Daily Archives: September 20, 2006

You just knew this was coming

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amaranth.jpgThe business news was awash with articles over the past couple of days about how Amaranth Advisors, LLP lost $5 billion or so by making wrong bets that natural gas prices would rise. Inasmuch as Monday morning quarterbacking is much easier than actually making money in placing such bets, it’s fairly clear what happened. As gas prices fell precipitously because of a storage glut, Amaranth increased bets that would pay off exponentially only if natural-gas prices rebounded in anticipation of a cold winter or as a result of a hurricane hammering natural-gas facilities. That hasn’t happened and so prices have continued to erode.
Meanwhile, Amaranth’s risk management systems apparently did not accurately measure how much downside risk the company faced and did not provide an effective mechanism for hedging that risk. Amaranth’s bets went bad because the company misjudged the spread, which is the movement of the difference between prices for different month contracts. The institutions and wealthy investors that invested with Amaranth knew about that risk, but they took it because of the potential for big gains if Amaranth bet right. Nothing too unusual about that.

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A story that Bill O’Reilly would love

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oreillyconfused6.jpgOil prices kept falling yesterday as the October crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange dropped $2.14 to settle at $61.66 a barrel, which is the lowest price for a front-month crude contract in six months. A couple of weeks ago, Pejman Yousefzadeh wrote this TCS Daily op-ed in which he observed that, despite such declining prices, the Bill O’Reilly-type claims of manipulation of oil markets continue to persist.
As if on cue, this NewsBusters post reports on a recent installment of the CNN show, “The Situation Room,” in which CNN reporter Bill Schneider speculated ominously that the current decrease in energy prices has been timed to help Republicans in the midterm elections:

“The drop in prices may last a couple of months, long enough to get through the November election. Could that be what the oil companies want?”

Schneider’s observation was then “buttressed” with the insight of one Tyson Slocum, a “consumer advocate:”

“Eighty-one percent of their money goes to members of the Republican Party. I cannot say for sure whether or not they are influencing prices to assure that outcome, but it is, I think, more than just a coincidence that we’re seeing an easing of prices at a time of running up to a very, very important election.”

That’s a helluva consumer advocate who argues that lower prices for consumers is a dark conspiracy of the Republican Party and big energy companies. Does that mean that the far lower energy prices that existed in the run-up to the 2000 election were the result of an equally dark conspiracy of the Democratic Party and big energy companies?

KPMG continues to play rough with its former partners

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kpmg logo53.jpgIn this earlier post, I noted that KPMG’s resistance to paying its former employees’ defense costs in the KPMG tax shelter criminal case could end up being an element in prompting US District Judge Lewis Kaplan to dismiss the charges because of the government’s prosecutorial misconduct in coercing the firm into that position.
Now, it looks as if KPMG has gone one step further. According to this Lynnlee Browning/NY Times article, KPMG is now suing several of its former employees who are also defendants in the criminal case for damages resulting from their alleged embezzlement from the firm and breach of fiduciary duty to the firm in regard to their involvement with the tax shelters.
That lawsuit — along with the firm’s continued refusal to pay their employees’ defense costs in the criminal case — must be giving current KPMG partners a warm and fuzzy feeling, don’t you think? Also, a note to KPMG — such civil suits have a little process called “discovery,” which often leads to the publication of embarrassing information. As if the firm needs any more bad publicity from this seemingly endless debacle.
Meanwhile, this Wall Street Journal editorial ($) reports that two previously undisclosed IRS memos to KPMG from 2003 and 2004 confirm that the Service didn’t think there was anything wrong with the shelters. The defendants in the criminal case are understandably demanding all government documents relating to such memos, and the prosecution — as is typical in this era of criminalizing business — is resisting those demands. In short, the legality of the KPMG tax shelters was a subject of debate within the IRS, but the Justice Department brought the criminal case anyway before the IRS had even won a court ruling declaring the shelters to be illegal.
So much for due process, eh?