Gotten

On the verge of Tuesday’s official start of winter, it seemed like the season had already gotten off to a strong start last week but was tending to recede a bit. However, except for some fairly big slides from last week’s $10-plus heights in the Northeast, most points registered moderate increases Monday.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) said late Wednesday the ongoing investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has still not “gotten to the bottom” of the explosion and fire that killed eight people and destroyed 37 homes. The San Francisco-based combination utility pledged to continue to support the investigation.

Summer has officially gotten under way, and many people are feeling it. With hot weather starting to pervade most of the U.S. except the Northeast and the upper half of the West, prices managed to rally Monday at most points in the Midcontinent and West and saw little change either up or down in the rest of the East.

Cash prices recorded double-digit increases across the board Friday, having gotten a strong launch from July futures making their prompt-month debut a day earlier with a 31.9-cent spike. The fact that Friday’s trading was for Monday-only flows, omitting the usual market baggage of weekend industrial load loss, was also a bullish factor.

Global futures exchange CME Group has gotten the green light from two regulators to begin clearing over-the-counter (OTC) credit default swap (CDS) transactions through CMDX, a joint venture company with Chicago-based Citadel Investment Group. Regulatory reviews by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are complete, and the last hurdle — approval by by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — is expected soon.

One day after the Dow Jones Industrials recorded one of the largest single-day point losses ever, the feeling on Tuesday was that investors might have gotten a little bit carried away. Bargain hunters rushed to Wall Street and to commodity markets on Tuesday, resulting in significant climbs on the day.

Hedge fund JANA Partners LLC may have gotten just what it wanted from Houston Exploration Co. (THX). The THX board last week unanimously voted down JANA’s $1.8 billion unsolicited acquisition proposal. But following the announcement, a JANA spokesman called the decision “a positive development.”

As the field of would-be West Coast liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal proponents has gotten more crowded, one of the early developers, Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp., has had to push back the initial terminal start date by nearly four years. Its current joint plans with subsidiaries of ConocoPhillips to open a terminal in Long Beach, CA harbor target 2011 for the first commercial operations, Mitsubishi’s COO for the project said Wednesday.

Having gotten a negative signal from prior-day futures trading and not yet seeing enough air conditioning load to make a difference, cash prices fell across the board Thursday.