[Rockingham]

Because markets work, I am disinclined to suspect manipulation when prices spike or collapse painfully. However, manipulation is often attempted, always possible in concept, and sometimes accomplished profitably in the short run. Markets can panic not because of demand rising but because future supply seems inadequate or major players get squeezed.

The oil tankers offshore claim always surfaces during price spikes. Keep in mind that gas prices at the pump, the spot crude oil market, and the markets and actual sale prices for wholesale crude are not the same, do not always move in sync, and rarely settle at the same price.

As it happens, there are always tankers offshore, often waiting for slots at terminals, for sale contracts to close, or for demand to firm up. Suppliers acting alone are ordinarily not prohibited by law from withholding supply for those reasons or to wait for better prices. Usually, after a price spike, prices fall when demand falls, and tankers (or fishing boats) dawdling offshore more than normal would be a sign that demand is faltering and that prices are about to fall.

Worst of all is our failure to develop domestic supplies. Even by their own ideology, the Democrats and liberals are idiots in that dirty, CO2 spewing coal is the electric generating substitute for oil and natural gas when oil gets too expensive.

The better course is to diminish coal use by turning to nuclear for electric power, using oil for transportation, and developing domestic oil and natural gas supplies to lessen our balance of payments problem and vulnerability to supply disruptions.

Of course, since liberals hate not just pollution and CO2 but also oil and cars, their hatreds collide and work at cross purposes. Because liberals hate freedom most of all, what liberals really want is for Americans to live like North Koreans, with themselves living like the Kim family.

[Just mythoughts]

Do you remember Hillary Clinton screeching to a bunch of Connecticut investor class donors before election 2004? She was not running for president and I doubt she expected the nation at large to be informed of her hysterics. She told her supporters that Bush economy equaled a Hoover economy.

I remember the screech getting air time because of her shrill voice made her sound like she had gone off the cliff. To me she was sending a warning, a signal to her supporters of what was going to unfold. NO I am not saying she pulled this off, what I am saying she knew darn well what the ‘housing’ bubble was going to cause. And she expected it to happen sooner than later.

Then there was another episode out of JFKerry’s mouth accusing Bush of ‘controlling’ the price of oil so he would win election 2004. Both of these people were elected officials so they personally were not doing the speculating, but as Senators they both sure would have the ability to discover what the numbers were and who was playing the numbers.

And liberals around this globe are united in doing whatever it takes to ‘equalize’ all nations. Equalizing all nations was the Clintons public stated policy, and so stated by Maddie Albright.