The scary thing for me is that in the US, the President and by extension the DoJ has a lot of power to override any legal protections that exist in most countries. In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
What if the whole point of the war was planned to generate trading opportunities? Every crazy tweet or announcement another cash out.
It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.
How is this at my expense? It's at the expense of the hedge fund they bought the oil futures from before the price went up. I don't see why I should assume that some hedge fund manager is more on my side than some insider trader.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
I don't see many comments here about the actual topic. Such is the case with anything Trump related.
Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.
No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.
I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.
Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.
The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...
Welcome to the world of commodity trading. There is no SEC here, and this is business as usual. You can look at T&S to see this for yourself, but this is (like it or not) how this typically goes in commodity markets.
So, basically, over the last century or more or so, we've learned:
- our laws, the ones that supposedly keep society stable and safe, don't apply to particular groups of people
- we can catch them, and maybe, just maybe, we will hold someone accountable for those people, though often they just distract and trick everyone from holding them accountable
- the majority of people are getting stolen from, treated like slaves and tricked and abused, and they will tolerate this abuse because of <fear???>
Am I to accept this frame of reality in which the universe and the earth, and the leaders currently making decisions for me and holding influence over the worlds' military powers, are this hostile towards me?
I refuse. I think we have more power than we think. In America at least, we still have an amendment that has yet to be repealed (created for scenarios in which abusers hold leadership positions and refuse to be accountable): the 1st amendment and parading guns legally, safely, and responsibly is a powerful reminder of what accountability and dignity looks like.
edit: I advocate for parading guns peacefully with an intention and purpose: go with a group standing for rights, safety and dignity
Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.
>The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
This topic keeps coming up so I'll summarize some points I've alrady made [1].
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
(paulkrugman.substack.com)506 points by Qem 7 May 2026 | 326 comments
Comments
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-probes-suspicious...
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.
https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
I think this sums it up.
Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.
No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.
I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.
Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.
The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...
- our laws, the ones that supposedly keep society stable and safe, don't apply to particular groups of people
- we can catch them, and maybe, just maybe, we will hold someone accountable for those people, though often they just distract and trick everyone from holding them accountable
- the majority of people are getting stolen from, treated like slaves and tricked and abused, and they will tolerate this abuse because of <fear???>
Am I to accept this frame of reality in which the universe and the earth, and the leaders currently making decisions for me and holding influence over the worlds' military powers, are this hostile towards me?
I refuse. I think we have more power than we think. In America at least, we still have an amendment that has yet to be repealed (created for scenarios in which abusers hold leadership positions and refuse to be accountable): the 1st amendment and parading guns legally, safely, and responsibly is a powerful reminder of what accountability and dignity looks like.
edit: I advocate for parading guns peacefully with an intention and purpose: go with a group standing for rights, safety and dignity
And then we'll do nothing anyway because the wealthy and corrupt run every single country on the planet. Money talks.
And people are too easily preoccupied with trivial policy squabbles to care about how badly we've all been fucked by the last 50 years or so.
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema...
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
And if that fails, just buy a pardon [7].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955623
[2]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-pric...
[3]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finall...
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/supreme-co...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
[6]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/michael-selig-predi...
[7]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market
I read all of the cases in the article
Good for them, I guess.
- Paul Krugman, 1998
Excuse me if I take the Krug-o-tron's opinions with a grain of salt.
And every time an article like this is published, HN predictably goes into the same tirade.
What are you actually going to do about it? Nothing. So keep complaining and hoping things change without changing.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.