Ready for the Oil Bubble?

Ft. Worth Star-Telegram ^ | May 21, 2008 | Ed Wallace

[wildbill]

How special interests and speculators manipulate the price of oil.

[icwhatudo]

AOL and Lucent were at $80 a share
250,000 Homes were selling for 500,000
Hoping beyond hope Oil is next

[kcm.org]

ping

[Manfred the Wonder Dawg]

Also disclosing why the only things worse is government control.

[dirtboy]

ping

[FunkyZero]

I share in this theory as well. You cannot discount the devalued USD, but that is also someone a rsult of energy prices. The bottom IS going to fall out of this, there is nohing substantial to support these prices. If only I could predict when... but then again, that is the million dollar question.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

$150 before $100 or $90 again.

[magellan]

Yes, and once oil prices come down to earth, we will see the sob stories on the national news of offshore oil workers losing their jobs, etc., etc.

[Red Badger]

Here's your "oil bubble"...................It ain't gonna pop any time soon..........

[kcm.org]

"There’s a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak [oil] theories and hot buttons of supply and demand and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come, they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy." — National Gas Week, Sept. 5, 2005 as reprinted in the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report, "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices," June 27, 2006

bump

[twntaipan]

If a oilman as successful and as savvy as T. Boone Pickens is pumping billions in to wind farms, and if he says high oil prices are here to stay, you have to pay attention. He is no fool.

[WarToad]

/popcorn

Man, I love me a good cospiracy theory.

[WarToad]

/popcorn

Man, I love me a good conspiracy theory.

[Williams]

From a Telegraph story: "Saudi Arabia is adding 300,000 bpd to the market in response to a personal plea from President George Bush, and to placate angry Democrats on Capitol Hill - even though Riyadh insists that there are abundant supplies for sale."

Yet everytime the President asked, the media reported the Saudis told him no.

[B Knotts]

Well, if this article is factual, there is going to be a huge glut of oil at some point, leading to the inevitable.

Hopefully, they will run out of places to put the oil.

But the bigger this bubble gets, the bigger the pop will be.

[B Knotts]

Anything he says is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he knows it.

[wildbill]

I refer everyone to the statement by the Saudi Oil Minister.

He said they would produce more and sell it—if there were buyers.

This is a delicate way of saying the oil speculators are driving up prices beyond the normal effects of supply and demand.

[q_an_a]

Ed has a Saturday morning radio show on KLIF in Dallas. He does an oil report about 9:10 CT and he has been explaining this article for a month - but in writing it looks worse. We have been getting the shaft by our congress - Republicans - because they love the money in their pockets not less government.

It takes many people and ideas, that cross party lines, to make this junk happen in congress. Trading the laws Ed mentions for votes against drilling is one way that we are making life hard for hard working people.

[Abathar]

Goldman Saks is doing far more than the oil companies to reap a profit from us all right now.

Oil companies are running 8-10% profit, Goldman’s speculation and price manipulation is making them FAR more profit than that, and the oil companies are riding on their coat tails with a smile on their face.

If Congress wants to investigate something they should look at any collusion between the two managements.

[theBuckwheat]

I have observed that so many of the people I correspond with who were so quick to be happy when they could fret about a “housing bubble”, or previously an “asset bubble”, each having the mandatory “tipping point”, have not been nearly as interested in applying the same criteria to the rapid run-up in the price of oil and gasoline.

This tells me that their original scolding of the rest of us was not entirely based in economics, but maybe was really a projection of some other personal issue, like maybe they were secretly cheering what they hoped was the impending disaster. For stocks and real estate, the “disaster” would not be in the run-up in prices, but in the “collapse” that would follow. For oil, the “disaster” is high and ever-higher prices. Any collapse in price would only be good news for the economy. In previous asset bubbles the phrase “tipping point” was mentioned so often it got worn out. In this bubble, I have not seen the phrase used once.