Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
The price of oil is high because it is God’s will. Ben should stop questioning God’s will and pray that it be done insted.
Let’s hope we can get some drilling legislation passed before it declines too much, or it’ll never happen!
But here, he seems to adopt an odd writing style. It's all: I could be wrong, and maybe it's not a good example but ... and maybe it's the wrong comparison, and on the other hand ...
It doesn't sound like he has faith in this article. Maybe he got squeezed by a deadline and just had to dash something off.
Ben Stein Get’s it bump!
One of the reasons it will remain somewhat high is because the Fed devalued the dollar to deal with the housing “crisis.”
Ha!
Ben is a very wise guy.
Wonder if Ben is so confident that he’s shorting oil?
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
The price of crude may keep falling right up to the time the Israelis strike Iran’s nuclear facilities...I wouldn’t start polishing that muscle car sitting in the garage just yet...
As long as oil remains a monopoly, we will continue to pay ridiculous prices for it. Give it a competitor and watch it drop to $60 a barrel. Refuse to give it a competitor, and you’ll see $145 again before you see $100.
Yes, I do believe that for a short period of time, that there was a bubble when investors fled from equities and went into commodities to collect some gains.
Investment houses and their respective hedge funds led the way, and everybody piled in behind them. This has now reversed, and they are going back to equities, but it all can easily reverse again, and again.
Putting aside perceptions, true, false or otherwise, the reality is that we are finding far less new oil and what we are finding is largely sour crude, and not the sweet stuff that our aged refineries can process. Emerging markets will continue to emerge as they now have tasted some degree of prosperity in the form of better food and transport, and transport still needs gasoline, as it will for the foreseeable future.
Oil prices will not hold long at the lower levels, and the resistance at 120 dollars per BBL appears to be holding up. As China's requirements drop in the post Olympic period, there will be a lot of pressure to drop beyond 120, but the hurricane season is only now getting cranked up and the smallest disruption will cause a huge jump in price. Iran, and the entire Middle East is still volatile and anything occurring there will cause a return to the 140-145 level and beyond. $200.00 is still in play this year and beyond.
As for me, I will never again short oil. I don't recommend that anyone does.
Not a single politician, pub or donk, will mention the weak dollar. I wonder why.
Thats’ right it is. Just because a price goes up and then it goes down doesn’t mean it’s a bubble.
I take back all those hateful things I said about Ben having lost his marbles over his ‘darling boy’s’ absolute possession of his good common sense and his dalliance with the charms of and fascination with Hollywood these past 12 years; the old boy has finally come to his senses at last.
Very important point. I've said here on any number of occasions that "rising energy costs" are primarily a currency problem, not an "energy" problem.
“Wait. I take that back. There has been one huge new factor. A staggering rise in purchases by speculators of contracts for future delivery of oil. This has been a new and gigantic effect in the market. This same effect gave us a bubble in high tech. It gave us a bubble in gold and silver about thirty years ago.”
I agree with Ben. There is an old explanation for a rapid rise a particular stock, or stock in an industry, or a rise in the entire stock market: Too many dollars chasing too few shares. And the stock or industry segment, or the entire market becomes: “overvalued”.
That has happened when some stock or segment becomes the next big thing, or when large amounts of foreign money, or money from lower yielding investments begins to flow into the stock market in large amounts.
No reason we can’t have too many dollars chasing too few crude oil futures contracts. So, the futures market can raise the price of crude independent of the actual supply and demand for crude.
This could happen and be entirely legal, or, as discussed in a thread a few weeks back, schemes to allow some trading entities to purchase more contracts that intended can allow big money buyers a bigger stake in the futures market than regulators intended.
It only went as high as it did due to a huge short position by SemGroup. It was the 2nd largest commodity loss in history ($3.2B), but you haven’t seen any news of it in the MSM. See http://www.investmentrarities.com/weeklycommentary.html
Ben is not much of an economist. I have read some of his recent economic writings, including this one, and they are not very well thought out and many of them are just plain wrong and leftist (calling for higher taxes and wealth redistribution in some of them).