Pickens Says CFTC Probe of Oil a `Waste of Time’

(Bloomberg) — A U.S. probe into whether speculators manipulated oil prices up to more than $135 a barrel is a “waste of time,” billionaire hedge-fund manager Boone Pickens said yesterday.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the watchdog for U.S. commodity transactions, said May 29 that it was investigating how much of the gain in oil prices was caused by manipulation, as opposed to consumer demand. The investigation has been under way since December.

“There’s nothing to it to start with,” Pickens said in interviews at an American Wind Energy Association conference in Houston. “That’s not what’s happened. You have 85 million barrels a day of oil available in the global energy market and 86.4 million barrels a day of demand. So the price of oil is going to go up until you can kill demand.”

Crude oil for July delivery fell 18 cents to $127.58 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange as of 7:32 a.m. in London. Oil has risen 93 percent in a year. It reached a record $135.09 a barrel on May 22. Some market analysts and members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries blamed speculators for the price.

Bloomberg