Friday 3rd of May 2024

unmasking the face of greed .....

unmasking the face of greed .....

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday will announce that it'll begin publishing how much hedge funds and other big financial firms are trading in oil and other commodities, with an eye toward curbing what critics say is speculation that pushes prices up.

The CFTC currently publishes weekly data that lumps some of the big financial firms' transactions in with those done by so-called commercial users, airlines, refiners and others who actually use the oil. Critics argue that leaves regulators and the public unaware of how much oil prices are being influenced by speculation.

"Enhancing the quality of information in these weekly reports will better inform market participants and the public about the positions of the various types of traders," CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement that was to be made public early Tuesday.

Since oil prices hit their all-time record of $147 a barrel a year ago, there's been growing pressure on regulators to curb excessive speculation in energy trading, and commodities markets more generally. The issue resurfaced in recent months as oil prices climbed from $40 to $70 with little obvious change in oil consumption patterns.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/71349.html

weathermen .....

Retirement money that Australian workers are required by law to hand over to the $6 billion VicSuper superannuation fund is being sucked into the Goldman Sachs carbon bubble machine, and Al Gore is coming to town this week to make sure it keeps coming.

VicSuper is a major investor in Gore's Generation Investment Management hedge fund, which is managed by former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood, just one of an array of current and former Goldman Suckers who are orchestrating a bigger financial scam than the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637, premised on conning people into believing they can change the weather.

Goldman specialises in peddling influence, by making their executives fabulously wealthy, and then deploying them to key positions in government and public service. Well known Goldman Suckers include: former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, George W. Bush's chief of staff Joshua Bolten, AIG white knight Ed Liddy (who funnelled $13 billion of AIG's bail-out money to Goldman), the heads of the Canadian and Italian central banks, the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Al Gore's partner David Blood, and former Australian Environment Minister and current Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

(Is Turnbull's Goldman Sachs connection the reason he is forcing a deal on Rudd's ignorantly-named Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), onto his very reluctant party room?)

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood blasted Gore's cap-and-trade scam: "Super funds are now rapidly pumping Australian savings into a carbon bubble, which will evaporate in Gore's hot air, just as dupes lost money in the dot-com bubble bolstered by the Y2K hoax. Remember those dot-com companies that produced nothing, yet had millions of dollars in market capital? Well, we're being sucked into the same type of fraud again with carbon trading."

Isherwood concluded, "However, this swindle is much worse, because we'll be pumping money to shut down productive industries and attempting to replace them with inefficient so-called alternatives, which will collapse our economy into dark age conditions, and kill people."

the power of the biggest lies .....

Besides Goldman Sachs, the Street's other surviving behemoth is JPMorgan. Today it posted second-quarter earnings up a stunning 36 percent from the first quarter, to $2.7 billion.

The resurgence of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs gives both banks more financial clout than any other players on the Street -allowing both firms to lure talent from everywhere else on the Street with multi-million pay packages, giving both firms enough economic power to charge clients whopping fees, and bestowing on both firms even more political heft in Washington.

Where are the anti-trusters when we need them? Alternatively, why isn't the government charging Goldman and JPMorgan a large insurance fee for classifying both firms as "too big to fail" and therefore automatically bailed out if the risks they take turn sour? Instead, we've ended up with two giants that now have most of the casino to themselves, are playing with poker chips backed by taxpayers, and have a big say in what the rules of the game are to be.

http://www.truthout.org/071909T?n