I encountered this in my internet travelings:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770.shtml
Selected quotes:
"Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was actually being consumed in the United States."
"...when Congress began holding hearings last summer and asked Wall Street banker Lawrence Eagles of J.P. Morgan what role excessive speculation played in rising oil prices, the answer was little to none. "We believe that high energy prices are fundamentally a result of supply and demand," he said in his testimony."
"...not even J.P. Morgan's chief global investment officer agreed with him. The same that day Eagles testified, an e-mail went out to clients saying "an enormous amount of speculation" ran up the price" and "140 dollars in July was ridiculous.""
"Gilligan said. "I tease people sometimes that, you know, people say, 'Well, who's the largest oil company in America?' And they'll always say, 'Well, Exxon Mobil or Chevron, or BP.' But I'll say, 'No. Morgan Stanley.'""
"The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs also has huge stakes in companies that own a refinery in Coffeyville, Kan., and control 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 storage terminals."
""Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger. "You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got.""
""When Enron failed, we learned that Enron, and its conspirators who used their trading engine, were able to drive the price of electricity up, some say, by as much as 300 percent on the West Coast... Every Enron trader, who knew how to do these manipulations, became the most valuable employee on Wall Street,""
This, from an article more than a week old. What I want to know is, why this isn't front page news. Why I didn't I hear about this sooner. Why didn't any of you. Or if the article is bunk, when the libel lawsuits were filed and who filed them.
Percy