A reader from Texas writes, apropos of my column about Richard Rainwater’s decision to cash in his big bet on rising oil prices:
My guess is Rainwater has always known how his $300m bet was going to turn into $3.5billion. Not because he’s the greatest investor or speculator of all time. He has no crystal ball. But he does have the President of the United States in his hip pocket for 8 years. The President, George W Bush, owes him something for making him a millionaire even if politics never worked out… If you go a step further, one can ask – “why has our Administration done absolutely nothing over the last 5 years about rising gas prices?” There’s more than just oil companies making money, there’s also very close friends.
I don’t really buy this, given that Rainwater began betting big on oil in early 1997, long before a Bush presidency appeared to be in the cards, and that bet began paying off in 1999. Also, Rainwater has actually tried to push public opinion in the direction of dramatic changes in energy policy.
That said, Rainwater did in fact put up most of the money for Bush’s acquisition of the Texas Rangers in 1989, a deal that later made Bush a multimillionaire. And T. Boone Pickens, another big winner from higher oil prices, helped get Bush re-elected in 2004 by bankrolling all that Swift Boat nonsense. (When Boone was here a couple weeks ago several folks tried to get him to express regret for supporting a candidate with such backward energy policies, but his response was that they’re all bad on energy policy.) So it’s certainly true that Bush knows and owes favors to people who have benefited mightily from rising oil prices, and he certainly hasn’t done anything during his time in office to reduce our dependence on oil in any significant way. But I think it’s the past quarter century of energy policy–plus some basic realities of global supply and demand–that has left us in our current predicament, not just the last seven-plus years of it.