Wall Street Journal: Speculators Are NOT To Blame
Speculators! Speculators! Speculators! The fuel and oil price problems are all the speculators fault! Or, so we heard non-stop from the powers that be (in control for now) in the House. There’s no other excuse they said. It has nothing to do with Supply and Demand they said. It has absolutely nothing to do with a weak monetary unit they said.
Well. The global bastion of financial news, that being the Wall Street Journal, says otherwise.
Not only did speculation have absolutely nothing to do with the price spike, but according to the WSJ article, In one of the broadest and most authoritative studies to date, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has offered hard statistical data that financial trading hasn’t been driving price moves. The CFTC conducted an unprecedented Wall Street data sweep and scrutinized millions of transactions worth billions of dollars between January and June of this year. And it turns out, it was exactly “supply and demand” that was responsible, along with, you guessed it, a weak dollar.
Go figure.
http://hoopyfrooddude.blogspot.com/2008/09/wall-street-journal-speculators-are-not.html
