Word: oiling
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...What if we took out all the traders who had nothing to do with the oil market? That would leave oil suppliers and oil hedgers: those trying to sell oil and those trying to buy oil, respectively. Suppliers benefit from higher prices and so would not be willing to sell. Hedgers, afraid of soaring prices, would buy oil futures, driving the price to unheard-of levels. Worse still, we would have to worry about the oil suppliers themselves getting in on the futures-price action. They can afford to take on huge risks in the oil-futures market because they...
...While speculators affect the market in both directions, commercial participants tend to put upward pressure on prices. If airlines fully hedged themselves in the futures market, the price of oil would jump enormously. The futures market cannot support hedging for energy, let alone for other things; for example, investors might buy oil to hedge against losses in other investments, like stocks. With speculators out of the market, an airline's hedge would have an even bigger impact, further raising the global price for oil...
...Since an oil supplier has more freedom than an oil hedger - after all, a supplier sits on oil with no rush to sell it, as a hedger attempts to curb real risk - a supplier can squeeze prices higher by refusing to sell on the futures market. The supplier would sell oil just through private deals, whose prices are determined by the futures market - and not the other way around. This catch-22 represents the systemic flaw in the global oil market...
...Technically, NYMEX has placed limits such that no one firm can control more than 20 million bbl. of oil. Then again, a previously unknown energy-trading company called Vitol controlled 11% of the open interest on NYMEX at one point last summer, which amounted to four times that. Around the same time, SemGroup, a large oil-distribution company, filed for bankruptcy after losing $2.4 billion on a short position that also dwarfed the supposed limit...
...Position limits at some threshold might be a good idea, but they must apply to all institutions - especially those dealing with physical oil. And they cannot be too small, or else loopholes will become viable means to corner the market, for instance, by using subsidiaries...