“I’m sure that kind of thing goes on, but again, the effects would be temporary. As thousands of market participants around the world react to news and rumors, the true price level will emerge. The moment it is clear that the news is false, traders will be shorting the futures and punishing those who bought erroneously.”
How do you punish an oil cartel? If they get away with pushing the price up, they gain alot. If they don’t, then they don’t gain quite as much. They can’t lose.
Well, in this example they would only be punished to the extent that they would lose money on any futures transaction that was attempting to manipulate the price, but was out of synch with the real market price. My point was to show that they can't significantly affect the long term oil price by sending someone to bid in the futures pit. The speculative buying and selling in the futures market is benign for the economy, even if the players are driven by greed, and even if the prices gyrate from moment to moment.
I think a true cartel like OPEC can affect the long term price by collusion, but even they will eventually be subject to market forces.
What's driving up oil prices these days is big increases in long term demand from the rising economies of China , Russia, and the rest of the developing world. Though painful at the pump, I can't but think that rising world prosperity is a good thing.
I wish Democrats and other self-interested parties (like Bill O'Reilly) would get out of the way of progress and let refining capacity increase and let evil "big oil" use their reasonable profits for all our benefit, without the threat of idiotic price controls, undue regulatiuons, and absurd "winfall profit" taxes.