A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but-to-banks-pure-gold.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A very interesting read on how the great USofA now works. In addition to the direct tax payer transfer from the govt to special interests (no less than sixteen _trillion_ dollars!), now we have a govt sponsored ‘tax’ that pulls another $5 billion dollars out of people’s pockets. Of course, that is pennies compared to the ‘tax’ on crude oil:
In 2011, for instance, an internal Goldman memo suggested that speculation by investors accounted for about a third of the price of a barrel of oil. A commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator, subsequently used that estimate to calculate that speculation added about $10 per fill-up for the average American driver. Other experts have put the total, combined cost at $200 billion a year.
And pennies, of course, compared to the above mentioned $16 trillion dollars ponied up directly by the tax payer, but when our idiot ‘sequester’ is about shaving a few 10’s of billions off our (admittedly bloated; why do we need so many aircraft carriers?) budgets we have at least $200 billion being sucked out of our economy because of accounting trickery with zero (really, can it even be that high? surely it must be very negative) benefit to our nation.
Portions of the article talk about how JP Morgan is trying to do with copper what Goldman is already doing with aluminum, so brace yourself for sky high copper prices in the next few years. I am not sure it even qualifies as speculation since I am quite sure that these massive ‘banks’ have the fix solidly in.
