LOL... Exactly. This week-end, my aunt, after arguing on the necessity of taxing the hell out of speculators, asked who paid me at the end of the year if I had losses...
What do you expect the media to do - explain that the central bank has destroyed the value of the currency? Some of the sheep are never going to get it, and will spend their lives bleating after bogey men. But hey, at least they'll make a good supply of cheap manual labor in the future.
You're right. So many people totally oblivious to the destruction of the Dollar currently underway. Instead, blame is shifted to the evil speculators driving up the price of oil and food.
''At the center of the feud is the CFTC, which passed new rules in October to limit certain traders â those who donât take physical delivery of crude or oil supplies'' So the CFTC want to ban small oil traders? How about OTC CL Futures and CFD's they can't kill those right?
I am sure that speculators will continue to be convenient scapegoats for as long as the current system exists, although all studies show that most speculators serve as liquidity providers with net losses and at best can only distort price in the very short term, if at all.
How will limits in any any way "ban small traders"? If you are small, limits will not affect your ability to trade your small size. We've lived with limit sizes in wheat for years and that market has survived just fine. The exchanges have always self regulated by protecting themselves with margin requirements. Like the man said, everybody thinks it's so easy to bid up a price but nobody wants to do it because they are afraid it might not work.
What's even funnier is no one cries about the speculators when they offer down the price of oil like the last few days..
there's a very good story about an NYSE specialist in one of those old stock trading books. He just showed up at his post for a normal days work and there were all these sell orders. It was his job to buy to maintain an orderly market so he opened 10 points below the previous days close because that was all he could afford. Well, apparently it was just a freak deal and the stock closed 1 1/4 higher. He made a lot of of money that day but they fined him 160K (which was a lot of money back then.) His response was, "Yeah, but what would you do to me if it went lower?"