really stupid gas prices.

I'm no economist - way too much math for an old toolie - but I've heard an economist explain it this way. Speculative investors around the world are constantly looking for a commodity that they can count on to go up in value faster than the cost of money. At times that has been gold, and even once upon a time the US dollar, diamonds, Yahoo stock, what have you. In recent times the only decent investment for these folks has been oil on the spot market. Somewhat like the crazy speculation in EMPTY office space in London several decades ago (only empty buildings were any good for speculation - a filled building with steady rents was not sufficiently speculative).

Again from the same economist, the "natural" price of oil, based on supply and demand should be perhaps $85 US right now. The $125 is speculation on "futures". I am not qualified to say if this is all true, but it does seem to make some sense. I'd be interested in the opinion of anyone who understands economics better than I.

r.buckminster fuller Critical Path,The WOrld Game:

"It was World Game that asked one of the world's greatest oil geologists, Francois de Chadenedes, if he could write an accurate scenario of nature producing petroleum on planet Earth through the photosynthetic transformation-into-hydrocarbon of Sun radiation by the vegetation and algae and the succession of events following their transformation as the vegetation is consumed by other biologicals, or is transformed into various residues, all of which are blown by winds or washed by streams and gradually accumulate in various geographical locations and become progressively buried within the planet's outer crust.

Thereafter there were various heats and pressures (caused by ice ages, etc.), earthquakes, or deep burial below water or soil until those chemical heats and pressure conditions occurred which are essential to the production of petroleum.
De Chadenedes said he could, and after a year he presented us with the scenario with all of its time increments and pressure conditions spelled out.
We then asked him to figure how much it would cost nature per each gallon of petroleum for that much pressure and heat for that much time, were it calculated at the retail rate for that much energy for that length of time as charged us by the public utilities.

The cost came to well over a million dollars per gallon.

Since World Game's accounting system is that of the Universe's own time-energy intertransforming requirements, we must accept as cosmically unquestionable this costing of petroleum, coal, and gas resources, which nature has been syntropically importing and accumulating on planet Earth in order, ten billion years hence, to turn the Earth into an energy-exporting (entropic) star.
For this reason World Game considers all fossil fuels to be nature's own savings account, deposited in our "Earth bank" and not to be stolen by exploiters.
Everyone knows that we should live on our (energy) income and not our savings account.
Nor should we burn our capital-account production equipment in order to produce meter-marketable energy, for there will soon be no further production capability.
Atomic energy by fission or fusion constitutes burning our terrestrial production equipment.
As mentioned, World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth—i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc. The majority of the jobs occasion the individuals using three to four gallons per day in their automobiles to go to and from work—at true cosmic costing this means four million dollars per worker per day. Obviously the computer finds that it would save the planet Earth's energy account $500 trillion a day to give all the non-wealth-producing workers their full pay to stay at home."

for more on R. Buckminster Fuller , Critical Path, and World Game visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute

Makes current and anticipated prices a real bargain...

Bucky is gone, but I am still inspired by his clear (if blunt) thinking.

milo So now the argument is between validity of accounting systems

Check out The Y Files. a recent blog on the subject by Moose.

Regards JD.

Look no further than those pesky investment bankers and the guys at opec... We are gonna get screwed by the high prices and their pocket books are going to get fatter and fatter. And of course the government isn't going to do anything here in the states because they want this problem to escalate and the "recession" to grow so they can push for th is North American Union thing that they are looking into growing out of the nafta papers No thank you! I enjoy this country the way it is.

Everyone is tricked by numbers. Numerical values don't matter, only percentages/proportions matter.

http://www.scotiacapital.com/English/bns_econ/bnscomod.pdf

The percentage of money supply in your bank that you own is going down. The percentage of money supply that the workers wages are, is going down. The commodity traders are just smart enough to know when the value of something has changed.