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I've suddenly become interested in the Brian Hunter timeline again

 


Brian Hunter, as some of you may remember, was a trader in natural gas and oil for an investment firm named Amaranth. 

Due to certain reckless Hunter trades, Amaranth melted down in 2005-06, and caused a good deal of volatility in the oil and gas derivatives markets in the process. 

Why am I interested in this? I covered it at the time, as a reporter for Reuters, but it was one of many things I covered back in the day and I'm sure I've forgotten many of them. 

One reason that this is on my mind is the coincidental significance of the year 2006 in a very different corner of the oil and gas world, the executive suites of Exxon-Mobil. That was the year one Rex Tillerson, a future Secretary of State, became the CEO of that company. 

The two companies, Amaranth, and Exxon-Mobil, have almost nothing in common except that they both have or had something to do with oil and gas. But Exxon is a vertically integrated firm that pumps the stuff out of the ground, provides the pumps whereby we may put it into our cars, and has operations at every stage in between. At some of those in-between stages, there are commodities markets that exist outside that sort o vertical intra-0corporate floor (and have a complicated relationship with it.)  In some of those markets, Amaranth lived and died. 

Still: timeline. Tillerson became CEO very early that year. Indeed, the closest I've come to nailing it down is that Tillerson received an award from the Maguire Energy Institute at SMU Cox School of Business on Thursday, January 14. Even on that day he is described as the chairman and CEO. So I suspect this was an appoint that took effect when the bell fell, January 1, 2006, though I'm open to correction. 

Separately, Amaranth Advisors' troubles had begun in earnest the preceding month when Hunter lost them $6.5 billion in a single week when prices of natural gas failed to move in the way he had bet they would. 

Hedge funds aren't very transparent, and Amaranth didn't make these losses publicly known until September 2006. 


So ... if you dear reader have any temptation to develop a conspiracy theory blaming Tillerson for the fall of Amaranth, or maintaining that Tillerson and Hunter are the same person beneath their disguises: you can work from that material. 


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