Gas Prices Are Down? Dodd-Frank!

This is copied-and-pasted from an article at Smirking Chimp. I think it's by wizard2000, but it's hard to tell:

"A couple of weeks ago MSNBC host Chris Hayes had an oil industry expert on as his guest to ask him a simple question, "Why are gasoline prices going down?"

"Haven't you noticed? Fuel prices have dropped quite significantly over the past several months, not as much (yet) as when they plummeted in late 2008 and early 2009 following the crash and disruption in trading on the stock market, but still by a substantial amount. So, Chris Hayes wanted to know why.

"I expected the usual answer, oil glut, refineries up and working at full capacity, etc etc, but I was surprised when Hayes' guest said that certain provisions of Dodd-Frank (passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in 2010) had finally kicked in a couple of months ago (after years of delay by Republicans suing Dodd-Frank in court and right-wing commissioners on the Commodities Futures Trading Commission refusing to enforce Dodd-Frank anti-speculative provisions). And then Hayes's guest said that these long-delayed Dodd-Frank provisions that restricted oil futures trading had caused Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan (and probably Koch Industries, and other speculators in oil futures) to shut down their oil futures trading desks.

"Now, you might ask why restricting oil futures trading would lead to lower oil barrel and gasoline prices? Well, just look at what happened in late 2008. The stock market crash (from an index over 12,000 to about 6,000, with 401-Ks taking a major hit) affected fuel prices (oil barrel prices fell from $150 to about $30 a barrel, while gasoline prices at the pump fell from over $4 to under $2 a gallon). Wow!! And all because trading on Wall Street was disrupted, including oil futures trading by the speculators.

"But I thought oil futures trading on the commodities exchange was primarily for heavy fuel users like airline companies, so they could lock in lower prices due to high volume purchases to keep ticket prices lower? Oh, this was the case until former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) inserted a speculator-friendly provision into a 1999 bill which deregulated completely oil futures trading, opening the door to billionaire/millionaire speculators. Over the past 15 years, their speculative activity has driven up and kept high the fuel prices hitting hard the middle class in America. Several years back, someone did a study showing that in the 1990s, oil futures trading was 70 percent heavy fuel users (airlines companies, etc) with only about 30 percent of the trading being done by speculators. After Gramm's bill was signed into law, this percentage reversed over the years with over 70 percent of oil futures trading being done by the speculators (J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, etc) leaving the 30 percent or so to the heavy fuel users. In other words, U.S. car drivers and long-haul truckers have been pumping billions of dollars into the pockets of the speculators every time they've pumped gas into their vehicle...just the way the greed-driven speculators planned.

"Dodd-Frank in 2010 (along with other provisions) was meant to address this theft from Americans and America's middle-class by rapacious Republicans, which of course explains why Republicans tried every trick they could think of to stop it from being implemented and enforced, even though the Dodd-Frank restrictions are far less stringent than those in place during the 1990s regarding oil futures trading. This obstruction of Dodd-Frank is the same as Republicans trying to restrict the Affordable Care Act even before it went into effect.

"So, what can we expect from Republicans starting in about a month when they take charge of Capitol Hill? In between numerous House impeach hearings of President Obama (who has hardly done anything approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors," just like President Clinton before him never got close to "high crimes and misdemeanors"), Republican will no doubt try one trick after another to repeal (in part or whole) the Affordable Care Act AND also repeal Dodd-Frank, so that price-gouging Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and price-gougers like the Koch brothers can return to speculating (rigging) the oil futures trading market like before, artificially driving up fuel costs in the process, making billions more for them and the other insatiable 1 percenters.

"And the Democratic Party better make this the central message of the Democratic Party over the next two years (and beyond), whether addressing rural or urban audiences, because anyone that drives a car has been paying enormous amounts of gas money over the past 15 years to a bunch of anti-American greed-driven thugs, domestic and foreign, with Repubilcan politicians and speculator front groups doing their dirty work. Hey, these Republican politicians and front groups are just another "investment commodity" in the eyes of the insanity insatiable 1 percenters, the best puppets their money can buy.