Was the 2007 Oil Bubble a huge Short Squeeze?

Here are a few snips from an explosive article in Forbes magazine:

When oil prices spiked last summer to $147 a barrel, the biggest corporate casualty was oil pipeline giant Semgroup Holdings, a $14 billion (sales) private firm in Tulsa, Okla. It had racked up $2.4 billion in trading losses betting that oil prices would go down.... With the credit crunch eliminating any hope of meeting a $500 million margin call, Semgroup filed for bankruptcy on July 22.

But now some of the people involved in cleaning up the financial mess are suggesting that Semgroup's collapse was more than just bad judgment and worse timing. There is evidence of a malevolent hand at work: oil price manipulation by traders orchestrating a short squeeze to push up the price of West Texas Intermediate crude to the point that it would generate fatal losses in Semgroup's accounts.
....
[N]umerous people familiar with the events insist that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and especially Goldman Sachs had knowledge about Semgroup's trading positions from their vetting of an ill-fated $1.5 billion private placement deal last spring. "Nothing's been proven, but if somebody has your book and knows every trade, it would not be difficult to bet against that book and put the company into a tremendous liquidity squeeze"....

The entire article is definitely worth a read. In 2008 there was tremendous market manipulation. Hoocudanode?

Subject Meta: 

Forum Categories: 

Sorry, thought that was obvious!

Don't wish to be flippant about an excellent article, but thought the market manipulation had been rather obvious for some time, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, et al., being the original financiers of that InterContinental Exchange (ICE) from whence all those oil and energy futures trading/manipulation was being done (along with foodstuff via "soft" commodities and precious metals, etc., along with zero, I repeat zero, increase in oil markets after BP shut down several oil & gas pipelines feeding the Euro markets after the attack on S. Ossetia and the Russian military response pretty much proving that.

[My personal list of the alpha dog perps: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, BofA and Deutsche Bank (UBS is in there somewhere as well...)

The obvious

One thing I have discovered in watching corporate lobbyists at play is they have amazing technique to make the obvious up for debate and obscured...

so you end up "debating" absolute truths as if they are now not...

even when you have amazing statistics and data to back up the obvious truth.