Michael Gracie

Just a summary of nuttiness

• Congress is nearing a quest to sue oil producing countries over prices. Even if they won such a lawsuit, who would determine the damages, and who would enforce the judgement? Is the Justice Department going to say “pay up, or you can’t export your oil to us anymore”?
• It’s time to lay down further regulation of the commodities markets. Despite skyrocketing global demand (and blatant stockpiling on China’s part in advance of the Olympics), the government still wants to blame everything on speculators. Forget never ending trade deficits, soaring national debt, and a plummeting dollar…it’s time to further regulate the exchange of futures contracts by Joe Trader In The Bathrobe.

What is going to happen when and if this bubble bursts?

UPDATE: Revisting peak oil (seen the chart before, and I’d recommend downloading and looking at it on a big screen).

UPDATE 2: More blaming the traders.

UPDATE 3: Hoarding may be reality.

Having 2,000 feed items stuffed in one’s reader when returning from even the shortest vacation has me thinking about how to put said reader on vacation as well.

• MySpace and Facebook apps suck. That’s not what they really said, but The Silicon Alley Insider did point out how little they might really be worth. I’ve got no experience with MySpace apps, and my only brush with Facebook apps was getting some notification that a friend had installed one and I should do the same. My first impression - I’m getting spammed (and others share that feeling). I would never react to such a notice again, even if I was an active Facebook user. Hence, they are worthless to me too (or maybe I’m just worthless to marketers). Also of note: based on their numbers Facebook should be worth something in the neighborhood of $850 million.
• The New York Times infers that things are getting overheated in Silicon Valley. I disagree - I think a lot more bets are being placed on a lot more companies, and I suspect those bets are generally a lot smaller than post-Bubble 1.0. There may be a lot of duplication of effort going on, but the best execution in each category is going to turn out a winner. The money is just trying to find each of those winners. Meanwhile, TechDirt had its take on the Dallas Cowboys backing out of a domain purchase, but I says its a simple matter of the rest of the world not paying much attention to the chaos.
• Commodities traders are in short supply. As a general rule, the commodities business also retains far fewer numbers than its big sister on the securities end. I think the actual registered headcount via the CFTC is less than 200K, while the NASD numbers hover around 800K. Someone throw me a bone on those numbers (and if anyone needs a Series 3/30, drop me a line).
• OpenID gets a victory in the fight against phishing, as well as some competition. I think the first part is great - now the challenge is getting anyone and everyone to embrace Information Cards. On the latter, I’m going to bet it’s a non-starter - too little, too late. Despite being widely embraced, even OpenID is having slow goings regarding consumption (both in systems and people). More power to SlashID if they can be more effective on that end, but I’m skeptical.
• After consuming this, I dropped TechMeme from my reading list. I guess I can just read each of these every morning from here on out. That, by the way, is a joke.
• Seems that debt problems extend beyond the government, those bought out, and even mortgagees. I thought much of the last year’s rally was purely cash-driven, but I guess I was wrong. Personally, I only use my margin account for short selling.

I think that covers last week.

The latest…online advertising exchanges are beginning to mirror commodities exchanges. Exchanges, however, seem to work best when there is a scarcity of resources. I don’t see any scarcity in the online ad realm, as the “real estate” has a marginal cost near zero, and delivery isn’t guaranteed (users can block ads).

The mirror must need cleaning.