Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
My business mentor in the 80′s was a man named Richard Rainwater, who ran Bass Brothers Investments out of a High rise in Fort Worth, Texas. I helped Richard and Sid Bass “save the Mouse”–rescue the Walt Disney Company from a corporate raid by Saul Steinberg and Mike Millken. Richard believed that one of the things investors loved were “self-fulfilling prophecies”. This morning Jad Mouawad depicted one of these in the International Herald Tribune.
The surge in energy prices is taking place as investors seek refuge in commodities to offset a slowing economy and a declining dollar.
Analysts pointed out that financial institutions like pension funds and hedge funds are also buying oil and other commodities like gold as hedges against a rise in inflation.
As energy prices rise, speculators buy energy futures, leading to higher prices. This momentum is accelerated by any word out of the Fed that they will cut rates, which will inevitably lead to the dollar falling further–making oil more expensive when bought in dollars.
“When investors lose confidence in the central bank, they tend to look for hard assets,” said Philip Verleger, an economist and oil expert. “The Fed’s capitulation on inflation is driving investors to commodities.”
This is great for the money men but what about the rest of us? No, don’t even bother to answer. Those people are way out of the reach of us ordinary mortals. Are you familiar with the author David Liss who chronicles in several historical novels the rise of the stock market in the Netherlands and England? I ask because in those stories he tells of men just as heartless and without a conscience as those who are now taking advantage of what you call a self-fulfilling prophecy but in reality is just another market manipulation.
Rainwater is a serious Peak Oiler. A good guy from what I hear. Milken is a really good guy too. That’d be a story I’d like to hear more about.
I met Mickey and Minnie in the early 1990s in LA. The voices of M & M, that is,,,they’re a biker couple who are “little people”. They and everyone else I met in LA who worked for “the Mouse” had not much good to say about working conditions, paranoia, and the corporate culture of Disney Corp.
When the Mouse went so deep as to do the animated version of the “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, I decided to drop a viral rumor into the LA creative types party scene. I started telling folks in the film biz that the Mouse was going to do an animated, happy ending version of the “Diary of Anne Frank”. Too many people believed it, and I couldn’t keep a straight face…and that was the only way people realized it wasn’t true…
That’s Mouse culture for you…
So far the commenters here seem to be star tripping instead of looking at the question. So here’s a new question: Is it a self-fullfilling prophecy if you prophecy the outcome with the intended purpose of making a profit out of the fulfillment?
rhbee, yes.
The requirement for a self fulfilling prophecy is that it aids in its own fulfillment. Nothing about motive there.
Rhbee-I’m not applauding these speculators, just pointing out the dynamic they are chasing. Us mortals don’t play this game. The fact that you pay a dollar more per gallon because these traders are gaming the market is irrelevant to Morgan, because after all–its a free market.
Jon,
I just saw a nicely argued report out of Houston, saying peak oil isn’t for another 30-50 years. It says quite rightly, that as the price goes up, oil reserves that were before to expensive to tap, are suddenly worth tapping.
I do not disagree with this logic. I do not disagree with your logic that money is sitting in oil futures (raising prices) because it is a safer investment than other things. I agree with all of this in theory.
I also in theory agree that oil can be weaponized. I know that OPEC just looked at “falling demand” as the reason to cut production – which isn’t weaponized oil, it is just an effort on their part to “cut production.”
If you wanted to rid the world of oil speculation, you need only push OPEC to increase production anytime X amount of $ is hiding in the oil barrel, one or two beat downs as a form of policy and the speculators will leave for greener pastures.
It is possible to hold all this information in one’s head and be a free market junkie and STILL think quite rationally, “I support the war in Iraq.”
I understand where you come from – you want to end the war. I do doubt you care about oil as much as you should. It is a struggle to convince you, but I’m up for the challenge.
Ok, troll comment — what’s with the trucker in the picture on the IHT? Guy looks like he’s pushing some serious wind out of his backside.
Morgan- I must confess that even at 7 AM London Time (in the dead of night on my body clock), I find it hard to reconcile your notion of what amounts to an oil price control mechanism, with your heretofore wholesale embrace of the market’s essential ability to do whatever market players want. Adam Smith couldn’t imagine that hedge funds with billions of capital might want to game the system–but that’s just whats happening.
[...] have maintained for a while that oil prices (and perhaps other commodities as well) are being driven higher not by the laws of supply and [...]
Hedge funds seem to be be blamed by the hour for high commodity prices.
- Richard