<p>I should probably stop worrying. </p>
<p>Ok. I will. :)</p>
<p>@dstark</p>
<p>Of all these proposals you keep proposing, did you ever stop to think “maybe this is too much? Maybe there is something inherently messed up that no amount of micromanaging can solve?”?</p>
<p>I remember reading this article about the consequences of price ceilings for commonly used commodities (e.g. bread and milk). If I find it, I’ll post the link.</p>
<p>You know one of the reasons the Great Depression lasted so long was because of wage controls. It is always when the government intervenes that the panics are prolonged (e.g. right now, great depression, panic of 1837). Hoover bailed out fraudulent banks and Bernanke is doing the same today. History repeats itself and I feel like I’m the only one who sees the recurring themes.</p>
<p>The “prescribed cure” (interventionism) is the same as the poison (interventionism). Your proposals would send us into a much longer period of doubt rather than make it end quickly.</p>
<p>I have thought about this for a long time.</p>
<p>I am not proposing a price ceiling. If people and companies want to buy oil, no problem. If the price goes up, then it goes up.</p>
<p>But you can no longer put down only $8,000 to control $110,000 of oil. </p>
<p>It’s a margin requirement. It’s not written in stone that the requirement has to be $8,000.</p>
<p>Let’s see what the real demand for oil is when the margin requirements are a little larger.</p>
<p>I haven’t been too happy about the bailouts. There are a few posters that know that. :)</p>
<p>I don’t think markets are infallible or free and when they are close to free, I don’t necessarily think they are infallible.</p>
<p>I did trade during the 1987 crash and if you think markets don’t occassionally need government assistance, let me just tell you…markets do.</p>
<p>A difference in margin requirements would have little effect on oil prices. Oil companies make money on high priced oil, not hedge funds. Hedge funds make money on guessing what direction it’s gonna go.</p>
<p>I don’t believe oil is gonna go below $80/bbl ever again. We’ve reached the point where everyone (except maybe Algeria & Iraq) has their spigots fully opened. If anything, I believe crude oil is significantly undervalued. In five or so years global production is going to free fall. There is no transportation fuel on the horizon that looks to replace the soon to be rapidly declining oil production.</p>
<p>We use 30 billion barrels of oil a year. We need to find 30 billion barrels of oil a year just to break even. A mammoth find off Brazil or the North Sea or Prudhoe Bay doesn’t come around very often.</p>
<p>From what I understand of margin requirements, you are raising the cost of speculation. But if we got rid of the interventions into the market, the price of speculation would already go to its normal levels (rather than follow the boom-bust cycle of monetarism).</p>
<p>“I don’t think markets are infallible or free and when they are close to free, I don’t necessarily think they are infallible.”</p>
<p>Who said the market was ever free? If the market were free, you would not be seeing mass speculation resulting in simultaneous busts in the industries. This happens at the hands of credit manipulation and other economic interventions from the government.</p>
<p>Infallibility is a contradiction in itself, but a free market is better then the alternatives,</p>
<p>“I did trade during the 1987 crash and if you think markets don’t occassionally need government assistance, let me just tell you…markets do.”</p>
<p>Why do you feel entitled to success? Why is it that investors are all merry when they are experiencing a boom, then they feel entitled to some help when the bust comes? That’s what investing IS: taking risks!</p>
<p>afruff23, </p>
<p>“Why do you feel entitled to success? Why is it that investors are all merry when they are experiencing a boom, then they feel entitled to some help when the bust comes? That’s what investing IS: taking risks!”</p>
<p>Are you addressing those questions to me?</p>
<p>That’s what investing IS: taking risks!"</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>“Who said the market was ever free? If the market were free, you would not be seeing mass speculation resulting in simultaneous busts in the industries. This happens at the hands of credit manipulation and other economic interventions from the government.”</p>
<p>I know your whole being is based on believing this, so I am just going to let this go.</p>
<p>Mr. Payne, you may be right.</p>
<p>I’d like to see if I’m wrong. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Don’t worry, I am right. Or maybe we should be worrying because I am right.</p>
<p>Another problem that should have occurred to me sooner. You can regulate the US capital market, sure. You can’t regulate other countries though. If there is significant money to be made by loaning money to speculators then it will occur everywhere. If hedge funds can’t borrow money in the US, they will borrow elsewhere.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You didn’t even address your sense of entitlement and you label me with the word “belief” as if there is no evidence to my point.</p>
<p>I suggest you read this free book:
<a href=“http://www.mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf[/url]”>http://www.mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf</a></p>
<p>It goes much more in-depth into how these booms and busts are not the creations of a free market. Hoover was by no means “laissez-fair” and with the right policies (e.g. no wage controls) , the great depression could have been nipped in the bud even AFTER the fact.</p>
<p>To try to steer this back on topic, I will say that these issues are all related to the cost of food and oil. Part of the reason oil prices rise is inflation (a monetary tool of the Fed). Another reason (which kinda falls into the first one) is that oil countries are losing faith in the dollar and changing their preferred method of transaction to other currencies. You cannot address the price of oil without addressing monetary policy.</p>
<p>
That’s only part of it. The price oil has gone up significantly in the Euro zone as well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ok, so how are you doing to replace the 6 to 8 billion gallons of ethanol?</p>