I saw a bunch of articles like this one ‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’ and never quite followed the connection of how futures contracts drove up current prices except for this "A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher." Though this particular article says "This is not an OPEC problem, it is a US Government regulatory problem of malign neglect. By not requiring the ICE to file daily reports of large trades of energy commodities, it is not able to detect and deter price manipulation."
This Wall Street Journal editorial, Political Speculators seems to pick apart every argument of the above article. Now I don't normally follow the editorial page of the WSJ, but this one is endorsed by none other than Paul Krugman. "I agree with a lot of what this WSJ editorial says. The difference, I think, is that they seem to believe that speculation is always good; I don’t, but I fail to see any evidence that speculation is the villain in this particular crisis."
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