I've been watching crude oil prices and ever since Quantitative Easing was first mentioned, crude has shot up over $15 dollars a barrel and gasoline futures have risen approximately 25 cents during the same period. Heck as I type this, crude has opened in Asia with another 60 cents on top of where it closed Friday!!!



This is all without increases in demand and just because of stimulus measures.



So my question is this, with investors stuffing money into oil...will demand EVER matter to gas prices again??? Are we now doomed to higher prices at the pump even without the subsequent demand increase?



From what I gathered investors are sharing the opinion that energy has officially become a win-win for them. If the economy tanks, the dollar falls and the price rises for energy. If the economy "recovers" then energy demand will pick up causing an increase in prices.



Sounds like the U.S. is in for a whole world of hurting like what happened in the summer of '08.



Unfortunately I don't see a way for our country to come out of this.

 

The way out is through the dark tunnel. We are on the gentle slope down to it right now. We could be most of the way through right now, but the fiscal socialists (bush/obama/democrat congress) cocked it up instead of letting the economy take a hard correction.



This is going to be an ugly sort of depression once our creditors figure out we're screwing them over. Until then, it's malaise v2.0.



Of course, we could also have a rule banning speculation in commodities and just have, you know, a market for commodities. Oh, wait, that would make sense.

 

+Infinity.



Force commodities traders to take delivery before selling and you fix 100% of the problem. Now the only people in the market are buyers and sellers, not speculators.

 

Well if that will fix the problem I suspect it will never be done

 

See? I was trying to be kind to the people in charge (read: your Elected Heroes) by not saying something like that, but yeah. You know I was thinkin' it.



On a positive note for your gas prices: China is getting set for a humm-dinger of an economic collapse, and everyone else is still in the global depression, so when china's economy implodes so will their demand for oil. Then all that will be left is speculators driving up oil prices, and gas will resume a price point closer to sanity.



. . . unless you live in California, where the people are too dumb to realize they elect the people who mandate the highest gas prices in America for them. Taxes? Sounds great, where do we sign?