The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century. Tom Bower
be compelled to buy from him at a premium price. Squeezing the market – compelling rival traders needing the oil to fulfil their own contracts to buy at his price – added uncertainty and volatility to prices. As the Dated Brent was sold to refiners, the price of the 15-day Brent rose because there was less on the market, rewarding the squeezer. In that topsy-turvy world, Hall perfected the squeeze, attracting charges of price manipulation. The squeeze, Hall knew, was not illegal. On the contrary, the British system invited speculators to buy large quantities of Brent for future delivery, despite the fact that Hall’s tactics precipitated a 15-year battle to draw a line between aggressive dealing and manipulation of the annual $30 billion trade.
As the spot market grew and prices moved depending on disruption of supplies, Hall became a substantial participant in the futures market for the sale of oil. His advantage over other traders was BP’s own information. Only BP knew how much oil would be piped from its Forties field through its own pipeline to the terminals at Hound Point. Working with Urs Rieder, a Swiss national at BP’s headquarters in London, and under the supervision of Robin Barclay, BP was not only anticipating how prices would vary, but was actually causing the market to change. That power transformed the company’s image. Buoyed by BP’s constant participation in the physical market, Hall traded uncompromisingly against smaller competitors. Leveraging the market to the hilt was not illegal, but entrepreneurial. Rieder’s move from BP to Marc Rich strengthened the relationship between Hall and the American trader. To outsiders, BP had become the Eton of traders. BP’s traders were a special breed, stamped by pedigree and lifelong friendships. Not only were they numerically astute, they were also internationalist, aware of historical, religious and cultural tensions dictating the price of oil. Among them, Hall shone as the prefect or head boy of a new school.
Hall’s casualties included Tom O’Malley, Marc Rich’s successor at Philipp Bros. Shrewd, intriguing and charismatic, O’Malley possessed an instinctive understanding of oil trading, bending rules but, unlike Rich, not breaking them. Profiting from the oil industry’s inefficiency and the market’s ignorance, he occasionally exported cargoes of oil from America’s west coast to the east coast merely to boost prices on the west coast, but he was occasionally stung by Hall’s squeeze when he was contracted to supply Brent oil in New York. To enhance his business and remove the competitor treading on his toes, O’Malley offered Hall a job. Simultaneously, Hall also received an offer from Marc Rich. At the climax of his negotiations with O’Malley, Hall asked for the terms and conditions of his employment and a company car. ‘Terms and conditions,’ snapped O’Malley, ‘is BP bullshit. You come to Philipps to become rich.’ Hall’s resignation from BP in summer 1982 was regarded as a bombshell in London. Rising stars and potential board members never left the family.
Combined, Hall and O’Malley were feared as ‘crocodiles in the water’, and became notorious for analysing markets, buying large, long positions in Brent oil, and holding out if there was insufficient volume until rivals screamed for mercy. In the Big Boys’ game, a rival trader’s scream was an invitation to squeeze harder. Philipp Bros, or Phibro, was good at squeezing, because there were large numbers of small traders – at least 50 in the US alone. To outsiders, Phibro personified the separate world inhabited by oil traders. ‘You’re ignoring the rule, “Don’t steal from thy brethren”,’ London trader Peter Gignoux complained. The British government’s remaining control over North Sea oil prices crumbled as Phibro aggressively traded primitive derivatives and futures against rival traders. The ‘plain vanilla swap’ compelled the customer either to take physical delivery of the oil or to pay to cover the loss.
For the first time, global oil prices were influenced by traders speculating as proprietors, regardless of the producers or the customers. The OPEC countries, especially Saudi Arabia, hated their game, and even Shell was displeased that their precious commodity created profiteers and casualties. In 1983 the market became murkier when Marc Rich remained in Switzerland and escaped facing criminal charges including tax evasion. Despite the scandal, Phibro and others continued to trade with him and Glencore, his corporate reincarnation in Zug. Phibro’s aggression invited retaliation. During that year, Shell took exception to Phibro squeezing Gatoil, a Lebanese oil trader based in Switzerland. Gatoil had speculated by short-selling Brent oil without owning the crude. Subsequently unable to obtain the oil to fulfil its contracts because Phibro had bought all the consignments, it defaulted on contracts worth $75 million. Refusing to bow out quietly, Gatoil reneged on the contracts and sent telexes to all its customers blaming Hall’s squeeze. Shell’s displeasure was made clear at the annual Institute of Petroleum conference in London, where every trader was warned not to attend Phibro’s party featuring Diana Ross. ‘A puerile idea to boycott our party,’ scoffed Hall, furious that the ‘clubby clique of traders around Gatoil and Shell obeyed and we were on the other side’. Shell levied a $2 million charge, and Phibro paid.
Mike Marks, the chairman of New York’s Mercantile Exchange, Nymex or the Merc, attempted to put an end to the chaos in 1983. Dairy products had been traded on Nymex since the market was established in 1872; Maine potatoes were added in 1941; and later traders could speculate on soya beans, known as ‘the crush’. Marks introduced trading of heating oil, an important fuel in America, and crude oil futures, dubbing the price spread ‘the crack’. The reference for prices was the future delivery of West Texas Intermediate (WTI, America’s light sweet crude oil) to Cushing, a small town of 8,500 people including prison inmates in the Oklahoma prairies. Several oil companies were building nine square miles of pipelines and steel container tanks in Cushing as a junction linked to ports and refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, New York and Chicago. Prices quoted on Nymex, based on those at the Cushing crossroads, rivalled those at London’s International Petroleum Exchange, trading futures in Brent and natural gas delivered in Europe. Instantly, the last vestiges Saudi Arabia’s stranglehold over world prices were removed. With the formalisation of a futures market, OPEC’s attempt to micro-manage fixed prices was replaced by market forces. The fragmented market became more efficient, but also murkier. Dictators producing oil were unwilling to succumb to regulators in New York, Washington and London. Instead of sanitising oil trading, Nymex lured reputable institutions to join a freebooting paradise trading oil across frontiers without rules. ‘I wish we were regulated,’ one trader lamented. ‘Why?’ he was asked by Peter Gignoux. ‘So I could bend the rules.’
In 1982, Phibro had faced an unusual problem. The profitable commodities business was handicapped by a lack of finance. Its solution was to buy Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street bank, and begin issuing oil warranties. Manhattan was shocked at a commodities trader owning an investment bank. Overnight, Hall and O’Malley were established as super-league players among oil traders, yet Hall was upset. ‘Traders and asset managers don’t mix,’ he announced. ‘I don’t want to be part of a bank.’ Phibro moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, to be as far from Salomon as possible, operating as a hedge fund before hedge funds became widespread.
Across Manhattan, Neal Shear, a pugnacious gold trader at Morgan Stanley, had watched Hall’s success with interest. Recruited in 1982 from J. Aron & Co., a commodities trader owned by Goldman Sachs, to start a metal-trading business to compete with his former employer, Shear envied the easy profits Hall and Rich were making. Compared to gold, he realised, oil trading was much more sophisticated and profitable. Without transaction costs or retail customers, and blessed by general ignorance about differing prices in Cushing and elsewhere in America, traders could pocket huge profits. In economists’ jargon, oil trading was ‘an inefficient market’. Shear’s business plan was original: ‘Our concept is not to be long or short but flat, to profit from transport, location, timing and quality specifications.’ Initially he wanted Morgan Stanley to copy and compete with Hall and Rich, but Louis Bernard, one of the bank’s senior partners, understood that the rapid changes in oil prices guaranteed better profits than speculating in foreign exchange. On Morgan Stanley’s model, the volatility of oil prices could be 30 per cent, while in the same period foreign exchange could move just 8 per cent. Investment bankers who had traditionally offered their clients the chance to manage risk in foreign currencies could make much more by offering them the chance to manage, protect and hedge crude prices against the risk of price changes. In 1984 Bernard hired John Shapiro, a trader at Conoco, and Nancy Kropp, a trader employed by Sun Oil, to trade crude. To ensure a constant stream of information about the market’s