Feds find California power manipulation

[Berzerker]

The FERC singled out seven subsidiaries of bankrupt Enron Corp. and five other companies for taking advantage of a dysfunctional market and reaping millions of dollars in unjust profits.

A dysfunctional market created by government, but does the left gripe about the government? Nooooooooo...

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Berzerker


A dysfunctional market created by government, but does the left gripe about the government? Nooooooooo...

A (really) left government wouldn't have de-regulated the market in the first place or at least tight governmental control would have been necessary to prevent this. The crisis and the dysfunctional market were created by an admin. that withdrew and left the field to companies with no agenda beside money.
An anarchistic "Free Market" and a government favoring it are the responsibles.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III


A (really) left government wouldn't have de-regulated the market in the first place or at least tight governmental control would have been necessary to prevent this. The crisis and the dysfunctional market were created by an admin. that withdrew and left the field to companies with no agenda beside money.
An anarchistic "Free Market" and a government favoring it are the responsibles.

If the market were actually deregulated into anything resembling an "anarchist" free market this crisis wouldn't have been possible. The (completely democratically controlled) California legislature instead created a scenario where shortages were assured and theft was only to be kept in abeyance by the goodwill of companies like Enron. You can see how much good that did. I sometimes think that there must have been some pretty big payoffs to the politicos from the likes of Enron, except there are so many signs of complete unfamiliarity with both the principles of economics as well as other features of human behavior in the legislation that semi-deregulated. Real thieves would have given themselves better cover.

[Berzerker]

A (really) left government wouldn't have de-regulated the market in the first place or at least tight governmental control would have been necessary to prevent this.

So California has a right wing government?

The crisis and the dysfunctional market were created by an admin. that withdrew and left the field to companies with no agenda beside money.

Government intrusions into the market caused the problem.

An anarchistic "Free Market" and a government favoring it are the responsibles.

How does one partially "de-regulate" a market and end up with a free market? Since when does anarchy or a free market allow for regulation in the first place? All they did was swap one set of regulations for another, and you think that makes the energy "market" free? Once again, "partial" de-regulation means the market is still regulated.

[Berzerker]

Subsequent research by the authors, presented at the American Economic Association meetings in January 2003, showed that had utilities been allowed to sign contracts, the losses due to market power would have been reduced by a factor of ten.

Gee, I wonder who wouldn't let the utilities sign those contracts. Oh yeah, the California legislature that supposedly "de-regulated" the electricity market.
Of course, had the California legislature not succumbed to pressure from environmentalists over recent decades, California wouldn't have had to buy energy from other states and producers. California would have had enough power plants to produce the needed energy...

[Sava]

That's right! It's all the lefties fault!

[chequita guevara]

The deregulation bill was written by people from the power companies. After all, as everyone says, they're the experts, while government legislators were in over their heads. The official sponsor of the bill had several people on loan from various power companies. So, yes, the government of California is to blame, but they weren't the one's who crafted the bill.

[Sava]

Wrong Chegitz... as with being responsible for the Russian Holocaust, "the Left" is responsible for this mess as well.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Re: Feds find California power manipulation

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
[I TOLD YOU SO!

Considering that the total hit on California was close to 50 billion, give or take a few, and initial non-government (i.e. energy consultants and analysts, but not utility types) estimates of the effects of gaming the market were up to, but no more than 7 billion, finding 3.3 billion of manipulation isn't that exciting. Gee, 93% of the problem was real market problems, and 7% was crooked scumbags taking advantage of it.

It's a lot different from the "totally manufactured crisis" line a lot of people were taking.

Berz - although it's common to slam environmentalist on power siting issues in California, it isn't entirely fair, either.

Large power consumers such as the LA basin and Contra Costa county already have large air quality problems due to the heavy industrialization, and internal routing of power plus site costs really favor out-of-area plants for economics reasons, as well.

With (at the time) lots of cheap hydro and exportable nuke power available, plus coal power from Utah, it was impossible for either utilities or non-utility generators to compete economically on power projects in California, for a good number of years, even where you had minimal environmental issues. Building a new power plant to compete in a whole sale market averaging two cents per kwh just isn't going to happen, and there was a long period of time from the late 80's to the mid 90's where California wholesale power prices averaged very close to that range.