energy in our country is over regulated and taxable .
That's not the problem here.
Commodity future markets used to limit speculators.
Commodity futures have a legitimate purpose to financially hedge both producers and consumers. (And please don't confuse old fashion hedging with the modern rip-off "hedge funds"). Producers and distributors want to know they can sell their stuff in the future in order to know how much to invest, go to the bankers for loans, etc. They're willing to sell for a bit less then they might otherwise get in exchange for the guaranteed sale. Consumers want to know how much they'll pay, so they pay a premium over what they might otherwise have to pay in order to guarantee the supply.
Commodity markets used to allow a limited amount of speculation -- the proverbial grease on the skids -- to help make the market and cover periods of temporary mis-match between ultimate sellers and buyers. The producers and consumers who originally set up these markets knew it was important to limit speculation, so they enforced it through their own exchange rules.
In the 1990s, financial speculators gained control of the various exchange boards and convinced their fellow CEOs, who were appointed by boards they all served on, to agree to the changes that eliminated speculation caps.
Now the investment banks could come in with billions of dollars -- they could effectively corner the market by buying futures from suppliers, and sitting on them until consumers were forced to pay what they wanted. The banks had the money and created inflation across many commodity markets whether it was grain or oil.
(Not that government policies sometimes made it worse, hello Ethanol...but ethanol doesn't explain the rise in things like wheat prices).
Today with the Democrats in charge and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission making noise about using it's existing legal powers to limit speculation, the banks are buying warehouse and distribution companies so they can claim to be market makers with a legitimate interest and capability to take physical delivery and use the goods...and thus not subject to rules for speculators.
The process has been increased by Quantitative Easing which has pumped a couple trillion with a tee dollars into the banks, which they haven't loaned out as some hoped...but kept on their own books. How? Well, doing things like speculating on commodity futures.
They're not contributing anything worthwhile to this market -- they simply have the cash to buy the futures from the producers before anyone else can get the finances together to do so, then they have the resources to sit on it until the consumers agree to pay their price.
There are no meaningful production or distribution issues here. The weather is worse than usual but not enough to justify what we're seeing. It's the financial middlemen here messing around and laughing all the way to the bank.
Used to be when you had the likes of Houston Natural Gas and they got cute with financial shenanigans (and rename themselves Enron), eventually the malfeasance caught up to you and you went out of business. Now the banks do it directly, we declare them too big to fail, and pay them to keep screwing us over as long as they pay fines every few weeks to make it look like they're being regulated.