"Goldman bought Metro International Trade Services, one of the country’s biggest storers
More than a quarter of the supply of aluminum available on the marke
t is kept in the company’s Detroit-area warehouses"
" Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again."
"This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange"
" The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal."
" warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records."
punch line :
" this increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country"
i'd say can move the prices
GS if it can move prices can make money
going short or long
ie
by moving prices up or down
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background :
" Using special exemptions granted by the Federal Reserve Bank and relaxed regulations approved by Congress, the banks have bought huge swaths of infrastructure used to store commodities and deliver them to consumers — from pipelines and refineries in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas; to fleets of more than 100 double-hulled oil tankers at sea around the globe; to companies that control operations at major ports like Oakland, Calif., and Seattle."
