Oil Traders, Not Oil Speculators

I have a hard time with Occupy Wall Streeters.  One reason is the sheer stupidity of the signs they hold up.  Let me give an example, and I’ll tie it up with job news.

You have signs against big oil.  Now no one held up signs when gas prices were a dollar a gallon.  And the same people then were selling the oil.   Did they just now get greedy? 

Well, let me give you reality.  These signs show a lack of economic understanding.  The oil prices that the “oil speculators” (oil traders in reality) set are like a line on a sports game.  The bookie doesn’t set the line, the money does.  The bookie just makes sure no matter where the bets fall, he or she makes money. 

If too much money falls on one team in a football game that is favored by a field goal (3 points), the spread goes up to maybe 4 points.   The bookie makes no extra money by this.  He makes money handling the transactions paid to the winners so if as many people are on the losing side as the winning side, he makes money on the game no matter who wins the game. 

If everyone better were on the winning side though, he’d have to pay everyone with no loser to charge.  He’d be destroyed financially, and with no bookie, no one who uses him or her could bet.

In the oil market the oil traders don’t set the prices, the money does.  If I can’t make money with oil over $3.70 a gallon, I’ll gladly pay $ 3.60 a gallon guaranteed at that price for a year.  The oil “speculator” makes this happen.  No oil trader, no oil and we all freeze to death above the Mason Dixon Line in the winter.

And since I don’t believe even communists want to freeze in the winter, then this tells you that the people in the Occupy Wall Street movement are fools.  They actually believe the stupid things told to them and also believe a better method is available that has never worked anywhere except in Karl Marx’s book. 

This is probably why the communists always kill the true believers in any revolution; because they don’t want to freeze in the winter.  And the true believer would make everyone freeze as they lived out slogans not reality. 

Now how does this add up to a job for you?  The world is still filled with people digging for energy for people who want energy that is readily available and affordable.  Whether natural gas, coal or oil, no matter what the stupid slogans, companies will continue to look for these fuels.

Right now there’s a shortage in not just skilled labor for oil fields and gas fields, but for the men and women with the degrees to find these fuels.  Get the training you need to do these jobs.

If it requires a degree in real geology, get it.  Don’t waste time in a science that is popular today and will be gone tomorrow. (I talk of the environmental sciences that don’t deal with the practical, like extracting energy cleanly, but in cleaning up imaginary pollutants, a fake need which will not be accepted eventually because you can’t fool even a fool forever). 

For the other skills, you can acquire them at tech schools.  Make a career helping keep people warm in winter, not out of holding signs with silly slogans for a kingmaker billionaire behind the signs who won’t even give you a job when the marching’s done.  .