Pronk Pops Show 26, May 3, 2011: Segment 2: President Obama Is The Reason Your Gasoline Prices Are Going Up!–American People Favor Drilling For Oil and Gas!–Drill Baby Drill–Videos

Posted on May 3, 2011. Filed under: American History, Budgetary Policy, Business, Climate Change, Coal, Economics, Federal Government, Fiscal Policy, Government, History, Monetary Policy, Oil, Philosophy, Politics, Private Sector Unions, Public Sector Unions, Resources, Tax Policy, Unions, Videos, Violence, War, Wisdom | Tags: Barack Obama, CFTC, Commodities, Commodity Future Contracts, Empire, Energy Prices, Gasoline Prices, Hedge Funds, Inflation, Investment Banks, Margin Requirements, Natural Gas, Oil, Postion Limits, Regulation, Speculation |

Pronk Pops Show 26:May 5, 2011

Pronk Pops Show 25: April 26, 2011

Pronk Pops Show 24: April 19, 2011

Pronk Pops Show 23: April 12, 2011

Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 22 (Part 2)-26

Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 16-22 (Part 1)

Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 10-15

Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1-9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_petroleum

High fuel prices worry struggling Americans. Burberry.

Obama Weekly Address: Gas Prices

END FED: Oil Prices Rise Due To

1) Oil Companies Can’t Drill

2) Fed Money Printing

3) Wars & Instability

Fraud, Manipulation Driving up Oil Prices

Renewable Energy Subsidies+High Consumer Costs=?

Government Energy Subsidies

Obama Is Playing The Blame Game For Price Of Gas At the Pump

TheBigPictureRT: The Real reason why Gas Prices are going up

Mar. 10 – MSNBC Greenberger – Gas Speculation

Banksters & Speculation Behind High Food-Oil Prices

Chairman Doc Hastings talks rising gasoline prices on Your World with Neil Cavuto

Trying to bring down gas prices

Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ — Goldman Sachs Obama’s #1 Private Contributor

Soaring Gas Prices Tank Obama’s Approval Rating

Oil speculation and oil prices

Survey Says – Speculators Dominate Interest in Oil Futures – Bloomberg

CFTC Proposes Limits for Energy Speculators

Gas Prices Continue to Climb

Obama Wants Gas Prices to Hit European Levels

Energy Problems are Obama Delivering on Campaign Promise

EPA Blocks Oil Drilling in Alaska – 4/25/2011

Obama New Task Force Will Examine Gas Prices

Gensler Says CFTC Needs More Staff to Implement Rules

Irresponsible Media Coverage of Oil & Gas Prices, Alyona Minkovski Interviewed

Bernard Whitman on Fox News Applauds Obama’s Decision to Investigate Oil Price Gouging, 4.22.11

Courtney calls for CFTC action to reduce high gas prices

TheAlyonashow: Big Oil Cashes in on Rising Gas Prices

Oil Speculator Gaming Palace

Playing the oil prices money game

Courtney calls on CFTC to issue rules limiting the role of oil speculators

Michael Greenberger Talks Speculation In Commodity Markets

Mike Masters on Regulating Commodities Speculation

Gas Prices Up Due to Wall Street Speculation, Not Supply & Demand

Glenn Beck: The Federal Reserve Is Looting America… Oil Isn’t Rising, The Dollar Is Dropping

Conspiracy Theorist Steve Forbes on high gas prices w/o Federal Reserve “economy would do just fine”

END FED Inflation Created By Gov Buying Bonds; QE2 ‘Wealth Effect’; Companies Game System; QE3

Peter Schiff on CNBC Fast Money 4/25/11: Unstoppable Silver

Peter Schiff On Silver and Inflation Lock In Your Food At Today’s Price Try It For Free Below!

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation: “69 percent of Americans favor increased offshore drilling”

WASHINGTON – Earlier today, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was released, further underscoring the fact that an overwhelmingly clear majority of Americans support the responsible development of homegrown oil and natural gas offshore. According to the poll, “69 percent of Americans favor increased offshore drilling.” According to CNN’s polling director, Keating Holland, “Although support for increased drilling in U.S. waters is highest among Republicans, a majority of Democrats also favor it.”

Barry Russell, president and CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), issued this statement regarding these findings:

“America’s independent oil and natural gas producers play a leading role in responsibly producing the homegrown energy resources critical to meet the nation’s growing demands. In fact, according to a recent report, independents drill 95 percent of America’s onshore and offshore wells. Equally clear, as confirmed by this new survey, is the American people’s support for the responsible development of job-creating offshore energy exploration and production.

“Our economy is struggling, and many remain out of work along the Gulf Coast as a result of misguided Washington policies that continue to discourage access to reliable oil and natural gas supplies offshore. And with gas prices on the rise, hampering our economic recovering and stretching family budgets to the brink, the Obama Administration and leaders in Congress must act boldly and swiftly to streamline access to taxpayer-owned oil and natural gas resources offshore. Shirking this critical responsibly will only further weaken our nation’s energy security. The American people have spoken clearly. Inaction is not an option.”

http://www.ipaa.org/news/press_releases/2011/2011-04-19_139.php

Obama Wants US to Help Brazil Develop Oil Reserves

Obama’s $2B Payback to Soros: Drill in Brazil

Glenn Beck: Is Obama a George Soros Puppet?

Glenn Beck-Soros Petrobras & Obama giving 2 billion to him

Vitter Criticizes Obama’s Support for Brazil Oil Exploration

Gulf Oil Industry in Recovery

Year After Oil Spill, Obama Energy Policy Endangers Economy

Vitter Fights Moratorium as Gulf Coast Economy Struggles to Recover from Drilling Shutdown (WWL-TV)

Federal Judge Martin Feldman Rules Against Obama Oil Drilling Ban !!!

Myron Ebell on the Offshore Drilling Moratorium

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar seeks to reimpose drilling moratorium

Pence Discusses Need to End Offshore Drilling Moratorium

Drilling Moratorium May Imperil Louisiana’s Oil Industry

Obama Lifts Ban on Offshore Drilling

Obama Lift’s Moratorium on Offshore Drilling Part 1 – 4-01-2010 Democracy NOW!

Obama Lift’s Moratorium on Offshore Drilling Part 2 – 4-01-2010 Democracy NOW!

Obama Says NO Drilling In ANWR As It Could Be A Problem

Gov. Palin on Drilling in the ANWR

Shell Arctic Exploration Program: The Next Chapter in Alaska’s Oil and Gas History

Oil Supply and Demand and the Next Oil Price Spike – PeakOilProof.com

Background Articles and Videos

Blame High Oil Prices on Speculators and Bernanke

Ed Wallace

“…Goldman Outs the Speculators

Meanwhile, the media continue to say that gasoline prices are directly tied to oil pricing, which isn’t quite true. Oil and gasoline are sold to different sets of buyers. One needs to buy crude for refining and the other sells gasoline at retail; these are legitimate hedgers. Then there are speculators, who jump into the market in search of profits on all fuels. To prove once again that no one in the investment banking business actually knows anything about oil, Goldman Sachs (GS) advised its clients on Apr. 11 to get rid of their commodities holdings, including oil. The Guardian quoted Goldman’s advice as warning: “The record levels of speculative trading in crude have pushed their prices up so much in recent months that in the near term, risk reward no longer favors holding those commodities.”

“Record levels of speculative trading in crude” have pushed up oil prices? Funny, all we’ve been hearing is that today’s oil prices are justified because of abnormally large demand, owing to the world’s improving economy. …”

“…Now let’s look at the big picture to see why gasoline prices are so incredibly high. Remember that our refinery utilization a week ago was only 81.4 percent. In the same week in 2005 it sat at 93.7 percent, with 212.2 million barrels of gasoline on hand. Even at that exceptionally high refining rate, we were down by almost a million barrels three weeks later. By contrast, we have dropped our inventories of gasoline from 223.2 million barrels to 209.7 million barrels since the first of the year and we still have only slightly less gasoline on hand than we had at the same time in 2005, amid blistering economic growth. Our refineries then were running at nearly 10 percent greater utilization.

The Fed’s Cheap Liquidity Flood

The problem starts with Ben Bernanke, no matter how many of his Fed presidents claim they are not to blame for the high price of oil. The fact is that when you flood the market with far too much liquidity at virtually no interest, funny things happen in commodities and equities. It was true in the 1920s, it was true in the last decade, and it’s still true today.

When Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, spoke in Germany late in March, Reuters quoted him as saying: “We are seeing speculative activity that may be exacerbating price rises in commodities such as oil.” Fisher added that he was seeing the signs of the same speculative trading that had fueled the first financial meltdown.

Here Fisher is in good company. Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig, who has been a vocal critic of the current Fed policy of zero interest and high liquidity, has suggested that markets don’t function correctly under those circumstances. And David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director, recently wrote a scathing article for MarketWatch, “Federal Reserve’s Path of Destruction,” in which he criticizes current Fed policy even more pointedly. Stockman wrote: “This destruction is namely the exploitation of middle-class savers; the current severe food and energy squeeze on lower income households … and the next round of bursting bubbles building up among the risk asset classes.”

Let’s not kid ourselves. Oil in today’s world is worth far more than the $25 a barrel it sold for over a decade ago. But the ability of markets to function properly, based on real supply and demand equations, has been destroyed by allowing ridiculous leverage and the unlimited ability to borrow the leverage at historically low interest rates. …”

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/apr2011/pi20110419_786652_page_2.htm

Priming the Pump: How Wall Street Boosts Gas Prices

By Alain Sherter

“…Plenty of research shows that speculation by hedge funds and other investors raises the cost of gas. Said U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Bart Chilton in a speech last week that touched on how speculators drove up the price of oilin 2008:

While I am not saying that they were the cruise control on gas or oil prices, I do think they tapped the gas pedal and prices moved up. They were a part of the price rise. Similarly, when they did get out of the markets, as the economy was melting down, prices decreased.

Mohsin Khan of the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that three years ago, speculation pushed up oil prices by nearly $70 a barrel. Now that linkage between Wall Street and prices at the pump is more alarming than ever: Speculation on oil futures is at a record high. As Chilton said in another presentation, since June 2008 the number of energy contracts held by such investors has risen 64 percent.

This isn’t to say that speculation is inherently bad — it isn’t. It can add liquidity to markets. Short-sellers also sometimes provide an important counterpoint to the prevailing, and often irrational, bullish sentiment. But there is by now copious evidence to suggest that speculation really does boost oil and gas prices. As MIT researchers put it in examining the cause of the 2008 run-up:

The oil price is a speculative bubble…. Just ask a commuter, a trucker or an airline customer and many production and commercial firms. …”

http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/priming-the-pump-how-wall-street-boosts-gas-prices/12055

Oil Speculation, Insider Trading, JPMorgan, AT&T: Compliance

“…President Barack Obama said a Justice Department probe will examine the role of “traders and speculators” in oil markets and how they contribute to high gas prices.

“The attorney general’s putting together a team whose job it us to root out any cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, and that includes the role of traders and speculators,” Obama said April 21 in Reno, Nevada. “We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of American consumers for their own short-term gain.”

The administration on April 21 created a working group to explore whether oil and gasoline prices are being driven higher by illegal manipulation.

The group, which includes representatives of federal agencies and state attorneys general, will check for fraud, collusion or misrepresentation at the retail and wholesale level, the Justice Department said in a statement last week. The group also will examine investor practices and the role of speculators and index traders in oil futures markets.

Obama faces political pressure over rising gasoline prices. Crude oil futures have increased 22 percent and gasoline surged 34 percent this year as Middle East unrest reduced supply and the global economic rebound bolstered fuel demand. Both futures contracts touched the highest levels this month since the records reached in 2008. …”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/oil-speculation-insider-trading-jpmorgan-at-t-compliance.html

http://www.stopoilspeculationnow.com/Pages/FAQs.aspx

‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’

by F. William Engdahl

“…The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. How?

First, the crucial role of the international oil exchanges in London and New York is crucial to the game. Nymex in New York and the ICE Futures in London today control global benchmark oil prices which in turn set most of the freely traded oil cargo. They do so via oil futures contracts on two grades of crude oil—West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent.

A third rather new oil exchange, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME), trading Dubai crude, is more or less a daughter of Nymex, with Nymex President, James Newsome, sitting on the board of DME and most key personnel British or American citizens.

Brent is used in spot and long-term contracts to value as much of crude oil produced in global oil markets each day. The Brent price is published by a private oil industry publication, Platt’s. Major oil producers including Russia and Nigeria use Brent as a benchmark for pricing the crude they produce. Brent is a key crude blend for the European market and, to some extent, for Asia.

WTI has historically been more of a US crude oil basket. Not only is it used as the basis for US-traded oil futures, but it’s also a key benchmark for US production….”

“…

As that US Senate report noted:

“Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.” ¹

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=8878&context=va

Paul Van Eeden schools CNBC panel on OIL,monetary policy,FED

Meet Author Matt Taibbi

Sonali Kolhatkar Interviews Matt Taibbi – Part 1

Sonali Kolhatkar Interviews Matt Taibbi – Part 2

Sonali Kolhatkar Interviews Matt Taibbi – Part 3

Matt Taibbi – Griftopia

Oil Price History and Analysis

http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm

Obama doesn’t believe in offshore drilling

Barack Obama on Offshore Oil Drilling

Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries// = 4){
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February 2011 Import Highlights:  Released April 28, 2011
Monthly data on the origins of crude oil imports in February 2011 has been released and it shows that two countries exported more than 1,000 thousand barrels per day to the United States (see table below). The top five exporting countries accounted for 77 percent of United States crude oil imports in February while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 92 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports. The top five sources of US crude oil imports for February were Canada (2,193 thousand barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (1,114 thousand barrels per day), Mexico (998 thousand barrels per day), Nigeria (948 thousand barrels per day), and Venezuela (878 thousand barrels per day). The rest of the top ten sources, in order, were Angola (357 thousand barrels per day), Iraq (263 thousand barrels per day), Ecuador (242 thousand barrels per day), Brazil (175 thousand barrels per day), and Colombia (175 thousand barrels per day). Total crude oil imports averaged 8,013 thousand barrels per day in February, which is a decrease of 1,056 thousand barrels per day from January 2011.

Canada remained the largest exporter of total petroleum in February, exporting 2,831 thousand barrels per day to the United States, which is an increase from last month (2,826 thousand barrels per day). The second largest exporter of total petroleum was Saudi Arabia with 1,114 thousand barrels per day.

Note: The data in the tables above exclude oil imports into the U.S. territories.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

U.S. Imports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products (Thousand Barrels)

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http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTIMUS1&f=M

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