Well…it’s red letter day here at “Overqualified & Unemployed” when I have been proven right by no less than the crooks at Goldman Sachs…should I feel good or bad about this? In today’s Free Press, there was a long article where it reported that the commodities people at this large trading house did a study of oil and gas prices and found that 27 dollars of the 110 dollar price of oil is directly attributable to speculators that are trading in the oil futures market…that is over 25% of the cost of a barrel of oil…and the traders have a neat little scam running on all of us….that when the traders bet that the price will go up in the future…it always goes up….you heard me right, these guys have so distorted the normal rules of supply and demand that they no longer have any bearing on the price of oil. I’m sure that with just a few phone calls amongst the big traders, they alternate daily who is going to be the one to bid the price up and who is going to just sit and rake in the profits. Now, who among you out there are for more deregulation of the economy? This crap started when the Bush administration pushed for rules that allowed traders to never take possession of the commodity they are trading…allowing oil and gas to be commoditized and made just another financial instrument like sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps….where there is no risk for the traders and guaranteeing that all of the benefits fall to the traders while the rest of our country pays for it….geez….but what to do about it? Normally, I just bitch about this stuff but this time I’m going to offer suggestions….let’s make these guys that are paper trading actually take possession of the commodity they are trading and put up, in real dollars, the total amount of the transactions. This will push the risk back on the traders that are distorting the market and make them less likely to continue to rake in billions in profits off you and me….