The left is trotting out the accusation that those evil speculators are manipulating oil prices. They even cart out the evil bugaboo Enron (oooh, scary!) to make it seem more sinister.
This canard was repeated by one of my classmates, to which I responded:
I was just re-reading those numbers. At 85 billion barrels a day I find it astonishing that anyone, even a government could buy enough oil to make a significant enough purchase to be accused of 'manipulating' the price.
85 BILLION barrels, at the bargain price of $100/barrel that is $8.5 Trillion/day. How much would someone have to buy in order to affect the price? 1%? That's $8.5 Billion dollars - for just one day.
The more I think about it the more ludicrous accusations of manipulation sound.
Those numbers are just mind boggling, and if they are within an order of magnitude, anyone that thinks that someone is manipulating the market is a fucking moron.
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