Slippery Business
This Time article unintentionally exposes the truth: Oil Is Plentiful, Demand Weak. Why Are Gas Prices Going Up?
Storage tankers across the globe may be brimming with oil that no one is buying because of the global economic downturn, but the traditional laws of supply and demand don’t always apply to oil prices.
The “laws of supply and demand” are really only suggestions, actually, excuses, used to cover up the gambling that is going on in the background. There is no “free market”, there are a bunch of global “good ol’ boys” getting together for their version of poker night to see how much they can gouge out of people who actually work for a living.
Real markets work rather well at determining the value of things, and always have, which is why they aren’t permitted to operate. The “good ol’ boys” don’t want to sell you what you need and want, they want to sell you what they have to sell at the price they set.
4 comments
Like the “good ol’ boys” of Enron who gambled California into an “energy crisis” and got our Governor booted. I still feel my blood pressure rising when I remember hearing those tapes of Enron traders joking and laughing about how much they are making while grannies suffered.
And Obama still doesn’t understand about why people are ticked off of the financial sector bail out. Those thieves need to share in the pain they created, not be buffered from it.
They should have treated just like the car companies.
BTW, the car companies is another reason there isn’t any justification for oil price increases. Cars aren’t selling, and future cars will use less fuel. The oil crowd went too far, and people are changing the way they think about transportation.
@Cookie Jill – Back in the day, I won a contest at Mad Kane’s site… I don’t remember if I answered a question about Enron or wrote some doggerel, but Mad sent me as a prize a copy of The Smartest Guys in the Room. By the time I finished reading that book, I was spitting mad. And… yes, count me as angry at Ken Lay for having not lived long enough for the society he ripped off to jail him.
Bryan – I couldn’t agree more. Doesn’t Wall Street realize, stock markets aside, that many Western democracies don’t even have what we would consider a banking industry, and a thriving, competitive economy can develop under a government-managed banking system? What part of “you’re dispensable; autos, trucks etc. are essential” do they not understand? I wonder occasionally if Obama would have done better not to appoint so many Wall Street exes (competency aside) to manage the recovery, but as I can’t imagine Obama not doing that, I suppose it’s irrelevant. Having no choice, we may as well try it for the hellevant, as Ogden Nash rhymed at least once.
Banks produce nothing of any intrinsic worth [ignoring the use of credit cards as burglary tools]. Banks are an expense, an intrusion in the market, not a requirement for the existence of a market. They are a service like waitresses and waiters, or valet parking, not essential, like the cook. They are the grease, not the cogs.
The large financial groups need to be down-sized so they remember their place in the economy. They are a sideshow, not the center ring.