Re: Re: (didnt we agree to stop talking about) The Transformation Problem
On Sep 20, 2006, at 2:50 AM, Daniel Davies wrote:
I don’t agree with Doug that it is intrinsically impossible to
manipulate the oil price for political ends. Enron manipulated the electricity
price in California - mainly for profit but they must have been aware that
the blackout would likely have favourable political consequences. Since the big
catalyst for the last leg up in oil prices was the BP Proudhon Bay fiasco,
you can sort of see how someone who really wanted to manipulate a US election
might be able to play around a bit with the scheduling of pipeline maintenance
and refinery outages in order to move some of the volatility around in the
gasoline price so that a spike or notch would occur immediately before (or after) an
election.
I don’t doubt they could screw around with the price a bit, but I
can’t imagine they could move it more than a few bucks either way.
I’m too lazy to do the research, but I’d bet that the California
electricity market is no more than a thousandth the size of the oil
market, and Enron was a very big player in that relatively small market.
BP…they can’t do anything right, can they?
Doug