Soros: Cap and trade can be gamed and manipulated, that's why types like me like it-Bloomberg

12/4/09, Bloomberg News, "Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market using Derivatives," by A. Kassenar

"In carbon markets, many of the derivatives would be futures, options and swaps that would allow a company to lock in a price for carbon like it would for any other commodity related to its business, (JP Morgan Chase's Blythe) Masters says. ...

• "...the scale of what’s being contemplated here is absolutely enormous,” Masters says....
  

Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history,

• the banks’ ability
  

• to turn climate change into a new commodities market
  
• should be curbed.

• “What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says.

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator,

• says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets.
  

“The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July.

• “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities.”...

Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost.

• And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says.

Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases. "...

• (It is helpful to view the remarks above as a logical result of several decades of crime mobs running American government. Then you have to decide if you think it needs to stop. Cap and trade is already in effect in parts of the US thanks to deals made by groups like RGGI, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a carbon trading group...claiming that it 'cares.' ed.)

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