{"id":2809,"date":"2009-01-12T17:15:52","date_gmt":"2009-01-12T22:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2809"},"modified":"2009-01-12T23:04:16","modified_gmt":"2009-01-13T04:04:16","slug":"the-ghost-of-enron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/12\/the-ghost-of-enron\/","title":{"rendered":"the ghost of Enron&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\">I know that I&#8217;ve been boring as hell with my obsession with financial bubbles, but it&#8217;s not only interesting, it&#8217;s important. Again, a financial bubble is when some Market takes off like a rocket and prices soar. The situation is accompanied by all kinds of rationalizations about why. &quot;The Internet is the wave of the future.&quot; &quot;People want to own their own homes.&quot; &quot;People are wanting to move back intown.&quot; &quot;People want to get out of town.&quot; &quot;We&#8217;re running out of oil.&quot; In retrospect, these arguments look absurd. They don&#8217;t explain why the price is rising so fast. The truth is that &quot;bubbles burst.&quot; Suddenly the price plummets because price has outrun value, and the spike disappears. People who get out of that Market before the burst make a killing. People who hold on past the burst get killed.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" hspace=\"4\" height=\"96\" border=\"1\" align=\"right\" width=\"124\" src=\"http:\/\/tbn1.google.com\/images?q=tbn:F3dpJHCWP2cwoM:http:\/\/antwerp.files.wordpress.com\/2006\/07\/enron.jpg\" \/>While it is the Speculators that drive a bubble&#8217;s ascendency, it&#8217;s unfair to say that they necessarily <u>cause<\/u> it. Maybe they just jumped on board. But there&#8217;s one place where it was &quot;caused&quot; &quot;on purpose&quot; that is for sure. Enron actively caused a bubble in energy on the West Coast. How they did it is complicated and involves sneaking deregulation [Phil Gramm] of their Market through Congress. But after Enron&#8217;s collapse, their shadow may well have continued to fall on the energy Market &#8211; specifically oil. This 60 Minute segment looks at the recent &quot;Oil Bubble&quot; and how it came to be: <\/div>\n<p align=\"center\"><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.cbs.com\/thunder\/swf\/rcpHolderCbs-prod.swf\" width=\"370\" height=\"361\"allowFullScreen=\"true\" FlashVars=\"link=http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/video\/watch\/?id=4713382n&#038;releaseURL=http:\/\/release.theplatform.com\/content.select?pid=jU_Hyops2EdVsNMg_adlFNYRoucM6rzt&#038;partner=newsembed&#038;autoPlayVid=false&#038;prevImg=http:\/\/thumbnails.cbsig.net\/CBS_Production_News\/948\/697\/60_Oil_0110_480x360.jpg\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" pluginspage=\"http:\/\/www.macromedia.com\/go\/getflashplayer\" \/><br \/><sup>Sorry about the commercial<br \/>This 60 Minutes is a <em>must watch<\/em>!<\/sup><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">I believe this story &#8211; that the Oil Bubble was created by speculators and mined for billions of dollars. I don&#8217;t exactly understand the mechanisms, but I know what the tools are &#8211; an unregulated Commodities Market and futures contracts including derivatives. <font color=\"#300030\"><strong>We haven&#8217;t yet got our minds around the fact that Deregulation was specifically promoted and used by large scale investors to take a fortune out of our economy &#8211; on purpose. And that the &quot;bubbles&quot; didn&#8217;t just happen, they were helped along. <\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/>\n<div align=\"justify\">I found this idea that the Enron Traders just left Enron after its collapse and did the same thing somewhere else interesting. So I decided to put the Enron stock graph on the same timeline as the &quot;oil bubble.&quot;<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" vspace=\"5\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/enron_bubble.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">Pretty amazing! Enron crashes then the Oil Bubble starts. Damn, they just moved next door and did it again&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know that I&#8217;ve been boring as hell with my obsession with financial bubbles, but it&#8217;s not only interesting, it&#8217;s important. Again, a financial bubble is when some Market takes off like a rocket and prices soar. The situation is accompanied by all kinds of rationalizations about why. &quot;The Internet is the wave of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}