LDS Freedom Forum

Nan wrote:Did you see this article? http://www.cnbc.com/id/41575599" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It is about clothing prices rising 10% this spring.

gclayjr wrote:Yes, But trying to blame it on the futures speculators misses the whole point.

Futures speculators can only effect the proce for a short time and it must stabilize. Look at it this way. A commodity broker is buying the right to a future delivery of a commodity. For example wheat. The price can go up and down until the date the wheat is to be delivered. Then someone actually has to buy that wheat to make something. The commodities broker does NOT want to own the rights to that wheat when the wheat is delivered. If he paid too much for the wheat is is stuck for a big loss.

The biggest example of this was the big drive up in the cost of oil back in 08. THe price of oil and gasoline went way up (gallon of gas to over $4.00 a gollon. Some of this was market driven, but some of it was based upon the rising expectation of prices based upon futures trading. However, the commodities brokers guessed wrong, and the price fell dramtically (Gas to the low $2.00' s per gallon).

Of course the govenment and Pinko's like CNBC don't want to face the real problem. Inflated currency and business destroying regulations and taxes, so they go for the convenient scapegoat...

Wall Street. This may feel good, but still avoids facing the real problems.

Regards,

George Clay

gclayjr wrote:mummy,

I am certainly beginnig to understand why you need to construct complex and highly improbably conspiracy theories. Your logic can't hold up without it.

Of course the facts show that Saudi Oil production INCREASED significantly in 2008... not reduced by 1/3

Some boring statistics if you care to read them

http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb1105.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also, you wave your hand with such illogical statrements as

"The other aspect with commodities is usually there is a need there. Food is the best example. People have to eat. If I can drive prices up through market manipulation....people still have to eat no matter what the price is. A tight rope though because when you push it too far people starve and all hell breaks loose"

without addressing why these conspirators would want to destroy themselves financially holding on to food commodities at a price more than they can sell on the market to those who will use them.

Regards,

George Clay

"Production capacity of the company was 12 million bpd in June, when output started from three fields which are Nuayyim, Khurais and Shaybah," the paper quoted Falih as saying.

The kingdom had expected to be producing more than 10 million bpd of oil by the time it completed its crude capacity expansion plan, Falih said. That was nearly 2 million bpd above current output, which a Reuters survey estimated to be at around 8 million bpd in June.

But the economic slowdown has cut crude demand, leading Opec to reduce output to match sliding consumption. Opec pledged to cut output by 4.2 million bpd last year, around 5% of global supply.

Saudi Arabia, by far Opec's largest producer, shouldered most of the cuts, reducing output by over 1.5 million bpd from around 9.54 million bpd in August.

That has left it with around 4.5 million bpd in spare capacity, more than double the 1.5 million to 2 million bpd cushion it has the policy of keeping to meet any unexpected disruption in global supply.

Global oil demand would eventually return to growth, Falih said. Then, Saudi spare capacity would help stabilise the market, he added.

The kingdom had been worried about global investment in the energy sector when oil prices were around $30 to $40 a barrel, Falih said.

The last time OPEC cut its production was December 2008, when the cartel's members engineered a series of reductions totaling 4.2 million barrels a day aimed at pushing back oil prices that had slumped to $30 a barrel. Since then, compliance levels have fallen to about 55 percent, from a high of over 80 percent last year.

Last year, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil company, had about 130 offshore and onshore rigs in operation at peak times, a number that is set to fall by up to a fifth throughout 2009, the people said.

"They haven't announced any specifics but they are saying there will be a reduction in the number of rigs by 20%," one Gulf-based oil industry official told Zawya Dow Jones.

Aramco has been expanding its drilling rig fleet in the past few years as part of plans to boost its oil production capacity amid rising energy demand. However, the global economic crisis has led to falling rig requirements as global oil demand has weakened and major oil expansion projects are being completed.

"Given the slowdown in oil production this year and the completion of major oil expansion projects, it is not surprising to see an easing of drilling activity," said Raja Kiwan, an analyst at PFC Energy.

"But this will be temporary before work begins on the next slate of oil and gas projects," Kiwan said.

According to the International Energy Agency, global oil demand is expected to drop by 1.2% this year, the biggest annual drop in 27 years, as the world's major consuming nations have fallen into recession and growth in Asia, notably in China, has weakened.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, has announced three production cuts since September to remove a total 4.2 million barrels a day of crude from the market in a bid to boost oil prices, which have slumped to below $40 a barrel, from a record $147 a barrel in July, due to deteriorating demand.

Saudi Arabia, the largest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its de-facto leader, has led production cuts announced in 2008 to support prices. Aramco has about 4 million barrels a day of unused oil output capacity because of the output quota, it said earlier this year.

July 9 (Bloomberg) -- Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest state-owned oil company, deepened cuts in supplies of its Arab Heavy and Medium oil grades sold under term contracts to Asia in August, refinery officials said.

The oil company will reduce overall supplies, which include the Light and Extra Light grades, by as much as 20 percent from contractual volumes, according to a survey of officials at refineries in Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

Saudi Aramco had reduced supplies by about 15 percent for July. The global recession prompted consumers to cut back on travel, limiting gasoline consumption and diesel demand.

The company lowered August prices for the Heavy and Medium grades while raising prices for the Light, Extra Light and Super Light types. Saudi Arabia has a quota to produce 8.051 million barrels a day after production cuts announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The nine month average worldwide black oil production rate for 2008 as reported by the Oil & Gas Journal in its monthly statistical section was 73.203 million bbl/day. Peak production occurred in July at 73.770 million. August saw a drop to 72.688 and September even further to 71.985 million. Some of the reduction was due to hurricanes. Still it is expected that October, November and December will also show further declines as the OPEC cuts enter the picture combined with fewer natural gas liquids due to gas well shut-ins in the U.S. January should show the first drop in Canadian oil sand production. All eyes will be focused on OECD inventory reports. Once they are no longer rising, as they have been since mid-2008, producers will sigh in relief for that will be the signal that higher prices are coming. Right now, no one knows exactly what the true supply/demand picture is. But the numbers will be coming in quickly now that so many steps have been taken to cure the imbalance. What goes largely unappreciated in this brief time of surplus is that crude oil consumption is still high and natural declines have not abated in any degree. Therefore under the current regime of delay and postponement, natural declines will quickly erode the relatively slender margins of over production. There have been suggestions that the surplus today could be as high as 5 million bbl/day. With OPEC cutting 2 million and other reductions adding up to at least a half million so far, the overhang by year end can hardly be greater than 2.5 million bbl/day, if that. The natural decline rate in 2009 will withdraw at least 3 million bbl/day from supplies because the delays and postponements will not replenish them as has happened in past years. The worldwide recession may endure for years but the demand/supply situation will be in balance by the end of 2009.

Saudi Arabia maintains the worlds largest crude oil production capacity, estimated by U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) at over 12 million bbl/d at end-2010. Over 2 million bbl/d of capacity was added in 2009 with the addition of increments at Khurais, AFK (Abu Hadriya, Fadhili and Khursaniyah), Shaybah, and Nuayyim.

In addition to 8.4 million bbl/d of crude oil, Saudi Arabia produced around 1.8 million bbl/d of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and other liquids, which are not subject to OPEC quotas.

clarkkent14 wrote:I just thought it was interesting that a famine of bread in Egypt is happening just a few years after president Hinckley reminded us of the Genesis account...

Mummy wrote:

clarkkent14 wrote:I just thought it was interesting that a famine of bread in Egypt is happening just a few years after president Hinckley reminded us of the Genesis account...

Wasn't that in '99?

clarkkent14 wrote:

Mummy wrote:

clarkkent14 wrote:I just thought it was interesting that a famine of bread in Egypt is happening just a few years after president Hinckley reminded us of the Genesis account...

Wasn't that in '99?

1998 | http://lds.org/general-conference/1998/ ... n?lang=eng" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
2001 | http://lds.org/general-conference/2001/ ... e?lang=eng" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
2005 | http://lds.org/general-conference/2005/ ... r?lang=eng" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“I wish to speak to you about temporal matters.” (Then he read the story from Genesis 41 about the Pharaoh of Egypt who had a dream that Joseph interpreted. He read the passage from the Bible about the dream of seven fat kine and seven lean kine, seven full ears of corn and seven withered ears of corn.) “Now, brethren, I want to make it very clear that I am not prophesying, that I am not predicting years of famine in the future. But I am suggesting that the time has come to get our houses in order...There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed.” (Ensign, Nov. 1998, 51).

“I cannot forget the lesson of Pharaoh’s dream of the fat & lean kine and of the full and withered stalks of corn” “I cannot dismiss from my mind the grim warnings of the Lord as set forth in the 24th chapter of Matthew.” (Ensign, Nov. 2001, 72).

“Let us never lose sight of the dream of Pharaoh concerning the fat cattle and the lean, the full ears of corn, and the blasted ears; the meaning of which was interpreted by Joseph to indicate years of plenty and years of scarcity.” (Ensign, Nov. 2005)

freedomfighter wrote:We better buy a large supply of burlap sacks. Clothing can be made from them.

blondenblueeyed wrote:

freedomfighter wrote:We better buy a large supply of burlap sacks. Clothing can be made from them.

Better yet just go to the garage sales and buy bolts of the old fabric that has been stored by the grandmas for years.

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration.

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.

The major federal agency on the Wall Street beat is the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC watches for violations like insider trading, and also deals with so-called "disclosure violations" — i.e., making sure that all the financial information that publicly traded companies are required to make public actually jibes with reality. But the SEC doesn't have prosecutorial power either, so in practice, when it looks like someone needs to go to jail, they refer the case to the Justice Department. And since the vast majority of crimes in the financial services industry take place in Lower Manhattan, cases referred by the SEC often end up in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Thus, the two top cops on Wall Street are generally considered to be that U.S. attorney — a job that has been held by thunderous prosecutorial personae like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani — and the SEC's director of enforcement.

The relationship between the SEC and the DOJ is necessarily close, even symbiotic. Since financial crime-fighting requires a high degree of financial expertise — and since the typical drug-and-terrorism-obsessed FBI agent can't balance his own checkbook, let alone tell a synthetic CDO from a credit default swap — the Justice Department ends up leaning heavily on the SEC's army of 1,100 number-crunching investigators to make their cases.

That's the way it's supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are. The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

The systematic lack of regulation has left even the country's top regulators frustrated. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street. "I think you've got a wrong assumption — that we even have a law-enforcement agency when it comes to Wall Street," he says.

In the hierarchy of the SEC, the chief accountant plays a major role in working to pursue misleading and phony financial disclosures. Turner held the post a decade ago, when one of the most significant cases was swallowed up by the SEC bureaucracy. In the late 1990s, the agency had an open-and-shut case against the Rite Aid drugstore chain, which was using diabolical accounting tricks to cook their books. But instead of moving swiftly to crack down on such scams, the SEC shoved the case into the "deal with it later" file. "The Philadelphia office literally did nothing with the case for a year," Turner recalls. "Very much like the New York office with Madoff." The Rite Aid case dragged on for years — and by the time it was finished, similar accounting fiascoes at Enron and WorldCom had exploded into a full-blown financial crisis. The same was true for another SEC case that presaged the Enron disaster. The agency knew that appliance-maker Sunbeam was using the same kind of accounting scams to systematically hide losses from its investors. But in the end, the SEC's punishment for Sunbeam's CEO, Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap — was a fine of $500,000. Dunlap's net worth at the time was an estimated $100 million. The SEC also barred Dunlap from ever running a public company again — forcing him to retire with a mere $99.5 million. Dunlap passed the time collecting royalties from his self-congratulatory memoir. Its title: Mean Business.

And the conclusion:

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

Now the cause of this iniquity of the people was this—Satan had great power, unto the stirring up of the people to do all manner of iniquity, and to the puffing them up with pride, tempting them to seek for power, and authority, and riches, and the vain things of the world.

And they did enter into a covenant one with another, yea, even into that covenant which was given by them of old, which covenant was given and administered by the devil, to combine against all righteousness.

Therefore they did combine against the people of the Lord, and enter into a covenant to destroy them, and to deliver those who were guilty of murder from the grasp of justice, which was about to be administered according to the law.

And they did set at defiance the law and the rights of their country; and they did covenant one with another to destroy the governor, and to establish a king over the land, that the land should no more be at liberty but should be subject unto kings.

"The other aspect with commodities is usually there is a need there. Food is the best example. People have to eat. If I can drive prices up through market manipulation....people still have to eat no matter what the price is. A tight rope though because when you push it too far people starve and all hell breaks loose"

without addressing why these conspirators would want to destroy themselves financially holding on to food commodities at a price more than they can sell on the market to those who will use them.

Brent Touches $120 Overnight After Chinese Oil Facilities In Libya Attacked, Bombay Stock Market Plunges

Global stagflation has moved from knocking gently on the door to pounding with a battering ram. Brent touched just south of $120 overnight, the highest level since the summer of 2008, just before the global economy imploded, after reports circulated that the oil facilities of CNPC, the largest Chinese oil producer, were attacked in Libya. "News of the attack will heighten concerns among oil industry executives that the turmoil in Libya may lead to widespread sabotage of oil facilities and that it would take many months or even years to return the country to full production capacity even if a semblance of peace returns.

In the meantime, US GDP has just lost another $300 billion in 12 hours, wiping out the gains all the gains in the last quarter.

Mummy wrote:

Brent Touches $120 Overnight After Chinese Oil Facilities In Libya Attacked, Bombay Stock Market Plunges

Global stagflation has moved from knocking gently on the door to pounding with a battering ram. Brent touched just south of $120 overnight, the highest level since the summer of 2008, just before the global economy imploded, after reports circulated that the oil facilities of CNPC, the largest Chinese oil producer, were attacked in Libya. "News of the attack will heighten concerns among oil industry executives that the turmoil in Libya may lead to widespread sabotage of oil facilities and that it would take many months or even years to return the country to full production capacity even if a semblance of peace returns.

In the meantime, US GDP has just lost another $300 billion in 12 hours, wiping out the gains all the gains in the last quarter.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/brent- ... a-attacked" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

....imaginary gains at best....but they are gone regardless!

Nan wrote:

Mummy wrote:

Brent Touches $120 Overnight After Chinese Oil Facilities In Libya Attacked, Bombay Stock Market Plunges

Global stagflation has moved from knocking gently on the door to pounding with a battering ram. Brent touched just south of $120 overnight, the highest level since the summer of 2008, just before the global economy imploded, after reports circulated that the oil facilities of CNPC, the largest Chinese oil producer, were attacked in Libya. "News of the attack will heighten concerns among oil industry executives that the turmoil in Libya may lead to widespread sabotage of oil facilities and that it would take many months or even years to return the country to full production capacity even if a semblance of peace returns.

In the meantime, US GDP has just lost another $300 billion in 12 hours, wiping out the gains all the gains in the last quarter.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/brent- ... a-attacked" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
....imaginary gains at best....but they are gone regardless!

All it is, is digits on a screen. It isn't even money anymore.