There was just a 鏗 鏘 集 episode on oil (消 費 者 加 油). Here are some more fresh materials on that complex issue. In addition to the issue of oligopoly, there are some sinister things happening here.
60 Minutes - The Price Of Oil (Jan 8, 2009)
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4713382n
Transcript
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770.shtml
"... In a five year period, Masters [Michael Masters, hedge fund manager] said the amount of money institutional investors, hedge funds, and the big Wall Street banks had placed in the commodities markets went from $13 billion to $300 billion. Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was actually being consumed in the United States....
...A recent report out of MIT, analyzing world oil production and consumption, also concluded that the basic fundamentals of supply and demand could not have been responsible for last year's run-up in oil prices. And Michael Masters says the U.S. Department of Energy's own statistics show that if the markets had been working properly, the price of oil should have been going down, not up. (From quarter four of '07 until the second quarter of '08 the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, said that supply went up, worldwide supply went up. And worldwide demand went down.)...
... "I tease people sometimes that, you know, people say, 'Well, who's the largest oil company in America?' And they'll always say, 'Well, Exxon Mobil or Chevron, or BP.' But I'll say, 'No. Morgan Stanley.'"
Morgan Stanley isn't an oil company in the traditional sense of the word - it doesn't own or control oil wells or refineries, or gas stations. But according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Morgan Stanley is a significant player in the wholesale market through various entities controlled by the corporation.
It not only buys and sells the physical product through subsidiaries and companies that it controls, Morgan Stanley has the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels. For example, some storage tanks in New Haven, Conn. hold Morgan Stanley heating oil bound for homes in New England, where it controls nearly 15 percent of the market.
The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs also has huge stakes in companies that own a refinery in Coffeyville, Kan., and control 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 storage terminals....
...It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation... "Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger. "You'd have to say Enron,....When Enron failed, we learned that Enron, and its conspirators who used their trading engine, were able to drive the price of electricity up, some say, by as much as 300 percent on the West Coast... Every Enron trader, who knew how to do these manipulations, became the most valuable employee on Wall Street," Greenberger said."
Antonia Juhasz - The Tyranny of Oil (Jan 16, 2009)
http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?video?AG_Int_20090116_907832_A...
"Big Oil - it's the world's most powerful industry and its impact on our lives is only growing. In a new book, Antonia Juhasz takes a critical look at how the American oil industry became so dominant globally and how to rein it in. She is an American public policy expert and her book is called "The Tyranny of Oil"."