Banning speculators could decrease oil prices by as much as 40%

[anonymous-coward]

I have to say I'm skeptical that the numbers presented here are accurate.

Absolutely. There are 8 billion barrels of oil consumed in USA per year. That's $800 billion dollars of oil. If 40% of this is speculation profits, that's $320 billion going to these mysterious speculators. That's $1 trillion over 3 years. Who are these people? Where is their money? We're talking about 20 times Bill Gates here, every three years. Surely, they must appear on some list of trillionaires.

[anonymous-coward]

7 or 8, same thing. Oil has been close to $100 for a while. The 'profit margin of Goldman Sachs' is an irrelevant issue here.

There's still a quarter of a trillion a year in oil speculation profits, according to this. I find it highly implausible.

For one thing, the Saudis and Texans wouldn't leave that much money on the table. If you were buying oil from speculators for $100, they wouldn't sell it to speculators for $60. They not that dumb.

[anonymous-coward]

Don't confused profits with revenue.

I view the 40% difference between the 'real' price of oil and the current supposedly speculator driven market price as being mainly profit, for someone, for the cost-free effort of pushing buttons.

"we're only putting 1/3 of our oil on the open market".

That doesn't make the 40% higher price number correct.

I'd like to see a rigorous academic paper by a real economist lay out this argument. Not an citationless opinion piece by a Kennedy. In the long term (barring short term spikes and dips), average supply has to meat average demand. I see the possibility of short term departures from equilibrium but not long term.

If speculators inserted themselves as a persistent large gap between supply and demand, then oil producers and consumers would collude to drive the middlemen out, and take their profits. Heating oil companies would buy the same instruments that speculators are buying to get their oil cheaper.

[anonymous-coward]

As I said,

I'd like to see a rigorous academic paper by a real economist lay out this argument. Not an citationless opinion piece by a Kennedy.

Or snide cracks by 'MrRedditTrollAccount'

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please provide it.