Since publishing "The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked The World's Oil Market,"  I have received a great deal of response (most of it in private correspondence and some in public forums, such as the press and in the courts, where I spent the better part of my summer...

With the hurricane aside and the power on, I finally settled down to watch the National Geographic Channel's exclusive interview with George W. Bush on the TiVo. This program actually aired last weekend. I am just catching up on it now. In it, George Bush reflects on...

In the end, it was all a little too anticlimactic. Despite the impressive turnout of Anderson Cooper at CNN, Shepard Smith at Fox News Channel, Brian Williams at NBC, Diane Sawyer at ABC and Scott Pelley at CBS, Hurricane Irene did not stick, stubbornly turning into a...

Warren Buffett, the world's third-richest man, hasn't raked in his $50 billion-plus by  nursing a bleeding heart for the middle class. In fact, those closest to him (I am talking about his kids and grandkids here) have personally told me the Seer of Omaha is as...

Neither super, nor a committee. But it's our un-super non-committee. A few facts about this unholy union: * There will be 12 members. Mostly picked for political reasons (read: not for their ability to actually fix what ails us). * The 12 members have until November...

The shot across the bow in the Great American Decline came at the usual time: just before the weekend after the market closed on a Friday. This time-honored tradition of announcing horrid things just as one tucks into Friday night was invented by flaks who believed --...

The good news: in a deal yet-to-be-passed by either house, Obama and Boehner's Raucous Caucus have finally agreed to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion in two stages, in exchange for an equal amount of spending cuts -- with $917 billion of the cuts to span the...

Lifeboats for senators and bankers only. Fidelity, which never sends emails, except to market its herd-investing strategies, has suddenly sputtered to life. This weekend's missive: "Debt ceiling: what you should know." Really. It's a little late to be sending this...

The thing about playing chicken is that fatally high stakes are a prerequisite of the game. And someone -- not excluding, say, an entire country -- is going lose. If you believe market pundits like Jim Rogers (an American trader of some fame who chooses to teach his...

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty."   -- Ronald Reagan Wall Street blames Washington for all the financial crises. And Washington blames Wall Street back. It would be amusing, if it wasn't so pathetic. Now we know the truth -- that both are...

Somewhere in the United States, right now, a billionaire is paying his taxes. This makes some people -- not naming any names -- very unhappy. In our nation, it is imperative that hedge fund managers, for example, pay roughly 15% on earnings via a handy loophole,...

I was cleansing my inbox today and found this friendly letter to the Fed from 2007 written by our comrades at Long or Short Capital (vaguely connected to our own fake hedge fund, Intergalactic Capital). I was all ready to take a whimsical walk down memory...

My New England home was my favorite place in the world when I was little. We bought it with several acres of land and it was surrounded by fields and forests and freshwater ponds on all sides. Our property was flanked by the longest line of ancient green-and-blue fir...

A reader requested I write about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Very well then. I do not ascribe zombies to the rise of the Tea Party, the Gang of Six, or today's call by euro-zone chiefs for a "selective default" on the Greek debt. Although that would be...

'I was being sued...it upset me.'A midlife crisis can take many forms. Cheating on your spouse. Purchasing a Maserati. Wearing Billabong. Buying into The Lynx Effect. Just being a jerk. But putting up an "execution" list on your Web site of high-ranking financial and...

. So there's this small issue of the world being debt-ridden and nobody hiring and the delicate financial machinery of our country breaking down in a way that can only be called utterly embarrassing. This is not altogether bad news. For those who have long been...

This week we discovered almost all the cash that was inside the U.S. is now outside the U.S. But guess what we still have in spades? Self-regard. In fact, a recent story in the New Yorker cited young Americans as having some of the lowest maths and English scores in...

There is a time to wear a headband and a time not to wear a headband. Some would say it is best not to wear a headband outside kindergarten. But if you're in Istanbul to consider offering the full thrust of free world legitimacy to the Libyan rebels, why not keep...

Hold the phone, we run of cash when? In two and a half weeks? Bah, fie and tut-tut. So that's what's behind this whole debt-ceiling/deficit talk getting in the way of my "Mad Men" re-runs. But maybe there's a silver lining. One humble query: If our entire nation can...

I remember when I first read about Rupert Murdoch as a kid, how he barnstormed the British media in the 1960s and published anything that might put the nation's panties in a bunch: its journalistic establishment, its finance establishment, its trade union...

It took longer than usual to take up the pen today. Probably because it was imperative to check out the "Every Single Outfit Catherine Wore on the Royal Tour" feature in the Huffington Post. Having done that, I now turn to more important matters. Like this...

As most writers, I am a tiny bit obsessed with music. Apropos of nothing, more than 14 million Americans are now out of work (according to the latest blizzard of stunningly disappointing U.S. Labor Department data released Friday). In the past, we've seen our tired,...

The whole Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair looks like it's coming to a painful close (with even the close itself looking painful in some such terms as, when will it close?). As we look askance, I am trying to ask myself...what have we learned? Not much. Except perhaps...

Not my words, just something an observant Canadian living inside the U.S. had to say today about our country's death match over the debt ceiling -- before remarking that it might be wise to, uh, "back-migrate." Instead of an espresso shot this morning, take a gander...

So, I wrote a book...but I have not been goodly enough to do much blogging about it. This was not intentional. This was mainly because of the furious pace of travel, lawsuits, the odd threat -- and the fact that I was serving full time as a journalism fellow at the...

Many of you have written to ask for a good bit more on the shenanigans prevalent in today's oil market. Check out this show, aired today, from minute 14 on...(Thankfully, you can scroll through to the juicy stuff.) More to come on DOJ, FTC, CFTC and FERC...

June 2011  by Rogue Philosopher The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World’s Oil Market by Leah McGrath Goodman details how a handful of commodity traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) manipulated the energy futures markets and thereby did more...

The price of oil is set not in Vienna at the headquarters of OPEC, but at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Llewellyn King, PBS Sunday, May 1, 2011 WASHINGTON -- The fate of the Obama presidency hangs not on a birth certificate or the red ink on the federal budget but...

Surprised by Gas Price of $4 a Gallon? Try $8.35 in Germany By SUSANNA KIM April 12, 2011 While American drivers are spooked by $4-per-gallon gasoline prices in the U.S., they may be shell-shocked on other continents like Europe. In London, gas was $8.17 per gallon in...

Another year of high oil prices, another endless conversation about the role of speculators. Call up anyone on Wall Street or in Washington to find out what’s really going on. Chances are, the answers you get will go a little something like an Abbott and Costello...

By Tim O'Shei HOUSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL | Friday, Apr 8th 2011 Who controls the global oil prices? Powerful banks? Massive hedge funds? Big Oil? OPEC? There's never been a straight answer to that question - until now. Leah McGrath Goodman, a former special writer and...

Originally published in The Financial Times on April 6th, 2011 Tensions in the Middle East and north Africa, we are told, lie behind the recent increase in global fuel prices, which Wednesday hit a 2 ½-year high. Yet while Brent crude this week stayed above $120 a...

Originally published on huffingtonpost.com on Mar. 14, 2011 In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Marine Corps sent more than a dozen generals, colonels and other high-ranking officers to the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the world's reigning oil market....

Originally published on fortune.cnn.com on Mar. 9, 2011 In this excerpt from The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market, Leah McGrath Goodman witnesses a NYMEX energy trader hazing ritual and watches Bill O'Reilly uncover how those traders set the...

Originally published on abcnews.go.com on Feb. 24, 2011 Energy Trading Is Rife with Loopholes for Some but Not All Oil topped $100 a barrel for the first time Wednesday since 2008, the same year that Wall Street and Washington brought the nation to the brink of...

Originally published on CNBC.com on Feb. 15, 2011 “It’s the side of Wall Street Wall Street doesn’t want you to see,” one high-level banker warned me before I ventured down the rabbit hole that would become my seven-year sojourn to the heart of the oil market. I will...