JPMorgan's $2 Billion Loss and the Price You Are Paying for Gas at the Pump

The Fed's mandate needs a massive overhaul, and our government needs to refocus its priorities from bailing Wall Street out of the mess they have gotten all of us into, and focusing on how bailing Wall Street plays out on Main Street.
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JP Morgan is a bank holding company. Under current law that means it not only functions as a bank but also as a casino. Using easy and practically cost free money to which it has access at the Federal Reserve under their guise as a bank, but then using that money to play roulette by betting on derivatives and commodities such as copper (please see "J.P. Morgan Chase Banks on Buying Into the Casino") crude oil and petroleum derivatives and on.

One could readily hypothesize that the recent spike in oil prices resulted in part on JP Morgan bets that price of would go higher, and in effect pushing the price up and in consequence the price of gasoline. JPMorgan is a 'bank' that has chartered oil tankers of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands tons capacity, filled them with millions of barrels of crude oil and kept them at anchor at sea for months at a time in order to game the price of oil. Of course, when one buys oil, taking it off the market, and loads it on tankers for speculation the price doesn't go down, the price goes up and we all end up paying for JP Morgan's casino gambit by paying higher prices for gas at the pump. And this while the Fed pumps more and more money into JP Morgan permitting it to buy more and more oil at bargain basement cost, a financing bargain gambit not available to refineries and those who actually use the oil and could pass along those economies to consumers.

The price of oil has been going down the last couple of weeks. Is it because or in part because JPMorgan has had to vacate their long oil positions? If so, will the Fed now step in and give JPMorgan the additional liquidity it needs to salvage their positions at our cost by pushing up the traded price of oil futures resulting in higher prices at the pump fashioned by the Fed's 'help' supporting JP Morgan at our expense? If so, the Fed's mandate needs a massive overhaul, and our government needs to refocus its priorities from bailing Wall Street out of the mess they have gotten all of us into, and focusing on how bailing Wall Street plays out on Main Street.

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