Oil is going nuts during a presidential election and voters want solutions. The old style of leadership where one explained what needed to be done then led the country down that path is over. Voters expect politicians to wave their hands and make problems go away. If they don't go away, they think we must need more government. Given the mindless average voter, which of the two silly ideas do you think will be first proposed during this election cycle by either McCain or Obama?
How making it mandatory for people who buy an oil futures contract to take delivery. You can't make it any simpler than that. The guy who guarantees that change in oil futures trading will win the next election.
Well, the nationalization idea has already been proposed by a number of democrats. Obama is against price controls because he actually favors high prices, as long as they don't hurt his supporters. That's why he wants to impose "windfall profits" taxes on oil companies and distribute the money to his inner city supporters( ie, the "poor"), who don't drive much anyway. Middle class working people can just suck it up, as far as he cares. He wants it to be so expensive for them to drive that they will use mass transit or get hybrids. They're not voting for him anyway, so WTF does he care?
pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having a futures market cause there would be no liquidity. There would be only a few really large "trades" per day, and the spread would be dollars wide.