Energy Hearing on Energy Speculation and Price Manipulation
December 12, 2007
The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is currently holding a hearing, "Energy Speculation: Is Greater Regulation Necessary to Stop Price Manipulation?"
Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak gives opening remarks. He notes that energy prices can be manipulated by speculating, including by the companies themselves, and plays audio recordings of one egregious example:
| Subcommittee Chairman Stupak: "I'd like to now play voice recordings of individuals from the British Petroleum and Energy Transfer Partner cases. Here they are in their own words: 'One, in terms of whether we should do this or not in terms of talking to Jim, is that, what we stand to gain is not just that we'd make out of it, but we would know from thereafter that we could control the market at will.'" [BP Lead Trader Mark Radley 2/5/04]" |
Professor Michael Greenberger, Director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at University of Maryland, gives opening testimony. He describes how energy commodities have fallen outside the regulation that agriculture commodoties have to protect consumers:
| Greenberger: "For today's hearings, the intent of the President's working group, and the Senate's draft, before it was amended late in the night in December 2000, was that Agriculture and Energy Commodities would continue to be regulated fully by the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission]. Late in the night of December 2000 the word 'energy' was struck from that bill, so the Agriculture Committee made sure that the farmers were still protected by the CFTC, but the Energy Sector was now allowed to operate outside the confines of the CFTC." |