Thumbing Its Nose At Europe
Yesterday, the WSJ ran a column co-authored by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. I’m guessing that neither 10 Downing St. nor the Elysee was terribly glad to discover that the Journal buried their column at the bottom of a page, without even including one of those charming pencil portraits of either the French president or the British prime minister.
More importantly, the Journal also chose to run the Sarkozy-Brown column under the headline “Oil Prices Need Government Supervision,” which I found to be rather misleading. It sounds like Sarkozy and Brown are calling for a government takeover of yet another market. But here’s the closest they came to saying anything like that:
The Expert Group of the International Energy Forum should take the lead in establishing a common long-term view on what price range would be consistent with the fundamentals.These experts should also consider any measures that could be put in place to reduce volatility. And they should look again at whether trading activity is amplifying erratic price movements.
Pretty vague, huh? If the Journal wants to editorialize about energy policy in UK and France, it should publish an editorial, not hijack a column.
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5 Responses to “Thumbing Its Nose At Europe”
Yes well the more government take-overs the better IMO. Lets start with healthcare here in America please.
It's a shame we will not get Justice with public senior exec beheadings.
Why shouldn't the market and supply and demand unfettered by government interference, be allowed to run free? Because this happens:
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. “The Bubble Machine”
It's not vague (grunt omitted). Obviously what's being advocated is interventionism in the oil market.
And for correction #2:
” If the Journal wants to editorialize about energy policy in UK and France, it should publish an editorial, not hijack a column.”
Not is it not hijacking a column, it's accurately titled opinion of the Europeans was on the _opinion_ page, as opposed to the practice in so many other, liberally-biased (both terms apply) newspapers of doing this in the “news” section. (I could add practices like relegating Congressional activity on a balanced budget amendment in the 1990s to a remote page of the Business section rather than on page one of the main news section — and so I'll add that, as another example of what others, rather than the Journal, do.)
DLS, we NEED regulation of the oil market. If it were supply and demand, as we were told, that's one thing. But it's not. Prices of a critical commodity were manipulated to the detriment of the general public. That is not a good thing.