Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Obama to move against "speculation" in oil market

Well, I'm all against speculation. Evil it is. Last year with the stock market, mortgage backed securities, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns going down the drain, a lot of money was invested in oil futures for lack of anywhere else to put it. Which drove the price of crude oil to $144 a barrel. Which drove the price of gasoline to $4 a gallon. Those are bad things.
Of course the bubble burst that summer and the price of crude dropped to $35 a barrel. A lot of people got severely burned. Couldn't happen to nicer people.
So is there any difference between an evil speculator and Southwest Airlines buying future contracts of jet fuel ? Especially as the futures contracts Southwest buys are sold by futures traders, guys who just buy and sell futures contracts, they never take delivery of physical product, they just buy and sell paper futures.
It's generally accepted that futures markets are economically useful, they allow buyers and seller to lock in a price for future production. With a price locked in, a farmer can get a loan, an bakery can predict his cost of flour, an airline can predict the price of jet fuel.
Once we have a commodities future market anyone can play. Last summer a lot of people thought crude oil futures were a sure thing, and nearly everything else looked like a loser. So money flowed into buying up crude oil, a scarce and valuable commodity, and the demand made it scarcer and more valuable.
If Obama really wanted to crack down on speculation in commodities, he could cut off loans. Right now you can borrow money to buy commodities futures. The banks lend, and use the value of the commodity as collateral for the loan. We could pass a law preventing banks from making commodity buying loans. In fact FIDC could probably just make a regulation against it. FDIC says to the banks "Don't loan federally insured money (all the banks money is federally insured) for the purchase of commodities."
The Southwest Airlines of the world could pay cash, but the hedge funds and the day traders would find their returns a lot lower when they had to put up real money to play the commodities market.

No comments: