US Government in oil swaps - using strategic reserves (premium, economy, financial)

[SilverOne]

The U.S. Treasury has only recently acknowledged that they have been involved in gold swaps. Not withstanding, for accounting purposes, they still claim to possess the SAME NUMBER OF PHYSICAL OUNCES. When gold is swapped or leased – it almost always physically leaves the vault and it is sold into the market – and it is replaced with an IOU.
As evidenced above, crude oil has also been swapped – likely sweet crude, WTI - for less expensive sour crude. Under such a scenario – physical sweet crude left the SPR – creating a market glut of “premium sweet oil”. This set off an engineered over-supply chain reaction in the crude complex which depressed WTI’s price relative to Brent Crude. Because supply chain storage facilities are finite and were completely filled in the Texas / Cushing region – this also contributed to further price declines in the crude complex.
This would also explain the phenomena of the world’s VLCC [very large crude carrier] Fleet being fully booked for storage purposes while the Baltic Dry Index is at or near record lows.
Like the price trend of gold - the price trend of WTI crude is widely viewed as a benchmark for inflationary expectations in the economy.
In the scenario described above, there would be NO APPRECIABLE ACCOUNTING CHANGE to the reported gross number of barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve [SPR] – but only the “subtle acknowledgement” of the composition alluded to in the DOE’s annual report.

more on article........

"Oh Yes They Did!" by Rob Kirby, FSU Editorial 05/24/2010

[HappyTexan]

I read that article. That answered a few questions for me.
There's so much funny business going on that you cannot trust any numbers coming out in government reports anymore. They're playing accounting games left, right and center.

And there's no one to call them on it..they are ALL in on this.