All of those gains are ill gotten in the first place. No pension funds should have been rolling the dice in oil futures.
I am all for doing whatever it takes to get the price of oil down significantly.
Whatever it takes.
As polls of those considering this a “crisis” go up, and polls of those blaming the oil companies go down, the heat is starting to be turned up on the environmentalists. I see this as an attempt to steer the blame away from the commies that fight our attempts to explore and drill.
Gee, wonder where this article is going?
You squeeze out speculators by SPOOKING them. Say “we’re drilling in ANWR, Bakkan, and all over the coastal shelf. We’re keeping tax incentives in place to all the big oil companies to develop domestic supplies. And we’re ending this ethanol crap.”
Boom. Instant drop in prices as speculators realize the game is over.
Devaluation of the US Dollar is the primarly cause of US inflation, and Dollar devaluation is caused by things like printing fiat US Dollars and wild US Government spending.
There is a mis-titled, but otherwise brilliant, opinion piece in the 10 June 2008 Wall Street Journal titled "The Fed and the Price of Rice." I say mis-titled because the title should be "Congress and the Price of Rice."
The last paragraph from that WSJ piece reads ...
Officials should stop wringing their hands over sky-high rice prices caused by alleged changes in rice's supply-demand fundamentals, and politicians should refrain from pointing accusative fingers at speculators and hoarders. The rice-price problem is a weak dollar problem. Until the dollar strengthens, the nominal dollar prices of rice and other commodities will remain elevated.
The Rats kept telling us we went to war for oil. Where in the hell is the oil?
Let the oil industry integrate vertically and speculation will disappear.