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

[Doug Henwood]

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