You could hear John Arnold trying to choose his words carefully. Seated at a conference table inside a drab government building in Washington, D.C., in August, Arnold hardly fit the stereotype of a swaggering, 35-year-old billionaire natural-gas trader.
Last year Andrew Hall, the head of Citigroup's energy trading unit, made over $100 million, making him one of the highest paid people on Wall Street.
Word is that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission is set to do an about-face on the role speculators play in setting oil prices. According to the Wall Street Journal, a CFTC study set to be released next month will find speculators to blame for last year's high prices. Presumably, the study will provide some intellectual justification for the Obama administration's plan to rein in oil speculators.
The Obama Administration has given itself two months to tell Congress what new legislation is needed to control over-the-counter derivatives, and testimony by Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner late last week indicated how incredibly difficult the job of writing a law is going to be.
Can reinvigorated financial watchdogs take a bite out of surging oil prices?
The Obama administration plans to release updated details in the coming weeks to guide Congress on the best way to reshape the nation's financial regulatory system and prevent future collapses.
The Obama administration is weighing a plan that would put the Federal Reserve in charge of monitoring systemic risk and give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. authority to unwind insolvent bank holding companies, sources familiar with the proposal said on Wednesday.
The Obama administration announced plans Thursday to boost the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's budget by 13% to help the investor protection agency better police markets and detect fraud.
President-elect Obama on Thursday kept up his blistering pace of naming top officials by announcing three people he will nominate as financial regulators.
"Investing is an act of faith." That simple declarative sentence begins my 1999 book, "Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor."
You could hear John Arnold trying to choose his words carefully. Seated at a conference table inside a drab government building in Washington, D.C., in August, Arnold hardly fit the stereotype of a swaggering, 35-year-old billionaire natural-gas trader.
Last year Andrew Hall, the head of Citigroup's energy trading unit, made over $100 million, making him one of the highest paid people on Wall Street.
Word is that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission is set to do an about-face on the role speculators play in setting oil prices. According to the Wall Street Journal, a CFTC study set to be released next month will find speculators to blame for last year's high prices. Presumably, the study will provide some intellectual justification for the Obama administration's plan to rein in oil speculators.
The Obama Administration has given itself two months to tell Congress what new legislation is needed to control over-the-counter derivatives, and testimony by Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner late last week indicated how incredibly difficult the job of writing a law is going to be.
Can reinvigorated financial watchdogs take a bite out of surging oil prices?
The Obama administration plans to release updated details in the coming weeks to guide Congress on the best way to reshape the nation's financial regulatory system and prevent future collapses.
The Obama administration is weighing a plan that would put the Federal Reserve in charge of monitoring systemic risk and give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. authority to unwind insolvent bank holding companies, sources familiar with the proposal said on Wednesday.
The Obama administration announced plans Thursday to boost the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's budget by 13% to help the investor protection agency better police markets and detect fraud.
President-elect Obama on Thursday kept up his blistering pace of naming top officials by announcing three people he will nominate as financial regulators.
"Investing is an act of faith." That simple declarative sentence begins my 1999 book, "Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor."
Oil prices posted the biggest one-day dollar gain ever Monday as the dollar was punished by the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan and big investors scrambled to fill obligations as the October contract expired.
To trace the causes of the current meltdown, you have to go back to a series of regulatory missteps
Looking for a way to profit from falling oil prices?
Oil prices staged a late-day rally Monday, after dithering on either side of break-even for most of the session, as investors watched mounting geopolitical tensions in oil-rich countries.
Watch out, speculators: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is getting tough on crime. But since, as the CFTC has said, speculation hasn't pushed up prices, the crackdown will benefit its image more than the economy.
The government charged an oil trading firm Thursday with manipulating oil prices in the first complaint to be announced since the regulators began a new investigation into wrongdoings in the energy markets.
Legislation meant to crack down on oil speculators passed a key test vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Some of the Democratic lawmakers leading the campaign to crack down on oil traders appeared Wednesday before the House Committee on Agriculture to explain their proposals.
The debate over whether oil prices are being driven by speculators in the futures market or by the fundamentals of supply and demand for the physical product slides right on by a central point. The question Congress and regulators should be focusing on isn't who is driving prices, but how prices are being driven.
Before the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission starts scrutinizing the role that speculators may have played in driving up fuel and food prices, investigators may want to take a look at price swings in a commodity not in today's news: onions.
As Americans clamor for action on record oil and fuel prices, Democratic leaders in the House had promised to address energy issues this week, but they ended up without much to show for it.
Close loopholes on foreign oil trading. Limit hedge funds from pouring money into the market. End oil speculation altogether.
Fed up with soaring oil prices and a chorus of people blaming Wall Street speculators, Congress is considering a host of rules aimed at limiting the inflow of investor money into oil contracts.
With a nationwide average gas price of just about $4 a gallon, lots of people are thinking there must be something the government can do to help.
High oil prices, driven by decreasing crude supplies and increasing demand could drive the U.S. economy into a recession, George Soros, the fund manager and commodities investor, told lawmakers Tuesday.
Amid soaring oil prices that some say are caused by nothing more than rampant speculation, the government Thursday announced a wide ranging probe into oil price manipulation and said it would get more information on the effect investors are having on the market.
Federal regulators investigating possible price manipulation of crude oil are probably looking at what role collapsed energy giant Enron may have played, a former government official said Friday.
Oil prices fell over $4 Thursday, a day of wild price swings on the back of plummeting crude supplies, signs of a strong economy, and news the government is six months into an oil trading investigation.
Speculation in the commodity markets took much of the blame for skyrocketing energy and food prices at a Senate hearing Tuesday
Sheila Bair became Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in June 2006 - just in time for the end of a real estate and credit bubble that has made her job one of the toughest in the regulatory world. She was one of the first members of the Bush Administration to say that it was the job of lenders and big banks to help mortgage holders in distress; and she has fought to uphold strict banking standards and create more lending laws.
The economy is stumbling, energy supplies are rising, yet oil prices are hitting new records. What's going on here?
Oil prices rose Monday as refinery outages in the United States stoked supply concerns again as the end of the summer driving season approaches.
Sentinel Management Group Inc., which oversees about $1.6 billion in assets, will not receive help from a commodities regulator to stop clients from pulling out their money, a move that could lead to big losses.
Marathon Oil Corp. agreed to pay a $1 million fine to settle charges that its Marathon Petroleum Company subsidiary attempted to manipulate crude oil prices in 2003, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced Wednesday.
U.S. market regulators on Wednesday charged failed hedge fund Amaranth Advisors LLC and its former head trader, Brian Hunter, with trying to manipulate natural gas futures prices.
Oil rose above $74 a barrel on Monday, driven towards an all-time high by an influx of speculative fund money and tightening crude supplies from the North Sea.
The U.S. House Financial Services Committee said Thursday it will hold a July 11 hearing into systemic risks to the economy and the financial system posed by hedge funds.
U.S. regulators were powerless to stop "excessive speculation" by Amaranth Advisors LLC because the giant hedge fund exploited an unregulated electronic exchange to "dominate" and "distort" natural gas markets in 2006, a U.S. Senate panel said in a report issued Sunday.
A Philadelphia firm and its president have been charged by the government with fraud for fleecing investors in a commodity trading and hedge fund called Philadelphia Alternative Asset Management.
Over the past few months, as oil prices raced toward $50 a barrel, most observers blamed a smorgasbord of international culprits, including the meltdown of Yukos, the gargantuan appetite of China, ...
Telephone records of New York Mercantile Exchange natural gas floor traders have been subpoenaed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a probe of possible market manipulation, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report Sunday.
So you think interest rates are going to rise again? Want to bet on it, but you're bamboozled by the futures market? Some University of Iowa professors can help you. Since late October, their priva...
It was the year of the derivative. From last spring on, as if a blockade of ice had suddenly given way, bad news about these exotic financial innovations started to flow, and victims, corporate and...
The typically lackluster world of municipal finance was thrown into the spotlight when Orange County, California, filed for bankruptcy last December 6. Former county treasurer Robert Citron leverag...
Your August article ''You May Already Be a Victim of Fraud'' referred to difficulties encountered by one of your reporters in obtaining complaint information from the Commodity Futures Trading Comm...
Don't expect a Wall Street-size scandal out of the Chicago sting, in which the FBI handed out subpoenas to surprised floor traders at the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange....
Congressmen more familiar with yeas and nays than with puts and calls are getting a ''crash'' course in the arcana of Black Monday. Their primer: the President's Brady Commission report. Among othe...
BID FAREWELL to 1987, the year of the stock market's boom and bust, but don't imagine that you've heard the last of Black Monday. Reverberations from the Brady Commission's recently released report...
Q. First Commodity Corp. of Boston persuaded me to invest $40,500 in sugar futures last February by telling me that I would double my money. So far I am out $16,500. The company was expelled from t...
COMMODITIES BROKERS, who deal in everything from pork bellies to Treasury bills and precious metals, emerged from their trading pits months ago to fight sweeping new regulations proposed by the Com...
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