SocraticGadfly: $100 mil for increasing our gas prices in a recession?

August 02, 2009

$100 mil for increasing our gas prices in a recession?

Meet Andrew J. Hall, arguably the king of oil commodities future speculators. It was him and his ilk, in addition to legitimate supply and demand concerns just 12 short months ago, who were probably adding an extra $25/bbl to the price of oil even as we were already officially in a recession and moving deeper into it.

It’s people like him who have caused the recent spike in gas prices, all because Wall Street is less “recessed” than you and I.

Oh, and he wants $100 million from Citigroup for his work, even though Citi got bilions in TARP money from Uncle Sam, aka “you and I.”

That all said, this is now the second time in less than a week that I’ve rhetorically asked why we have no Congressional action on another promise, or quasi-promise, from Obama, to rein in commodities speculators. (That said, that wasn’t just an Obama promise — at the periphery of the bailout table last October, a lot of people were saying we needed this.)

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