[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Bursting the peak-oil-bubble speculators

[Patrick Bond]

  InterPress Service

© Hazel Henderson, 2008

Changing Games in the Global Casino

Ever since the 1980s when Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and US President 
Ronald Reagan spurred de-regulation of global finance and privatization, 
market fundamentalism became the main game.

At last, the world is seeing the difference between money and real 
wealth, between “demand” in markets and the real needs of people without 
money. We cringe at the tragic pictures of poor people eyeing abundant, 
tempting supplies of food in the local markets around the world but who 
are forced to go away hungry or make their children patties made of mud, 
spices and whatever scraps of vegetation they can find.

The games of traders, speculators, hedge funds, private equity and even 
pension funds and charitable foundation and university portfolio 
managers, driving up prices of oil and food, invoke increasing outrage 
and demands for reform. The recent FAO Summit in Rome called for $10 
billion more to pay these higher food prices. Yet, without financial 
reforms, this money will fatten players in the global casino.

The flaws of laissez-faire economics are again evident in the latest set 
of financial debacles, with $100 billion written down from faulty risk 
models and collapsed hedge funds to speculation in oil and commodities. 
Despite the efforts of socially-responsible investors and asset managers 
to impose transparency, better corporate governance and true-cost 
pricing, little progress has been made to internalize social and 
environmental costs into risk-analyses, company balance sheets and 
national GDP accounting. These huge, mounting costs: from pollution to 
global climate change, ignored for decades by financiers, accountants 
and most official statistics, now feed the suspicions of millions that 
global finance is indeed a casino with rules rigged by the insiders.

In the ceaseless, now computerized, trading between all market players 
(recently measured in London’s exchanges by the elevated testosterone 
levels of the mostly-male traders), the games of money, power and ego 
are changing again – for the worse.

    * Market players unwilling to submit to enhanced scrutiny of
      shareholders, analysts and the rigors of public stock ownership
      retreat into private equity deals – buy companies, saddle them
      with debt and often strip their assets and re-sell them.

    * Companies try to boost their stock prices with share buy-backs –
      limiting the supply, e.g., oil companies “banking” huge oil price
      increases rather than investing in new supplies or facilities.

    * Hedge funds (630 speculating in energy) total $2.9 trillion with
      their top 10 managers earning $14 billion in 2007. They still
      proliferate even after their many risk-analyses failures, as
      greedier investors seek ever-higher returns. The game, as with
      private equity, is also to buy companies with borrowed money.
      Speculating in commodities ($8 trillion of futures contracts in
      oil in 2007) drives up the prices of other necessities.

    * The game of “enhancing shareholder value” (versus other
      stakeholders’ interests), played by private equity and hedge fund
      players, has led many asset managers of employee pension funds,
      foundations and university endowments to join these new greed
      sweepstakes. Many employees are shocked to find their pension fund
      managers investing their retirement funds in all these efforts to
      try to beat each others’ market performance – contributing to the
      problems of plant closures, rising gas and food prices and carbon
      emissions.

    * The newest game is the rise of sovereign wealth funds, swelled
      with oil revenues and trade surpluses. Norway has the oldest and
      most responsibly managed of these funds. Others are in Singapore,
      China, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Here the game is not
      just money but power and influence as well as buying real assets
      instead of holding slumping US dollars. The USA, the world’s
      largest debtor, must court these funds, sending Treasure Secretary
      Henry Paulson, hat in hand, while President Bush pleads with Saudi
      Arabia’s King Abdullah for more oil.

    * Banks, hurt by reckless investments in the alphabet soup of
      esoteric derivatives: CDOs, SIVs, CDSs (at $62 trillion), also
      look to sovereign wealth funds to bail them out, joining hedge
      funds and private equity supplicants. Taxpayers baulk at the bail
      out of Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, while central
      banks are exhausting their reserves, tools and remedies. US Fed
      interest rate cuts have weakened the dollar, feeding inflation and
      speculative bubbles in oil and commodities.

What are the likely outcomes of all these new games in the global casino 
– still unregulated since the Asian meltdowns of the late 1990s? 
Firstly, we are seeing the effects of the massive credit creation by 
central banks which fed the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the oil, 
food and commodities bubbles – a worldwide expansion of fiat currencies. 
The globalization of unregulated financial markets led to the rapid 
“contagion” – accelerated by computerized and algorithm-based automated 
trading. The “rocket-scientist” academic mathematicians, lured by the 
hedge funds, turned out faulty models which failed to see risks from 
these new conditions and how their own trading strategies were creating 
new systemic risks to their own financial markets.

Financial sectors of the US, UK and other market economies metastasized 
– just as they had done prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In 
Britain, finance represents 25% of GDP and over 20% in the USA. Too many 
people are employed in trading, borrowing and financial engineering – 
rather than in producing real goods and services.

Money was an important invention in human societies, but it only retains 
its value if it is a good tracking and scoring system of the products 
and exchanges of the real economy. Pyramiding of paper and now 
electronic “assets” inevitably leads to write-downs, dislocating both 
the speculating players and the rest of the economy. We see now how the 
changing theories of central bankers distort real economies, from Alan 
Greenspan’s belief that the dot.coms had created a “New Economy” to his 
urging US borrowers to try adjustable rate mortgages and hailing all the 
new derivatives as "financial innovations" that spread risk to those 
able to bear it.

Reforms of these excesses in the global financial casino include:

    * taxing the 90% of speculation in today’s $2 trillion of daily
      currency trading;
    * curbing the $260 billion in index funds tied to oil and other
      commodities;
    * reducing the 16 to 1 leverage allowed in oil and commodity trading
      by raising margin requirements;
    * repealing the “ENRON loophole” passed in 2000 that de-regulated
      energy trading;
    * repealing of US and EU subsidies and mandates for ethanol;
    * greater transparency and oversight of hedge funds, private equity
      and sovereign wealth funds.

Many more fundamental reforms are necessary: requiring central banks to 
use their more targeted tools beyond manipulating interest rates, e.g., 
increasing the capital reserves banks must hold and raising margin 
requirements on stock purchases. Reforming tax policies is urgent: 
taxing carbon emissions, pollution, waste, planned obsolescence and 
resource-depletion while reducing income and payroll taxes. Shifting the 
still-massive subsidies showered on the oil, coal, gas and nuclear 
industries to production tax credits can accelerate the growth of 
renewable energy. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, fuel cells, hydrogen, 
mass transit, smart DC electric grids as well as capturing the 40% of 
energy currently wasted in the US fossil fuel economy can shift human 
societies to the Solar Age.

And as we change the financial games and fix accounting errors in the 
global casino, we can also change the obsolete scorecards. There is 
widespread public recognition in global surveys of the errors of 
money-measured GDP growth, and correcting its omissions of social and 
environmental costs has begun (www.beyond-gdp.eu 
<http://www.beyond-gdp.eu>). Including all these factors and indicators 
of health, education, poverty gaps, environment and quality of life can 
help shrink the global casino and restore finance to its proper function.

HAZEL HENDERSON is author of _Ethical Markets: Growing The Green 
Economy_, president of the independent Ethical Markets Media, LLC, and 
co-creator of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators (updated 
regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com <http://www.calvert-henderson.com>).

Ethical Markets Media, LLC

PO Box 5190, St. Augustine, FL 32085; Phone 904/829-3140, Fax 904/826-0325

Visit www.EthicalMarkets.com <http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/> to see 
Hazel Henderson’s award-winning book _Ethical Markets: Growing the Green 
Economy_.