$ 15 BILLIOn… sucked out of Americans’ pockets !
By Daniel at 5 August, 2009, 3:21 pm
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July 8 (Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley may never have the same leeway in commodities as they did when oil reached a record $147 a barrel last year.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will consider greater regulation of oil, gas and other energy markets at hearings this month. It plans to review exemptions to trading limits that since the 1990s allowed Goldman and Morgan to build multibillion-dollar ventures in futures, swaps and over-the- counter markets.
“They’re very significant swaps participants, and they’re very significant dealers for over-the-counter swaps in the commodities market,” said Dan Waldman, former general counsel of the CFTC and a senior partner at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington. “If their ability to do some of that business was limited, they’d have to find other ways to reduce their risk or reduce the size of their commodity swaps books.”
Energy swaps are trades in which parties exchange the difference between two price payments, one fixed and one floating, for a specific commodity for a period of time.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley accounted for about half of the $15 billion in revenue that the world’s 10 largest investment banks generated from commodities in 2007, Ethan Ravage, a financial-services industry consultant in San Francisco, estimated last year, as energy prices neared records.
Spokesmen for both banks declined to comment,
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