You guys are pretty much a bunch of patsies. Fodder for the big boys. As it should be. On Brinkers show he suggested that it was possible that the OIL SCUM themselves were manipulating the market higher. I'll bet it costs 1/100 of the profit thats being made at the margin to keep this thing in the air. Never thought of that huh. That's what happens when you go to school, you get stupid.
Of course it's possible Chavez or HOS are buying futs to pump it up. But if there wasn't additional buying in back of them the price would sag after their buying was done. For example I can go on Intrade right now, spend 10k and push Clinton up to a 60% chance of being President. Except for margined shorts who HAVE to cover no one else will pay more than a nickel. So where do I go with my longs? I'd press the market right back trying to get out and I'd find less buyers on the way down than I found sellers on the way up. Oil is no diff. If a fund or an OPEC member or God buys 20,000 CL tomorrow they'll pump up futures a few dollars. Then what? If the market is fundementally strong then new buyers will pay the new above value prices. However if there's less global retail demand for end product then existing longs, shorts with a big axe to grind or OTHER producers will sell the shit out of it. Remember the Hunts? Going all in without the cards only pays if you spook the table. Else it's a sucker play. On size. In the past 25 years I've seen two huge grain commercials blow up, the Hunts, a handfull of U.S. Treasury primary dealers, Bear-who by the way were doing the same thing in CDO's that some are doing in Oil. That is leveraging the shit out of CDO's to trap shorts and get their marks up. When it's not there it's not there no matter how much $ you throw at it.
SWhiting - my reference to the massive number of deaths and misery caused by socialism is explained by the drag on economic growth and living standards caused by having more socialism. A 1% difference in annual GDP growth will, other things being equal, cause millions of premature deaths of children and old people over the space of several decades due to worse medical care, lower living standards, worse diets, less availability of food and clean drinking water, less medical research, lower production of medicines and pharmaceuticals, less skilled medical professionals, more risk taking due to lower time preference and higher interest rates etc. Economic growth saves lives. Knowingly retarding it by implementing socialism is equivalent to culpable mass murder. People who through no fault of their own are ignorant of economics can be forgiven for making this mistake, however such people should not make pronouncements which require economic knowledge if they clearly don't have it. Educated people who *have* studied the economic theory & consequences of socialism vs capitalism have no such excuse. They are consequentially, if not morally, equivalent to mass murderers. There are areas of legitimate dispute as to whether more or less free markets are a good or bad thing e.g. medical insurance, the legal system, national defence, high pressure/misleading sales etc. But on the whole, the case is overwhelmingly proven that socialism across the vast majority of industries and services results in more poverty, worse products at higher prices, and thus more deaths and misery. Also, given that most socialists equate wealth with "real freedom", socialism makes people less "free" and more powerless too.