Apparently, there’s a global oil scam making Bernie Madoff look like a petty thief.

If serial entrepreneur and Seeking Alpha columnist Philip Davis is to be believed, the world is being scammed out of $2.5 trillion, 50 times greater than the sum Madoff took from the duped investors.

According to Davis, the scam starts in 2000 with the formation of the ICE – the Intercontinental Exchange. The ICE – founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale – is an online commodities and futures marketplace that exists outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.

After a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating “round-trip” trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price, as told by Davis.

No commodity ever changes hands

Quite shockingly no commodity ever changes hands, but the transactions still send a signal to the market, artificially boosting company revenue. Angry yet? There’s more.

Because the trading is unregulated by Washington, its difficult to gauge the scale on which “round-trip” trading takes place.

But when DMS Energy were investigated by Congress, the company admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. This means 80 percent of all trades in that year were false trades. Not a drop of oil changed hands, but the balance sheets showed increased revenue.

The idea is to hike up commodity prices. For example, according to Davis, after the ICE turned commodity trading into a “speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced”, Goldman Sachs were able to triple the price of commodities in just five years.

ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand

The beauty (or rather the horror) of the scam outlined by Davis is that because they control the oil markets, the ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge consumers an extra dollar per gallon of gas. And whereas this may not seem like much, this $1 soon becomes $50 billion A MONTH as global drivers consume 1.7 billion gallons of gas every single day.

Whereas, at this stage, it would not be accurate or indeed wise to suggest what Philip Davis claims is either true or false, one cannot ignore the issue. There have been concerns for may years that global markets are controlled by a monopoly of mega-organizations, but there could be a strong case for suggesting the ICE is close to becoming just that – a super-organization with the power to push oil prices up or down.

Good luck Washington, you might just be getting a deluge of mail demanding answers.

The slide show below comes from SlideShare.net and gives a breakdown of the global oil scam.

Recent news articles have brought to light the fact that almost 47% of households in the US currently have zero or negative federal tax liability. We take a closer look at this lack of liability across each income level, highlighting the percentage in each range that will not pay any taxes. Also shown is a full breakdown of who is paying the bulk of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year.

Personal Finance
Software – Mint.com

It seems as if not even Hollywood is exempt from the fact that life has a tendency to come full circle. Nicolas Cage saw his finances crumble this year, leaving the actor currently facing a tax bill of over $5 million as previously reported here. While Cage is in the process of suing his former financial advisor for mismanaging his funds, it looks like his dire financial straits may be temporarily fixed, and by none other than fellow A-lister Johnny Depp.

In a true “that’s what friends are for” move, the Public Enemies star has reportedly called his old friend to let him know that he will front “whatever he needs” to get him out of this crisis. Depp is generous in his financial and emotional support, possibly seeing the move as a way to pay Cage back for launching Depp’s stellar career: It was Nic who arranged for Depp, then an unknown musician, to meet with his agent, which led him to A Nightmare on Elm Street.

[Via: StyleCaster.com]