[lbo-talk] Re: (didnt we agree to stop talking about) The Transformation Problem

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Sep 20 04:45:10 PDT 2006


On Sep 20, 2006, at 2:50 AM, Daniel Davies wrote:


> I don't agree with Doug that it is intrinsically impossible to
> manipulate the
> oil price for political ends. Enron manipulated the electricity
> price in
> California - mainly for profit but they must have been aware that
> the blackout
> would likely have favourable political consequences. Since the big
> catalyst
> for the last leg up in oil prices was the BP Proudhon Bay fiasco,
> you can sort
> of see how someone who really wanted to manipulate a US election
> might be able
> to play around a bit with the scheduling of pipeline maintenance
> and refinery
> outages in order to move some of the volatility around in the
> gasoline price so
> that a spike or notch would occur immediately before (or after) an
> election.

I don't doubt they could screw around with the price a bit, but I can't imagine they could move it more than a few bucks either way. I'm too lazy to do the research, but I'd bet that the California electricity market is no more than a thousandth the size of the oil market, and Enron was a very big player in that relatively small market.

BP...they can't do anything right, can they?

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list