T. Boone Pickens on Lack of Leadership and Oil Prices

In an interview on CNBC this morning Texas oil billionaire and wind energy advocate T. Boone Pickens blamed "lack of leadership" from George W. Bush and "that speech" from Nancy Pelosi for the vote against the Bail-Out plan in the House yesterday:

Watch the T. Boone Pickens interview on CNBC

Commenting on the current financial crisis and the Bail-Out failure Mr. Pickens said that:

Paulson is in there with bullets going past his head all over the place. He's very smart to call Warren Buffet.  Buffet's in Omaha and nobody's shooting at him… I think that's very smart on the part of Paulson and Buffet's very good to come in and help out on it. So here you've got the American people don't understand, and you've got everyone trying to get re-elected. I think they've got to come together on the deal, that's all there is to it. It's got to happen, and I think it will. I think it will happen on Thursday… I think you've got to get the FDIC into it, and I think that'll happen too.

Then he pointed out that in his opinion there is an even bigger problem waiting in the wings – The energy crisis:

You've got another one coming up, and that'll be energy. We can't continue to do what we're doing on energy. What's the number on this problem, $700 billion? Look at what you're paying for foreign oil. Annually, not one time, $700 billion!

The oil [price] we're still right around the $100.  I said OPEC would support it at $100, and I'm not so sure they're not supporting it right now.  All they have to do is just pinch back a little bit.  There's not any reason for them to take $60 oil. People talking about how it's going to come down to $60 they don't understand how the people that make the oil work. They're not going to give it to you at $60.

When we get to the energy issue, and we're going to get to it pretty quick just as soon as this is cleared up. When we get to the energy issue Washington doesn't fully understand it and they can't explain it to the American people.

Now it seems I was a bit hasty when I said just over a month ago that "BP Capital is still going strong".  Boone Pickens revealed in the CNBC interview that his hedge funds have lost over a billion dollars.

We have a 90 day notice and right now we have been notified by about 15% of our people that they want the option to withdraw their funds by the end of the year.

If I may summarise: the American people don't understand finance or energy. That's because Washington doesn't understand finance or energy. T. Boone Pickens understands energy so well his hedge funds have lost more than 1 billion dollars, plus a lot more yesterday. I guess we'd all better hope Warren Buffet understands some of this stuff, or who knows what might happen? As Boone Pickens put it:

We'll hope that Warren and Hank get this thing squared away here.