It's short for "speculation"--which is too effing long for a decent cussword. Aternatively, you can spell it "speck"...which is an apt description for the level of regard I have for speculators.
I'm becoming increasingly aware that our entire economy is subject to the whims and vagaries of specking specks in casinos called stock markets.
I haven't abandoned the Peak Oil hypothesis that I've pushed several times in the past, but I have, uh, refined it a little. It's awfully hard to keep up the pretense that we're running out of cheap oil when the price of a barrel of crude has fallen by a third in a matter of two months. It's doubly hard when you get a look at the profits Big Oil's been raking in lately.
Interestingly, that linked article from The Economist says that it's most likely oil prices are falling because of slowing global demand, "despite the flap earlier this year about the role of speculators". This directly contradicts a recent report. It also flies in the face of what happened at midnight today.
For my American readers, the price of gasoline here in southern Ontario jumped 12 to 17 cents a litre overnight. One of our regular fillup places went from $1.194/litre to $1.35. Converting everything into American and taking into account our dollar, which has sank like a stone lately due to (ha-ha) falling oil prices, we get a price hike from US$4.218/gallon to $4.769.
Have your gas prices gone up 55 cents a gallon? Somehow, I doubt it.
This doesn't affect us personally all that much. We were going to fill up last night anyway, but decided against it when we saw it would be a twenty minute wait to get to a pump. We were sitting on a half tank in our Echo: filling up last night would have saved us about four bucks. I earn more than that in twenty minutes and my wife outearns me two to one...it's just not worth the time. But obviously there are many people out there making a lot less than minimum wage driving Hummers on fumes, because the lineups were insane.
What really irks me about this is the reason excuse given: Hurricane Ike, which is supposed to cause a hell of a lot of damage to oil refining in the Gulf of Mexico, coupled with a drop in Canadian oil production. First off, Ike hasn't even hit yet. Our prices went up sixteen cents a litre in the aftermath of Katrina. I grumbled then--I still don't confess to understanding why Canada, an oil-rich country, is so tied to events far from its shores--but at least the greedy bastards waited. Now, they've degenerated from bastardy into....specks.
It also calls all the retail price hikes into serious question. What percentage of our misery is due to a tiny bunch of specks getting even more stinkin' rich on our backs? Fifty? Seventy? It appears that all you have to do--if you're a speck devoid of human conscience--is pick a commodity and spec it right up into the specking stratosphere, then take your specking money and run.
Another thing that pisses me off is Dan McTeague. He's a Liberal MP who for some time now has predicted "tomorrow's gas price today". Accurately. He's uncannily good at it...almost as if Big Oil's feeding him the information. He'll then turn around and post "rip off alerts" whining and moaning about the obscene spread between what we're paying and the U.S. wholesale price.
I agree: it's obscene. But did he do anything about the obscenity when he was in power? Hell, no. Is his leader, Stephane Dion, promising to do anything about it now? Well, actually, yes: he wants to make it worse. (He says otherwise, of course, but the provincial carbon tax that just kicked in in British Columbia added 2.3 cents a litre to the price of gas...don't tell me that national carbon tax won't do something similar, one way or another!). To be fair, Dion does intend to cut income taxes commensurate with the carbon tax. But when our government's already powerless to do anything about high fuel prices, I have to say I'm skeptical.
Back to those speculators. There ought to be a law to prevent this kind of mass market manipulation. These people are playing with lives and livelihoods and they don't give two hoots who they hurt. It's sickening. That our governments, of all stripes, sit silently by and let this happen is even more sickening.
The specks.
2 comments:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11453090
Ther article inthe Economist is great and purports that it is supply and demand causing the oil price fluctuation with Spec's aiding but not causing the issue.
I just can't beleive that speculators (actually investors), the ones that actually have enough $$ to aid the moves in prices are morons and woudl risk thier investments on pure speculation as they should know that they may not be able to get out in time.
I don't know man, it is a quagmire.
Rocket, that's an interesting read, thanks. It's dated end-of-May this year, though...which leads me to wonder if they've rethought anything now that the price of oil has (temporarily) peaked and those speculators have abandoned that futures market (in search of another)?
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