http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/bu...d.html?hp&_r=0
Don't know how to react. Vote out all politicians and replace them with people that care more about our country than the next election cycle???
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/bu...d.html?hp&_r=0
Don't know how to react. Vote out all politicians and replace them with people that care more about our country than the next election cycle???
This doesn't seem like a new financial instrument at all. Honestly, the article is sort of a mess.
Clearly there are some problems in these metal exchanges that are leading to inefficiencies. But are those inefficiencies really consequential?
Aluminum prices are at their lowest since July 2009 and the aluminum processing industry isn't exactly booming. Alcoa's performance has been so bad over the years that it's no longer a bellwether company and it's cutting back capacity by substantial amounts.
Nonetheless, for all its perceived inefficiencies, the aluminum market is working relatively well for buyers and sellers. If it didn't, there are plenty of big-enough consumers to bypass these exchanges and deal directly. It just so happens a bank owns the a warehouse that participates with an exchange, so it becomes an easy target for NYT faux economic reporting/agitprop.
Keep your eyes open.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Instrument, scheme, whatever you want to call it....it's manipulating market prices, and akin to insider trading. :down:
"For much of the last century, Congress tried to keep a wall between banking and commerce. Banks were forbidden from owning nonfinancial businesses (and vice versa) to minimize the risks they take and, ultimately, to protect depositors. Congress strengthened those regulations in the 1950s, but by the 1980s, a wave of deregulation began to build and banks have in some cases been transformed into merchants, according to Saule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and expert in regulation of financial institutions. Goldman and other firms won regulatory approval to buy companies that traded in oil and other commodities. Other restrictions were weakened or eliminated during the 1990s, when some banks were allowed to expand into storing and transporting commodities."
High time that wall was re-built, or at least restructured. Bring back boring banking.
"Over the past decade, a handful of bank holding companies have sought and received approval from the Federal Reserve to buy physical commodity trading assets".
The Fed should ditch "bank holding" status for financial/investment firms that aren't depository Banks. Or the FDIC should kick them out of treasury protection. That would at least protect tax payers if their gambling game blows up.
I agree, it definitely looks like that and if it doesn't violate regulations it ought to. But this practice has nothing whatsoever to do with Glass-Steagall. Any company allowed to own the warehouses could have done this, it has nothing to do with Goldman being a bank. It may have to do with the increasingly. . . I want to say corrupt, attitude and lack of ethics at Goldman-Sachs but again, that has next to nothing to do with operating either a holding bank or an investment bank. The reason it's Goldman that did this is because it works hard to employ a lot of the best and brightest to look for loopholes which can make GS money.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
The NYT article isn't very good and I'd suggest reading this analysis instead:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/07/2...anks-a-recap/#
And an even more simplified version:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-c...goldman-2013-7
I didn't read the first link 'cause it requires registration. But second link references the first and puts forth a much different allegation than the NYT's article. Your link states the shuffling is being used to purposely manipulate the commodity price. The allegation in the NYT article is that the shuffling is used to increase the time commodity owners pay rent which incidentally increases the cost of the commodity. Two very different allegations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Quote:
Originally Posted by Being
Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
I couldn't get to the FT link, but the BusinessInsider summary posted by Aimless brings up the point I made earlier that makes me think this whole outrage is BS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Simply put, the price of commodities is just plain down. So this idea that Goldman is driving up prices is hard to reconcile with the overall negative price trend.
Meanwhile, the NYT expects us to believe that this one warehouse that Goldman owns is somehow critical to aluminum prices. As Goldman points out in Minxie's link, this is just one warehouse. 95% of aluminum sold on the London Metals Exchange doesn't go through the warehouse system at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by WSJ
From another article in today's WSJ that happens to be about this-
Commodity consolidation is definitely a bad thing, but it's not clear that this consolidation is happening...and it's certainly not happening with this commodity and with Goldman. If you want to "open your eyes", I think we should be asking who pitched this story to the NYTimes and why the NYT bought it so easily.Quote:
...a steep drop in the prices of many commodities since the financial crisis...have led banks to sell assets and reduce trading positions. Banks' commodity revenue is on track for $3.4 billion this year, a roughly 75% decline from five years ago, according to Coalition, a research firm.
Meanwhile, companies whose main business is commodities, including Glencore Xstrata PLC and Trafigura Beheer BV, have expanded their reach. Glencore and others now own 33% of the more than 700 warehouses licensed by the London Metal Exchange, up from under 20% in 2010. Banks' share is 25%, down from 32% three years ago.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...175383090.html
Well, that last question is obvious: their reporters are mostly left-wing trust-fund kids who don't understand business.
See post above.
edit: You probably didn't read the NYT article in full because it is clear that there are multiple warehouses that Goldman owns. That is how they are able to suffle. :rolleyes: And like I stated above, the suffle isn't meant to increase the price.
I think you're misreading the main point of the Business Insider link (which echoes the underlying trend I highlighted with the two WSJ articles). From BI:
In other words, aluminum spot prices have come down so much that it's distorting the futures market. Couple that with this funky system of warehousing imposed by regulators and we get some clear inefficiencies and manipulatable pricing trends.Quote:
Because of an obscure (to us laymen) trading phenomenon, they could both be right. It could be that Goldman is impacting the price of the commodity, but not because of something as simple as a warehouse shuffle.
The trading phenomenon is called contango. It's what happens when the curve showing the spot price of a commodity (the price at which you can buy a commodity at a give time) is less than the futures market's price for the commodity.
I don't understand the later point in the BI article about how Goldman can peg the base price if they aren't on the buy/sell side in any meaningful way. And the NYT article makes no attempt to even suggest Goldman is on the buy/sell side in any meaningful way.
I also don't understand how they can make a meaningful impact on the market simply by owning this warehouse considering that it's one of the 700 LME metals warehouses out there...which in total account for only 5% of global aluminum trade...in a market where aluminum prices are going down for years on end.
It's shoddy journalism from the Times.
Don't be like Kat. :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by Being
It's 27 warehouses all in the same area. All owned by the same company. If you want to see the full list of warehouses, you can: http://www.lme.com/~/media/Files/War...warehouses.pdf
It's a pretty big list. And if the "suffle" isn't meant to increase the price, what is it doing and why are you angry about it? I would accuse you of not reading the article, but I don't think that's what the issue is here. The issue is the article is grasping at straws.
The argument was that while most aluminum isn't warehoused, the GS-owned company holds a significant amount of the metal which is warehoused and the warehoused stock is a primary datapoint in setting the index-price (presumably because it's easier to get information on) giving it a disproportionate impact. But I see no way to reconcile the NYT claim that GS has caused prices to spike from 2010 with your own claim, provided they are talking about the same markets and prices. Can you actually demonstrate this? Because they don't look to me like they're talking about the same specific things and from one ignorant layman to another I think you're overusing one contract to make claims about every trade of that commodity, both real and in futures.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Dread, I can't speak to the veracity of the NYT article since the data they provided was nearly nonexistent (mostly just anecdotes). And I agree that the connection to GS being a bank is largely irrelevant to the question of whether they are manipulating prices.
However, it's worth it to note that there has been evidence in the past - MUCH better documented evidence - that various commodity prices have been artificially manipulated on the basis of fairly small transactions which had outsized impacts on the spot price. You may recall my thread about allegations Gunvor was manipulating the published Urals oil price from Platts. There they were allegedly using a tricky dodge where small bouts of intense selling activity depressed the spot price slightly (because of arcane details on how Platts constructed their published prices) which allowed them to lock in better terms on long term deals. The point is that it's possible for relatively small portions of market movement to have disproportionate effects on a quoted price because of inadequacies in the pricing formulas. The more thinly/granularly traded the market, and the more complicated the pricing formula, the more opportunity for such shenanigans.
Is this such a case? I honestly don't know. The long term price trends of Al likely reflect fundamentals in the industry and economy rather than a small price increase engineered by GS, so that's not a very convincing refutation of the underlying point - the counterfactual is not very clear. But it's certainly possible that if storage time is factored into the spot price then a company not directly party to much of the market transactions could engineer prices to a small degree. A small degree multiplied by enough transactions and enough time could result in big bucks.
I'd like to see some real data, plus some detail on the pricing scheme before arriving at a conclusion.
It's still speculative trading and market manipulation, using new instruments/schemes that can put depository money at risk, and require intervention from Treasury or Fed. I said the same thing about highly leveraged derivatives and securitized CDOs that almost crashed the global financial and banking system. It was during that crisis that GS received bank-holding status, in order to negotiate asset exchanges with other banks, and have access to TARP funds. The point is -- Goldman is NOT a bank, they're an investment and financial services firm. But since they're so entangled in the global banking system, they're afforded special privileges.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
The CFTC and SEC is reportedly trying to re-build walls that separate depository Banks from the riskier, speculative financial trading firms, and commodity manipulations. It doesn't have to be re-instating the Glass-Steagall Act, but enacting the remaining parts of Dodd-Frank legislation would be a good start. That includes a variation on the old Volcker Rule, but regulatory funding and staffing has been cut or halted by congressional Republicans (just like they obstructed the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency by refusing to confirm Cordray). Yay.
I think citizens deserve the choice between boring depository banks and high finance, with distinct boundaries. As you said, rich and powerful SIFI like Goldman can hire the best and brightest to find every loophole and exploit it for profit. But that doesn't mean the USD, tax payer money, or citizen deposits should be held hostage to the rigged game.
Providing a short excerpt below, the whole article can be viewed here for one day:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/155480085/...8xmyebpbzpmy8e
Quote:
The New York Times ran a big piece on the ongoing commodity shuffle this weekend. The one FT Alphaville (and others) have been writing about for a long while now, and which applies to both metals and energy markets.
The story followed a Reuters article reporting that the Fed was now “reviewing” a landmark 2003 decision that first allowed regulated banks to trade in physical commodity markets. It was this, we always noted, that allowed for the emergence of a so-called physical loophole for a number of top Wall Street institutions active in commodity markets. The fact that they were swap dealers with physical exposures ensured they were eligible for exemptions (on such things as position limits) whilst other financial institutions were not.
When 2008 hit, and most commodity curves went into super-contango, this allowed those banks with commodity businesses to very profitably enter the warehousing space — which was now a securitised path towards yield enhancement, exploiting the fact that passive commodity speculators were prepared to pay the industry to store commodities no-one else wanted.
In this case contango-yield positions ended up working very much like repo-to-maturity positions in the bond world.
During a contango there is an exploitable arbitrage for anyone who can buy the underlying commodity, warehouse it and simulatenously forward sell it at a premium and then sit back and collect yield until it has to be delivered (at which point the trade can either be rolled on or liquidated). It is fundamentally a two-leg trade (though sometimes it is bolstered by another two legs further up the curve).
Providing your warehousing and financing costs don’t eat into your forward-carry profits — or that margin calls on your physical and futures legs don’t become unsustainable — the trade is a lucrative one for as long as futures remain in contango, or begin moving into backwardation. The former allows the trader to profit from a standing position that’s held to maturity, while the latter allows him to liquidate the position early, profiting from the respective moves of the two legs of the trade.
Banks and some trading houses found themselves in a very unique position. For while anyone could set up a contango position and sit back and collect profit, balance sheets represented a serious constraint for many institutions.
You could do the trade, but it would, in short, take up a helluva lot of your balance sheet.
It is in this capacity then that banks and some trading houses found themselves able to service the industry. So, as well as participating outright in similar trades, they created a business in freeing up the balance sheets of those firms which were encumbered by large but clearly profitable contango trades, by financing these trades and taking them off-balance sheet in return for some of the contango margin.
I have stated the meaning in prior posts. It's the main conflicting allegation between the NYT article and the link that Aimless provided.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
From NYT,
Warehouses...the new financial instrument.Quote:
This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal.
More than a quarter of the supply! Did you read that?Quote:
In the case of aluminum, Goldman bought Metro International Trade Services, one of the country’s biggest storers of the metal. More than a quarter of the supply of aluminum available on the market is kept in the company’s Detroit-area warehouses.
Twenty fold! Did you read that?Quote:
Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.
Am I boring you yet? I'd post the whole article if I thought you'd read it.Quote:
At least 3,000 tons of that metal must be moved out each day. But nearly all of the metal that Metro moves is not delivered to customers, according to the interviews. Instead, it is shuttled from one warehouse to another.
The premium has doubled...not the price...the premium...money taken by others than the seller. The overall price may have gone down but that's not the point. Are you following?Quote:
Aluminum industry analysts say that the lengthy delays at Metro International since Goldman took over are a major reason the premium on all aluminum sold in the spot market has doubled since 2010.
Based on your responses so far I don't know how you could have read this article and not call the facts as stated by NYT lies. That could be a whole new thread, Dread believes that NYT lies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Thank for Aimless for posting the article, though the snark in the article title is immature. But that FT blog post is suggesting something very different than what the NYT is suggesting. The FT blogger is suggesting that Goldman is, either by intent or by accident, taking advantage of a secular decrease in aluminum prices. The NYT is suggesting Goldman is hoarding the metal to increase its price.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
Which is it? Is Goldman eeeevily and maliciously buying warehouses to hoard aluminum, corner the market and drive the price up? Or is it eeeevily and maliciously using this "cotango" nonsense to profit?
I think the most plausible answer is the somewhere near the simplest: Goldman bought this warehouse in 2010 because it seemed fairly profitable way to get into a segment of the spot market of a major commodity, which they bet would rally substantially after 2008/2009 lows. They were wrong, and are left holding this warehouse in an industry with declining volume to charge storage fees for.
But there's no question aluminum prices have gone down wholesale since Goldman took over the thing. The warehouse is part of the London Metals Exchange system and checking a variety of historical prices at http://www.lme.com/ suggests a pretty broad downward trend on buy contracts both on the spot market and futures markets.
http://i39.tinypic.com/25qui6x.png
http://i42.tinypic.com/2u9tp5i.png
http://i40.tinypic.com/27wzi1l.png
I think it's pretty telling that the NYT author didn't mention any general aluminum price trends, or even point to any particular contracts at all. He merely said, "Well, Goldman owns this warehouse, Goldman is obviously evil, we got some folks to say deliveries are slow so clearly Goldman is driving up the price of sixpacks for Joe Sixpack!" And then he tucks in the point (probably on the insistence of editors) that many are bypassing Goldman's warehouses altogether.
Wiggin points out some very real areas where speculators can spike the market, but that's an entirely different area in my view.
My question is why Goldman is basically begging people to store in its warehouses. Is their subsidiary just doing an exceptionally shitty job and they are trying to not lose market share of the storage world? Or does some guy at Goldman think the aluminum supply chain is going to get tight and they are doubling-down to make sure their warehouses are stocked when that happens?
Whatever is going on, if Goldman has some quasi-maniuplative intent here, I don't think it's being captured by any of the articles we're reading. And, in the absence of a plausible reason Goldman could make much money from poorly-operated warehouses amid an aluminum market with declining volume, I'm not inclined to believe the dark conspiracy theories. Though I'm open to ideas about why Goldman seems to be doubling-down on this investment, unless aluminum storage is fantastically more profitable than we can imaging.
Think about this outside of the article and check out the other things folks are posting. You're ignoring the idea that Goldman is probably just a shitty warehouse operator and the vast majority of aluminum is bypassing this whole warehouse altogether. Goldman is practically begging folks to store in their warehouse.Quote:
Originally Posted by Being
I'm beginning to believe you can't read. :haha: What part of premium don't you understand? What part of quarter don't you understand? What part of twenty fold don't you understand? There is absolutely no verbage in the NYT article that claims Goldman is usng the shuffling scheme to artificially raise prices. The NYT article is not pushing any conspiracy theory concerning Goldman. Open your eyes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Quote:
But the London Metal Exchange, which oversees 719 warehouses around the globe, has not always been an impartial arbiter — it receives 1 percent of the rent collected by its warehouses worldwide. Until last year, it was owned by members, including Goldman, Barclays and Citigroup. Many of its regulations were drawn up by the exchange’s warehouse committee, which is made up of executives of various banks, trading companies and storage companies — including the president of Goldman’s Metro International — as well as representatives of powerful trading firms in Europe. The exchange was sold last year to a group of Hong Kong investors and this month it proposed regulations that would take effect in April 2014 intended to reduce the bottlenecks at Metro.
1. So's your face :mad: which is actually true :downcast:Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
2.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...n-storage.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ore-expensive/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8G3NC120120508
http://www.beveragedaily.com/Regulat...-aluminum-bill
The money is in the premiums although in the long run the premium-inflating antics may influence the actual value of the aluminum stocks. Goldman makes money from the rent, from the premium that it artificially inflates, from the contango (in its own direct dealing where it also profits from lower storage costs by virtue of owning the warehouses) and from (financially and physically) enabling others to profit from the contango (and then taking a cut of those profits). It's not criminal but it's an entirely artificial and unnecessary drag on the market. Better to just impose a real soda tax
I don't think this needs to be an either/or. I suspect that the NYT piece got some of the details wrong, probably because the author didn't really understand what was going on. It appears to be Alphaville's contention that the increased premium/warehousing time NYT was complaining about is merely a happy side effect of the fundamental dodge going on which takes advantage of contango to make big bucks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dread
I also don't think there's anything uniquely evil or malicious about it, they're just trying to make money by exploiting the way pricing is currently working in the market. Fix the rules, and the unintended side effects (long wait times, slightly higher prices) are likely to disappear rapidly.
Frankly, I don't buy your 'plausible' answer at all; Goldman is making a not insignificant amount of money and I doubt this was a bet gone wrong.
Dread, this isn't just about Aluminum, or Goldman Sachs, or how the NYT covers news or writes their stories. This isn't even about "dark conspiracy theories". It's about big financial players exploiting systems and rules to make obscene amounts of money in shadow markets, and calling it "market-making". That doesn't make markets more open, efficient, or fair, and it certainly doesn't benefit the end-consumer in any appreciable way.
Big financial institutions can't properly monitor themselves, despite Randian freee market theories, or whatever kool-aid Chairman Greenspan was drinking in the 80's-90's. When he awoke from his money-induced coma during the Great Recession, he was shocked, shocked to find flaws in those theories. By then it was too late to admit that government regulation isn't automatically evil, but absolutely necessary.
Greenspan is the poster child for why market manipulation is bad. Greenspan is the poster child for why GOVERNMENT manipulation of markets is bad. It boggles my mind that you think the federal reserve and their government sponsered deliberate market manipulation is a "Randian freee market theory."Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I doubt that NYT got any of the details about Goldman wrong. We would have heard about that. I believe that NYT focused on something that can be remediated quickly without going through the government system. 2014 is when the new owners of the exchange stated they plan to implement new regulations to address the Goldman maneuver.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
Great idea for a new thread...Taxation by Venture Vs Taxation by Government...Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Quote:
Originally Posted by Being
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
People keep ranting about the premiums without quantifying the premiums. The NYT article doesn't quantify the premiums at all beyond its estimate that Goldman is supposedly adding a few dollars per ton (off of what base?). We have no clue how much Goldman is making, which is sort of a prerequisite for determining if this is NYTimes bullshit.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
EG, Wiggin, you say Goldman is making a "not insignificant amount of money". How do you or I know that? At best, we can speculate that the price plummets of aluminum will help warehousing because the excess inventory must be stored in a way that's ready for sale (IE via the LME system). But Goldman making money on this warehouse is then contingent on falling aluminum prices, not increased prices for consumers. And, with a purchase price of about $500 million for these warehouses*in 2010, I'm guessing the margins aren't stunning.
Goldman put out a factsheet that, while not addressing the issue that well, had a few interesting points-
You can think all you want that Goldman is lying about the sequestration of information between LME and Goldman, but don't take the line of a NYT reporter who is missing a few big things-Quote:
Originally Posted by Goldman
1) An understanding of supply and demand.
2) An understanding of the scope/scale of this warehouse and its impact on pricing in the aluminum market.
3) An understanding of the warehouse rates. All the NYT reporter has is an unnamed "expert" in paragraph 15 who claims this is raising prices. This expert is probably the person who pitched the story, probably has a financial interest in somehow hurting Goldman and isn't identified at all.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/goldman...s.php?page=all
Quote:
In its dozen-point discussion of its commodities business, Goldman makes fair points, but essentially sidesteps nearly all of the Times’s assertions. Let’s take a look at a few.
One is that Goldman’s stake in the aluminum market is not really that big.
• Aluminum stored in Metro warehouses amounts to approximately 1.5 million tonnes, compared with global aluminum production in 2012 of about 48 million tonnes.
• Approximately 95 percent of the aluminum that is used in manufacturing is sourced from producers and dealers outside of the LME warehouse system.
The Times, though, says something different (my emphasis): “More than a quarter of the supply of aluminum available on the market is kept in the company’s Detroit-area warehouses.
The Times figure is a subset of the former. And though aluminum markets are murky, experts have chimed in that it’s far from out of question that the logjam at Goldman’s warehouse could have impacted the price.
Also from Goldman:
• Delivered aluminum prices are nearly 40 percent lower than they were in 2006. The warehousing system is not driving up the price of aluminum.
Well, for one thing, in 2006 we had a housing bubble followed by a Global Financial Crisis (which some observers, including governmental authorities, believe Goldman had something to do with: See, for example, Chapter VI: “Investment Bank Abuse: Case Study of Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.”).
The Times’s point is again different from the one Goldman is making: that Goldman’s activities are raising aluminum prices higher than they would normally be absent the problems in Detroit:
[Because storage cost is a major component of the “premium” added to the price of all aluminum sold on the spot market, the delays mean higher prices for nearly everyone, even though most of the metal never passes through one of Goldman’s warehouses.
Business Insider quotes Jeffrey Carter, a former board member of the Chicago Mercantile exchange and writer of the blog, Points and Figures, who puts it this way: “They [Goldman] can influence the price heavily because they affect a price where the entire market pegs.”
Goldman also says this:
Recent news reports have inaccurately accused Metro of deliberately creating aluminum shortages and incorrectly asserted that Metro moves aluminum from one warehouse to another in order to earn more rent fees.
• In fact, it is the owners of the metal who direct warehouse operators to dispose of stored metal or transport metal from LME-approved warehouses to warehouses outside the LME system to meet their own needs or objectives.
The idea here is that at the behest of tenants, the company is moving the metal from the more expensive LME space to cheaper non-LME space, also owned by Goldman.
The physical premiums have doubled since 2010 and more than doubled since 2008.
As for sourcing aluminum directly from producers, don't you think it might be more fair to first let people take out the metal they've already bought and stored with GS-owned warehouses??
The things is, GGT, that this has nothing to do with a being a financial institution, however shady it looks. Disney could have done this. Or Apple. It would still be just as shady.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I'd just like to echo what Lewk is saying here. I'm not certain you have a firm grasp on what Rand's market theories were, or what makes a market free.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
Yeah Dread it's probably the same shady ninja-expert who's been going around joining the companies who use the aluminum in order to shadily convince them to lodge complaints with both regulators and the LME about the consequences of these warehousing practices.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
More on the topic, and it's easy to see this has been a while in the coming and supported by more than just NYT:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c04c5...44feabdc0.html
http://www.crugroup.com/about-cru/cr...dwest_premiums
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/07/1...ect-in-metals/
Explaining some of the situation using scripture:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/07/2...ith-scripture/
I wonder, if Goldman Sachs is Joseph in this story, who is the Pharoh? :mad:
Minx, can I ask you to either provide quotations or stop leaving links to sites that don't let non-members access the text as the only material in your posts?
I just don't want to risk angering the copyright gods :cry:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
You mock your own idea, but I'm glad you've finally arrived at the plausible explanation for this story's origin. Ironically, I think I'm more cynical about business than you are.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
This story was probably pitched to the NYT by a PR person working on behalf of an aluminum customer frustrated at Goldman's shitty management of this warehouse. The increased storage premiums is annoying, but it's more than counteracted by the overall aluminum price decrease. What's more annoying to the consumers is the delay getting aluminum supplies on the spot market when, say, a soda bottler needs more aluminum than they have in their inventory.
When Goldman bought it, they may have slimmed down the staff to save costs. Or maybe this is also a malicious way to increase storage fees. Who knows? But, as Fuzzy points out, anyone could be running a warehouse this way. Hell, I could do it.
But the aluminum consumers are being smart by having their PR people blather-on about Goldman, pricing fixing and commodity market trading. And they tout-out this bullshit back-of-the-envelope calculation about price increases that makes no sense in the context of the wider aluminum market. Coupled with a famously anti-corporate NYT reporter and we have this.
This site has safe harbor status. The worst the copyright gods can do is ask us to remove individual posts, and they're unlikely to waste their time.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Agreed, no matter who's doing it, it's still shady behavior. The thing is, Fuzzy, that this kind of behavior is common in powerful industry sectors with ties to high-finance. They have a symbiotic relationship based primarily on profits, regardless of business ethics or common morality. Those profits can mean exploiting tax loopholes, cornering a commodity, manipulating costs, sheltering profits, creating off-shore subsidiaries, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
That behavior can't happen without financial institutions participating or colluding.
A more recent Business Insider article that pieces the puzzle a bit better:
How The Financial Crisis Helped Turn Big Banks Into Global Commodities Kings
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/banks...#ixzz2bjJp7CCP
That Grandfather Clause for bank-holding status was a crappy move. :down:
It didn't take much for Fed and Treasury -- in hair-on-fire emergency meetings -- to convince congress they could save the global financial system from meltdown, without much congressional oversight. Too bad the article doesn't suss that out, but I wouldn't call it an unintended consequence of crisis-chaos. September should be an interesting month.