone is aware that supply and demand constraints contribute to price increases, there’s another force at work that, like gravity, is invisible yet powerful. This force is rampant speculation.

Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil to sell again, rather than to use. As largely unregulated speculators pocket billions of dollars at your expense, the price of commodities has increased out of proportion to marketplace demands.

As speculators continue to dominate the market, the volume of oil traded “on paper” has been as high as 22 times greater than the volume of oil consumed. As prices rise, institutional investors have become active traders, turning commodities into just another asset class. This has caused severe market imbalance and upset the natural relationship between supply and demand. As a result, legitimate customers such as trucking companies, airlines, and consumers have been forced to purchase oil at unnecessarily higher prices. This has dramatically raised costs, resulting in needlessly high prices for American consumers and businesses.

How do they get away with that?

Over the last 20 years, commodities markets have become increasingly less regulated. Today, as many as 90 percent of all commodities trades occur outside of the traditional marketplace exchanges. In these so-called “Swaps trades”, parties secretly buy and sell commodities with absolutely no one watching. This means speculators can manipulate oil prices and corner the market without anyone knowing.

In addition, other loopholes exist allowing increasingly sophisticated speculators to take advantage of consumers. For example, in 2000 Enron lobbied policy makers to permit some U.S. commodities exchanges to operate without normal oversight. This has allowed speculators to dodge public disclosure rules that would normally limit the number of trades an investor can make.