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The Government did absolutly nothing to the speculators last time. So it was inevidable that they would do it again.
There is no crisis or drop in the oil supply to justify the rise in prices. This means they are raising them just to make money from the suckers one more time.
The Republicans who want smaller Government think we should just let these people rip us off every year or so by raising prices, and the Government to just let them do it. Yet out of the other side of their mouths they say Governments job is to protect us. Protecting us means protecting us from the unscrupulous, the rip off artists, and the crooks just as much as it does the Terrorists.
When Dick Cheney said they kept us safe. He didn’t mention that they failed to act on the speculators on the oil prices, failed to act on the rip offs of Wall Street, failed to hold contractors to account, failed to catch the Bernie Madoffs until it was to late. So they didn’t keep us safe, but left us open to be taken to the cleaners by everybody. Much of this cost us more, and was more damaging to life and limb in this country than a Terrorist attack.
All that aside I have been warning people that some kind of oil crisis, even if it’s just much higher prices were going to hit. In answer people more or less put off what I was saying, as if it couldn’t happen here.
Guess what? Republicans and Democrats are going to be paying those high prices and hurt by them much the same.
The people now bitching about the possible offshore drilling will I’m sure keep bitching while paying those high prices.
If You think the Recession is bad now, and prices are also bad now, wait and see what all that will be at four or five dollar gas.
Good Government, not size matters. Good Government would protect us from the speculators, and not manage but control those who would just raise prices just to make enormous profits at the cost of Country and People.
The American People will someday wake up. They became up in arms over healthcare, but let the last run up in gas prices just slide. They didn’t even bother to badger their Representatives about the speculators the last time, and just ate the high prices.
Maybe this time with the Recession they won’t be quite so quiet when the prices start to eat into their way of living.
13 Comments
Let’s call Timothy Geithner.
Oh! I see what the Wall St. Bankers have done here.
Why poor Timmie?
The Banks are not directly involved in the speculation it’s the Markets and the Hedge Funds, and we all seem to be glad that their doing really good.
More clearly, oil has become not a commodity but a ‘store of value’ and also reflects the rise in the dollar in anticipation of increased interest rates.
Yeah, it’s all a manipulation to further the ‘soft landing’ the powers that be think they have enacted; too bad their mistaken and so many who don’t have a ‘security cushion’ will be,again, considered ‘cannon fodder’ for their financial manipulations.
Drill Baby Drill seems to be Pres. Obamarahma’s latest betrayal so whose surprised that an emboldened Oil cartel will now rip us all off again with impunity?
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are probably up to thier eyeballs in this. They are the two of the biggest energy trading firms.
Letting it go on could endanger the recovery and since there’s no economic reason for the price to go up it’s safe to assume gov’t intervention to push back against the speculators will be correct, effective and accepted by the public.
And, in case people had forgotten, this will serve as an excellent reminder to legislators of what happened so many times before and what must be systemically regulated instead of met on an ad hoc basis.
I don’t drive so I might have missed something.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=LON%3ACRUD
Hit “Max” on the chart, oil hasn’t risen all that much?
The big banks are hedge funds.
If You think the Recession is bad now, and prices are also bad now, wait and see what all that will be at four or five dollar gas.
That´s still way too cheap.
Maybe this time with the Recession they won’t be quite so quiet when the prices start to eat into their way of living.
The sooner the better, your ´way of living´ is threatening everyone on the planet.
I’mma hold off on calling it a recovery until unemployment and forclosure rates are brought down to an acceptable level. But I do completely agree that our government could fix this problem if they chose to fix it.
The last oil spike was a result of a peak in production. Even with soaring prices, daily production rates remained flat, because there was no excess to tap. The only thing that caused the price to drop was the worldwide recession, which now seems to be bottoming out.
Another major factor is China. I was in Beijing last week and saw very few bicycles (a smaller fraction of the vehicles than you would see in Manhattan.) The 1.3 billion Chinese are now driving cars. There is your demand.
We are destined to relive this scenario (growth – peak oil – price spike – recession – price drop) indefinitely every few years until we can find alternative sources of energy, particularly for transportation. We can’t drill out of this problem, although more drilling will mitigate the effects of the cycle, but only on the margins.
Exactly. It’s especially evident in China, but various third world countries have populations with more cash to spend, and the citizens there are buying cars. There are many countries where bicycles used to be predominant with motor bikes a close second. Now more and more people around the globe have the money to buy cars and (for now) to buy gas.
China has already told us to shut up, if the USA thinks we can tell their citizens to stop this kind of consumption and go back to walking or cycling. They’re right, too. No matter what the environmental issues are, we here in the good EwEssAay are in no position to tell anyone anywhere not to use more fossil fuels.
But, per usual, instead of leading the way towards using different resources for transportation (hence lending us some slim margin of credibility for asking others to curb their use), what happens? Why we’re back to Sarah Palin’s & Michael Steele’s rally cry of drill baby drill.
So stupid. I agree with one post. The higher gasoline prices go, the better. The sooner this nation learns to depend on other means of transportation and other resources for fuel, the better. It’s clear that no one here is going to do anything until they really, really, really have to.
Short sighted, narrow minded, entitled, dumb and wasteful: what a ship of fools this is.
There will definitely be much more competition for commodities, especially as our population grows ever poorer due to our fabulous corporations off-shoring all of the jobs to third world countries. This is just the tip of the iceberg, imo.
There are few options to replace gasoline. Electric cars, for example, merely shift the burden to the electrical generation plants. There are only two options for the short to medium term. The first is “clean” coal (which is possible, although not the way is currently proposed. We might have to revive the process Germany used in WWII to make a gasoline substitute.) The second, and unavoidable, option is nuclear. This is the only significant energy source that emits no greenhouse gases. Of course, distributed solar, wind and geothermal energy should be pursued where feasible, but these cannot span the gap in the foreseeable future.
The only real solution is conservation. Cutting our usage makes a permanent reduction in the need for energy. New supplies must be replenished constantly.
It is going to be very grim for the next 50-100 years, especially since we wasted the last 30 when we abandoned conservation, alternate sources and nuclear. The period between 1979 and 1981 was critical. The combination of TMI & ‘The China Syndrome,” the collapse of oil prices when the Iranians opened the tap and the rise of Reagan and his end of conservation measures supported by every President since Nixon led to our current fix.