These are not wicked men and women deliberately leeching off the rest of us. They are very nicely paid workers eventually shaken and almost destroyed by events well beyond their control. You don't approve of them but you do identify. As Eric Dale, for instance, Tucci plays a senior risk manager who is summarily told to collect his papers, has his mobile cut off and is led out of the building by a stolid security officer. When the young man does so, he is horrified. The firm is holding mortgage assets the losses on which exceed the firm's entire market capitalisation.
He summons his bosses Paul Bettany and Spacey , and they set about searching for Dale before the news gets out. Finally, they have to alert the louche Brit head of the firm Irons , who flies in from the UK. Another of Chandor's clever touches, apart from making these panicking human beings less than devils, is to suggest that the higher you get in such a firm, the less you know about what is actually going on.
It is barely plausible to him - though we can certainly believe it. He is, however, not head of the firm for nothing and his method of worming out of the situation posits how all of us were nearly broken on the wheel of high finance. So well do the entire cast play, their faces seem almost to whiten as the apocalypse draws near. If Spacey and Tucci are remarkable, Irons has fun as the outwardly smooth but inwardly ruffled Big Boss.
Even Demi Moore, surprisingly cast as the designated fall guy in the rescue operation, doesn't disappoint. But the true hero is the film's talented director, who tells it like it probably was. He orchestrates a complex drama full of stressed phone calls, hurried meetings and financial jargon in a way that doesn't preclude a close look at the men and women involved.
The sources, who include company officials, brokers and bankers, declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. Glencore, whose main business is mining, declined to comment. Trafigura and Vitol also declined to comment. Smaller Swiss trader Kolmar Group said it was paying major margin calls but the positions were adequately covered and not a risk to the business.
It did not give details. Lebanese firm BB Energy said it faced no margin calls. Trading firms have gambled heavily on natural gas produced and exported from the United States in recent years, signing long-term contracts to buy cargoes of liquefied natural gas LNG.
Some of the contracts run through and are mainly designed to export gas to Europe and Asia. A bond prospectus published by Gunvor this week gave a rare glimpse into the size of its hedging operations, much of it related to gas and LNG. To hedge against price differences between physical gas in the United States now and the rest of the world in the future, traders need to sell short positions in the European and Asian gas futures markets. A short position is created when a trader sells a gas futures contract with the intention of repurchasing it later, hopefully at a lower price.
The strategy caused a liquidity squeeze last month when European gas prices soared due to a variety of factors including low inventories, high demand for gas in Asia, low Russian and LNG supply to Europe, and outages. In Europe, the main platform for building a short position in gas futures is the Dutch TTF gas market hub.
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