NPRA ’08: Huntsman chief hails US trading plans

31 March 2008 23:39  [Source: ICIS news]

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (ICIS news)--Huntsman Company president and CEO Peter Huntsman on Monday applauded plans announced earlier by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for tighter regulation of commodity trading, saying it could help ease natural gas prices.

 

Among other things, the wide-ranging financial and markets regulatory reforms proposed by Paulson and the Bush administration would include merging the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) into the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).

 

“That would be a good first step” toward improving government oversight of natural gas trading, Huntsman said.

 

Huntsman has long charged that the sharply increased prices for US natural gas - climbing to $10/m Btu this year from $2 in 1999 - are due more to price-driving market trades by speculators, not supply-demand realities. He has voiced support for legislation pending in the US Congress that would give the CFTC greater authority to monitor commodity trading, including natural gas.

 

Natural gas is a principal feedstock for the US petrochemicals industry.

 

“Merging the CFTC into the SEC would be a good thing,” Huntsman said, “because there are a lot of very good career prosecutors at the SEC who would bring real enforcement into play.”

 

He criticized trading oversight by the existing CFTC, charging that there has been “a revolving door between the commission and the New York Mercantile Exchange [NYMEX], with officials of one going to work at the other”.

 

“It is pathetic to think that the commission is adequately regulating the exchange,” he said.

 

He also was critical of US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, charging that Bodman was unrealistic in saying recently that traders have nothing to do with natural gas prices.

 

“Since the commission has assessed nearly half a billion dollars in fines against traders in the last year or so, traders must be doing something to unfairly influence the market,” Huntsman said.

 

Huntsman spoke on the sidelines of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association’s (NPRA) annual petrochemicals conference.  The meeting began on Sunday and runs through Tuesday.

By: Joe Kamalick
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