SandRidge Energy, Inc. (fka SDOCQ)

[Imagineer66]

they're not oilmen..they're bankers and they have no interest in running an oil company.

This was true before the banking law changes in the late '90s. Distinctly not true today.

“The Federal Reserve regularly monitors the commodity activities of supervised firms and is reviewing the 2003 determination that certain commodity activities are complementary to financial activities and thus permissible for bank holding companies.”

...
Brown chairs the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, which will hold a hearing tomorrow titled: “Examining Financial Holding Companies: Should Banks Control Power Plants, Warehouses, and Oil Refineries?” Does that question even have to be asked given the 2008 to 2010 taxpayer bailout of these banks?

Don’t feel badly if you thought banks weren’t allowed to own commercial businesses; much of the investing public and Congress will be flabbergasted to learn what’s been going on behind their backs for the past nine years – all courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s inability to say “no” to Wall Street.

Last year, Omarova published a 77-page paper, “The Merchants of Wall Street: Banking, Commerce, and Commodities,” which provided an in-depth look at the enormous conflicts that the Federal Reserve had signed off on by allowing the largest Wall Street banks to not only hold insured deposits while trading trillions in unregulated derivatives but to also own physical commodities like oil, natural gas, and base metals with the ability to hoard these economically essential products in storage facilities.

The hearing comes four years after 60 Minutes reported in 2009 that Morgan Stanley had the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels of oil and Goldman Sachs had taken stakes in companies that owned oil storage terminals – while both firms’ oil analysts made public statements that oil would reach $150 and $200 per barrel, respectively.

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/07/should-wall-street-banks-own-hoard-oil-and-metal-sherrod-brown-drills-down-this-tuesday/

Not just oil but basically anything

By controlling warehouses, pipelines and ports, banks gain valuable market intelligence, investment analysts say. That, in turn, can give them an edge when trading commodities. In the stock market, such an arrangement might be seen as a conflict of interest — or even insider trading. But in the commodities market, it is perfectly legal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but-to-banks-pure-gold.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&smid=tw-share

There is a ton more on this but the above should be sufficient for prima facia support of my supposition.