Bahhd regulators | Leah McGrath Goodman

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Oil and Gas Politics: Just The Nonpartisan Facts

May 7, 2012

I’ve been writing a series for Fortune in recent weeks tackling questions like, if the U.S. is now selling more petroleum products than it is buying for the first time in more than six decades, why is most of the country paying around $4 a gallon for gas? And if 30% of U.S. oil is […]

Q&A With The Global Journal: Oil Trading And The Casino Syndrome

February 28, 2012

Happy National Pancake/Leap Year/Week before Super Tuesday Day, all. It has been a turbulent past few months and not just in the oil market. I will get into why very shortly but, for now, let’s just say that after a long and dark winter, I am once again available for dancing in the streets. Without any further cryptic remarks, I’d like […]

How To Make Someone Else Swallow Your Losses, The Mastercourse

November 21, 2011

It’s official: when a Wall Street powerhouse suddenly collapses and (possibly) more than a billion dollars goes missing, it’s no longer just the ordinary taxpayer’s problem. Now, it has moved up the chain. Below, the piece I wrote today for Fortune on what traders do when you misappropriate their money. While Occupy Wall Street was holding its two-month anniversary rally in Manhattan […]

A Certain Stylishness In Hating The Rich

November 7, 2011

Our national discourse on the nature of wealth has been a good cure for sanity of late. News that a book coming out from the surviving son of Bernard Madoff, mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, elicited comments from readers that could be called anything but charitable. Alongside an interview with Madoff’s wife, Ruth, whose picture speaks volumes about […]

Dear The Fed: You Suck

July 23, 2011

I was cleansing my inbox today and found this friendly letter to the Fed from 2007 written by our comrades at Long or Short Capital (vaguely connected to our own fake hedge fund, Intergalactic Capital). I was all ready to take a whimsical walk down memory lane, since 2007 was the year before our financial meltdown. Yet strangely, this missive does not seem […]

Cash or Credit: A Stuffing Under the Mattress Vs. A Hiding in the Closet

July 12, 2011

It took longer than usual to take up the pen today. Probably because it was imperative to check out the “Every Single Outfit Catherine Wore on the Royal Tour” feature in the Huffington Post. Having done that, I now turn to more important matters. Like this cash-or-credit debate taking place in the papers. Financial vigilantes are urging consumers to cut up […]

Interview on ‘Keiser Report’ – Russia Today

June 28, 2011

Many of you have written to ask for a good bit more on the shenanigans prevalent in today’s oil market. Check out this show, aired today, from minute 14 on…(Thankfully, you can scroll through to the juicy stuff.) More to come on DOJ, FTC, CFTC and FERC investigations into the price of oil and gas — and where the […]

April 13, 2011

Quote from a great piece in this month’s Vanity Fair, penned by the illustrious Mr. S… “Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions […]

The Global Oil Casino Benefits Only Its Players

April 7, 2011

Originally published in The Financial Times on April 6th, 2011 Tensions in the Middle East and north Africa, we are told, lie behind the recent increase in global fuel prices, which Wednesday hit a 2 ½-year high. Yet while Brent crude this week stayed above $120 a barrel, in Tripoli petrol hovered at around 54 […]

Killing Your Own: The Truth About Oil Speculators

March 17, 2011

Originally published on huffingtonpost.com on Mar. 14, 2011 In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Marine Corps sent more than a dozen generals, colonels and other high-ranking officers to the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the world’s reigning oil market. Their mission: to see how the traders behaved when forced to make tough decisions […]