The Wall Street Journal is having its usual gigantic hissyfit:
As if U.S. financial firms needed another reason to move to Europe and Asia, Senator Bernie Sanders keeps trying: Now they can't trust that confidential trading information will be kept, well, confidential.
The Independent-Socialist from Vermont recently released to the media the trading positions of banks and other companies in crude oil futures and other commodities as of June 30, 2008. While Mr. Sanders acknowledged the move "may have upset Wall Street speculators," he said in a statement that "the American people have a right to know exactly what caused ...
WSJ has finally succeeded in blocking my non-subscriber access and that's all I can pull up, but it probably follows along the reasoning below the fold:
31 August, 2011 - 14:53
FIA 'shocked and outraged' after Senator leaks oil trading data
The Futures Industry Association (FIA) says its members have been "shocked and outraged" by the leaking of confidential oil trading data by a US senator.
Senator Bernie Sanders handed the Wall Street Journal names and positions of traders covering the run up to a period of record oil prices in 2008 before posting the documents on his Web site.
The data was initially gathered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2008 but an internal investigation has found no evidence that a member of its staff was responsible for handing it to Sanders.
http://www.finextra.com/...
Bully to the Senator for disclosing the manner in which we were royally screwed by Wall Street in 2008. I fail to see what that should not be public knowledge, inasmuch as it had a great deal to do with the collapse of my 401K and other financial matters in my life, not to mention the lives of millions of other Americans.
Explaining his decision to leak, Sanders says: "This report clearly shows that in the summer of 2008 when gas prices spiked to more than $4 a gallon, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy. The CFTC has kept this information hidden from the American public for nearly three years. That is an outrage."
Yeah, what the Senator said.
Senator Sanders has a complete list of offenders at:
http://sanders.senate.gov/...
Every page is stamped "Confidential" but why that should be so 3 years after the fact is beyond my comprehension, believing as I do in "The Public's Right to Know."
WSJ reports:
Commodities traders, unlike big buyers and sellers of stocks, have never had to disclose their holdings publicly. But that hidebound system is coming under attack.
Tyson Slocum, a member of a Commodities Futures Trading Commission advisory committee and director of the energy group at advocacy organization Public Citizen, this afternoon officially proposed a dramatic change in transparency of energy traders. He delivered a letter to members of Congress and commissioners at the CFTC formally asking that company-specific data be released two weeks after the daily close.
http://blogs.wsj.com/...
Why not? What right have Goldman Sachs, et al, to keep their nefarious business secret when it has such a huge effect on millions of American lives? Does the corporate right to secrecy overrule the right of an individual "natural person" not to be financially ruined by corporate shenanigans?