Gas Pump Thievery: Who's Really Behind the Rising Prices at the Pumps?

[FourScore]

Gas Pump Thievery: Who's Really Behind the Rising Prices at the Pumps?
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted June 25, 2009
What's going on here is not the "magic of the marketplace," but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers.

Like a Fourth of July crescendo of fireworks, our gasoline prices are rising higher and higher. While this is tough on consumers, we're assured by a covey of tongue-clucking industry analysts that nothing can be done about it, for it's simply the law of supply and demand in action -- so suck it up, and pay up.

But hold your BPExxonMobilShellChevron horses right there. Supply and demand? The supply of crude oil has risen this year to its highest level in nearly two decades, even while the demand for gasoline has dropped dramatically, having fallen this month to a 10-year low. Let's see -- supply up, demand down. That's a classic market formula for cheaper prices at the pump. Yet our prices have steadily moved up, rising by two-thirds since the beginning of the year (and by 60 cents a gallon in the past two months alone).

What's going on here is not the "magic of the marketplace," but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers. What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don't operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands -- but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil. They're playing an electronic casino game in a global "dark market" of exotic derivatives and credit swaps.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's because this is the same game that Wall Street played with subprime mortgages, leading to the present crash of our economy. And, yes, these are the exact same banksters that you and I are presently bailing out with our trillions of tax dollars.

Yet, there they go again. By pooling money from sheltered hedge funds, sovereign state funds, offshore accounts and other super-wealthy investors, speculators like Goldman and Morgan have quietly been buying trillions of dollars worth of oil derivatives -- which essentially are bets that oil prices will rise to a certain level by a certain date.

Unlike those investors who actually purchase contracts for future delivery of oil, there is no limit on how much money these gamblers can put into the oil market. Nor do they have to report to anyone how much they have bet, even though their massive infusion of money is totally and artificially distorting the real value of petroleum...

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140889/gas_pump_thievery%3A_who%27s_really_behind_the_rising_prices_at_the_pumps/

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. America is simply a nation of suckers, marks and rubes for the likes of Goldman Sachs

Americans are being screwed by Wall Street banks in a host of ways. Anyone that buys the the BS about gas prices being a function of free markets is dreaming.

[excess_3]

4. European motortists are better off , IMO

choose one.

pay 2.40 to Exxon
or
pay 8.00

[checks-n-balances]

2. k&r - Because the prices are creeping, sometimes it's harder to notice

Hightower is correct to connect it to the larger financial picture.

[jgraz]

3. Your tax dollars at work.

And STILL Obama won't take on these criminals. :banghead:

[zbdent]

5. If you can get out to Bath Ohio - $2.399/gallon ...