Senators Carl Levin and Dianne Feinstein intend to close the "London loophole" by empowering the CFTC to impose speculative limits on US traders who use London exchanges. The move is aimed at helping to prevent price manipulation and excessive speculation in the oil market.
The senators\’ aim goes one step further than the CFTC\’s current investigation into the US crude oil market, which was announced on Thursday, by giving the American futures regulator the power to intervene in trading activities that occur outside its own legal jurisdiction.
Both politicians are keen to reduce the amount of speculative energy trading, which they believe pushes up the price of crude oil, and so petrol prices, unfairly hurting their constituents.
They are of course perfectly at liberty to impose restraints on trades by those in the US. It won\’t have much effect for if it is seen as a burden by said traders then they\’ll simply open a desk in London or Zurich.
But the real fuckwittery comes from the attempt to curb speculation. Speculators smooth out prices over time….they move shortages and gluts and the associated price rises and falls intertemporally, something that we all rather desire should happen.
But then they are indeed politicians so perhaps we shouldn\’t expect them to understand anything about the real world.
Where the plot gets lost on Greens is how they forget the goal is to reduce energy usage and emissions, best served by eliminating the trip to the dump by using personal transport.
Reducing the regular un-recycled waste collection, and limiting recycled waste collections, combined with the fascist penalties on “bins too full” legislation, will inevitably generate _more_ journeys to waste disposal sites, thus more energy use and more emissions, in addition to that generated by the council.
Enforcing their draconian rules to get us to recycle ,and their stupidity in collection policy, they are actually causing _more_ damage to the environment.
“Enforcing their draconian rules to get us to recycle ,and their stupidity in collection policy, they are actually causing _more_ damage to the environment.”
It’s not about the environment, is it? That’s just a convenient excuse to get us to obey the orders of the central command. Obeying orders is the end itself.
When you assert:
Speculators smooth out prices over time….they move shortages and gluts and the associated price rises and falls intertemporally, something that we all rather desire should happen.
what are you basing that on? I’ve been doing some research into academic studies and I don’t really find that many which are so certain on the issue.
Tim adds: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. In the discussions about speculators and the price of corn. It really ain’t a new idea.
The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, I’m not sure it is fully up to speed with what’s happening in futures markets.
Principles are principles. Newton’s work was published a couple of years before the Moon landings, but the math proved perfectly capable. And if you think there were no futures markets in those days, think again. Our forebears may not have had our technology, but they were not therefore unsophisticated idiots.