I drive about 400 miles a week. Get about 20 mpg. So that works out to $20 a week or a grand a year.
Now, lets talk heating oil. That's up a good two bucks since this time last year. Speculative price impacts cost me probably $500 bucks in additional heating costs this winter.
Now throw in the price increases for transport of food and goods, and this is all costing me about $2,500 bucks. Throw in the fact that the fed is devaluing the currency as the speculators make me pay a lot more for goods with what is left of my pay, and that's a rather large bite from a middle-class income.
I can absorb that. But a lot of folks can't.
I don't mind market forces. $70/bbl will open up a lot of development, enhanced recovery and alternative fuels such as coal to diesel. I'm not interested in it going back to $30/bbl. But I loathe a couple grand of my hard-earned income going to line the pockets of speculators who, unlike you, don't produce jack in the way of real goods and who are messing up market after market with their manipulations.
“By your own admission, the price of oil probably should be $70/bbl. I’ll spot you $80.”
Banks lend on some internal percentage of what they deem the “real” price to be. So 80 is probably more the market price.
But yes, there is ample speculation in the market.
That said, where were you in 1999? Oil was $8.50 -— and it cost $28 to get out of the ground.
What was going on was OPEC was trying to break its competitors — living lean while USA domestic production disappeared -— AND stupid “no drill” laws got passed -— because they didn’t seem so expensive at the time.
In that time, you got an EXTRA $2,500 bucks that you should have been saving up for today.
Just manipulation — on the other side.
Of course, the North East was the beneficiary of THAT manipulation, so the MSM didn’t bitch about it.