“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.
Hey, I used to live in Texas and Oklahoma. I know what cheap oil does to the economies down there. The main reason I didn't become a petroleum geologist was the oil bust of the early eighties.
But this speculation is extending to more than just oil. It is filling every commodity. So the impact is far more than being offset by cheap oil in the late 1990s.