Word: oil
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...point is, it would only take about $9 billion to control the entire long position in oil. That sounds like an enormous amount of money, but some of the major individual players in oil are bigger than the market itself: Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin, of Brunei Shell Petroleum, is worth about $23 billion; Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud is worth about $21 billion; Russian Vagit Alekperov of LUKoil is worth about $13 billion. No, we're not implicating any of these guys in market rigging; in fact the list of billionaires with that kind of swag is long...
...would these individuals or their companies risk their own money and reputations, should they be discovered? They don't need to. There's an anonymous investment vehicle - the hedge fund - with which they can even risk other investors' money for futures speculation. Although we're all affected by oil prices, we as oil consumers don't set the prices. Herein lies the problem. The futures market that serves as a price discovery mechanism for the physical oil market is open only to the elite. We trust these elites to determine the prices, but who are they...
...oil supplier would have to do to raise prices is buy up futures contracts...
...futures market is the open interest, the total number of outstanding positions. For contracts ranging from next month to a decade from now, there is a total of one billion barrels accounted for from the total number of outstanding positions. Interestingly enough, more than 30 billion barrels of oil are actually consumed each year. Despite all the volume, the claims realized through open interest pale in comparison to the actual consumption of oil. The futures market is much smaller than the real oil market. When you consider margin, the amount of money actually invested is even smaller. Indeed, one dollar...
...even that risky. Either the suppliers/investors risk an insignificant fraction of their gargantuan fortune, or they entice other investors to share the risk. With virtually unlimited resources and an actual tie to the underlying commodity, oil suppliers are in a far better position to accomplish this manipulation than, say, the Hunt brothers were during their attempt to corner the silver market in the 1970s...