Word: oiled
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...need more - not fewer - oil traders. After a roller-coaster ride that has sent oil prices from a record high of $147 per bbl. last July to below $35 in December and back to around $60, there has been a clamor to clamp down on speculators - those investors who trade oil but don't ultimately supply it or use it (the way airlines do, for instance). The economic disruption caused by oil's volatility has been so vexing that the Obama Administration believes it can stabilize prices by regulating speculators out of the market...
...much money has piled into oil that there's a belief that there are too many people involved in the futures market. In fact, the opposite is true. The participants are so few that a couple of major players can, if they choose, garner absolute control, cornering the market and creating a price bubble for their own benefit. (Read "Oil Shocks: Biden, Iran and Fears of Another Price Jump...
...Currently, with virtually no regulation, the oil-futures market - given that it drives the price of oil worldwide - is very small. Dangerously small. To limit trading would make it smaller still. If the government decides to curb trading in the oil-futures market, it would limit trading by purely financial speculators. Instead, the government should focus on trade activity by oil companies, oil suppliers and oil hedgers like airlines. Yes, you read correctly: oil traders with physical ties to crude represent the greatest threat for another price hike...
...Merkel, who agreed to leave the deal intact while forming a coalition with the Social Democrats in 2005, now wants to "phase out the phase out." She argues that it is unrealistic in the face of high oil costs, will endanger renewable energy goals, and will leave Germany vulnerable to the whims of its largest gas supplier, Russia. If the chancellor's party manages to ditch the Social Democrats to form a coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats in September, Merkel may get her wish to keep nuclear plants open longer. (Read about Merkel in this year's TIME...
...China's civil wars, Uighur leaders in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar declared a short-lived independent Republic of East Turkestan. But Xinjiang was wholly subsumed into the new state forged by China's victorious Communists after 1949, with Beijing steadily tightening its grip on the oil rich territory. Its official designation as an "autonomous region" belies rigid controls from the central government over Xinjiang, and a policy of settling hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese there that has left the Uighurs comprising a little less than half of the region's roughly 20 million people. (See pictures...