books.global-investor.com www.amazon.co.uk — About the Book The spike in the oil price to almost $150 per barrel in summer 2008 was the last great excess of the crazed noughties bull markets, staged even as stock markets crumbled worldwide. Contrary to entrenched establishment opinion still embraced by many, ‘Petromania’ proves this oil price blowout was a classic speculative bubble, but driven primarily by new modes of financial speculation. Demolishing widespread, oft-repeated but incorrect arguments that such trade in paper barrels cannot move oil prices, ‘Petromania’ details how this financialisation of the oil markets meshed with other trends to create a moment that saw investment banks and hedge funds collectively wield more power over the price of black gold than OPEC or any multinational oil company. It also shows how regulatory blindness to the ‘dark matter’ of modern finance caused so many to confuse fantasy with reality for so long. ‘Petromania’ matters not just because fortunes were won and lost in oil’s dizzying ascent and crash, but because this bubble spelled misery for ordinary people worldwide, destabilised developing world governments, and delayed interest rate cuts desperately needed to address the ongoing global recession. ‘Petromania’ matters because while all eyes are on the crippled banking system, we risk ignoring valuable lessons about twenty-first century markets from this other great boom-and-bust – even as the forces that blew the bubble are …
www.interest.co.nz Hello. I’m Bernard Hickey with daily briefing from interest.co.nz… Today, we’ll look petrol prices and why we’re predicting they’ll hit NZ$2 a litre within a couple of weeks We’ll also look at a sharp rise in power prices and explain why we think the Reserve Bank shouldn’t be cutting rates right now. We say we have an inflation problem that needs fixing, not firing up even more. Story 1, But firstly, we look petrol prices and why we’re saying New Zealand petrol prices will hit $2 a litre within a couple of weeks. The real oil price paid by New Zealand’s oil importers has risen 15% in the last five weeks to a record NZ$122.45 a barrel. Over that time petrol prices at the pump have risen just 5%. We forecast this increase in the basic price paid by importers will flow through into a $2 a litre petrol price at the pumps in a matter of weeks, possibly as early as the beginning of April. Figures from the Ministry of Economic Development show that the oil importers were paying US$98.25 a barrel for Dubai crude in the week ending March 14. That translates into NZ$122.45 a barrel, which is up 15%. Once that 15% price in the basic cost of the crude flows through, then the price at the pump will rise to NZ$1.93 a litre. So we’re not quite there yet. But this NZ$122 a litre depends on a basic Dubai oil price of US$98.25, which depends on futures contracts agreed by New Zealand’s oil importers several weeks ago. Since then the Dubai spot price has risen to US …