The Wall Street Journal's Brian Baskin today nails down both ends of a mystery in oil markets. The collapse of the little-known SemGroup, a pipeline and storage company as well as major oil trader, may have helped push the oil futures market down in recent days. But before that, the company's frantic trades may have kept the price rising. Most of the story is behind the WSJ subscription barrier, but here's the gist of it:

The cratering of the L.A. Times and the rest of Tribune Co. has me worrying, again, about who will hold the powerful, the corrupt and the incompetent to account when all the investigative and beat reporters are fired. One small but notable point of hope is ProPublica, a well-financed online nonprofit network that is grabbing good reporters, including from the L.A. Times, and actually paying them. A gander at ProPublica today turns up a pair of significant oil industry stories: a taxpayer gift of up to $53 billion to oil companies, and a threat to New York's drinking water from sloppily permitted toxic drilling for natural gas.

I've been suspicious of oilman T. Boone Pickens' new campaign for wind power and natural gas vehicles, partly because it looked like he'd be profiting on the backs of California taxpayers by way of a November ballot initiative. It turns out Pickens won't have to wait that long.

 

 

The PR departments of the major oil companies are madly developing their spin for the yet-another-record 2nd quarter profits they're about to report.

What they'll say: "Without these gigantic profits (including billions in taxpayer subsidies), we couldn't explore and drill and supply oil for the future." "We're not really so rich, compared to other industries." "The oil industry is volatile, so this offsets our huge losses in other years." "It's OPEC stealing your money, not us." And a perennial favorite, "We pay such big taxes that you should be grateful." Oh, really? Let's take these points one at a time.

Critics of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) say it is nonsensical to talk about core inflation nationally of 0.3% in June and 2.4% compared with a year earlier. (For Los Angeles, it was 0.2% and 3%, respectively.) "In the grocery store, they are getting two bags with what they used to [be paying to] get three," said Judy Dugan, research director of Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group based in Santa Monica. "In the gas station, they are paying double what they were paying two years ago."