Why, look: It’s an oil price-rigging revival

Beware, Americans! Wall Street is desperately trying to rig the oil and gasoline markets again.

I’ve been following this scheme for nearly 10 years as speculators, led by the Goldman Sachs gang, tried to convince people that the world is running short of oil and that the price would soon go to $200 a barrel. That would have meant more than $5 for a gallon of gas.

The scam artists even had a fancy name for it: peak oil, a phrase coined by a Shell Oil employee decades before and laid to rest until Wall Street latched onto it.

And just about everyone in the media bought into this cockamamy idea despite the fact that oil demand was falling and more-efficient engines were making cars require a lot less fuel.

But the scheme has fallen apart over the last year. Oil prices dropped recently to around $28 a barrel and gasoline — well, you know how much it’s decreased in your town.

The average price of gas nationwide is now $1.84 a gallon, down more than 64 cents a gallon from a year ago. It’s fallen a lot more than that in some states.

And with a little encouragement from Washington and the governments of other developed countries, the price can (and will) go much lower.

Heck, oil could turn into a nearly useless commodity — worth maybe $10 a barrel — if Washington alone decided to put money behind electric and hydrogen cars while also allowing full-blown exploration for US oil.

But greedy speculators can’t have that, even if low energy costs are good financially for the vast majority of the US population. So the gang has recently been able to talk oil back up to around $38 a barrel, based on nothing but rumors.

Wall Street speculators’ attempts to control oil prices are reminiscent of what happened in 2008, when oil went up to $136 a barrel, then down to $31, and then up $61 by April 2011.

And all the while, demand for energy was skidding along with the world economies. Prices have been particularly volatile in recent years because Wall Street makes substantial profits trading futures contracts on the stuff whether its price rises or falls.

Rules limiting this sort of speculation were relaxed in the late 1990s and Wall Street has taken full advantage.

Speculators are mainly afraid of the fact that the sluggish world economy has led people to use a shockingly smaller amount of fuel for the past eight years.

So the fast-money folks on Wall Street have been latching on to whatever rumors they can — no matter how flimsy — to get the price of crude back up.

Over the past few weeks, speculators have succeeded with the help of their dupes at outfits like CNBC, which almost every day reports that some oil producer or another is about to freeze output.

Freezing output, of course, does nothing to solve the problem of a massive oversupply of oil that is already out of the ground. All it really does is maybe — maybe — keep that oversupply at already unsupportable levels.

Why don’t oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia cut production? Here’s the story speculators would like you to believe: The largest producers in the world are trying to put newcomers in the US hydraulic fracturing (fracking) industry out of business.

There may be something to that. But the bigger reason is that the Saudis need as much oil revenue as they can get to protect themselves from Islamic radicals, as well as possible uprisings by their own people who have grown accustomed to the government dole that high oil-revenue allowed.

Here are some numbers from the US Energy Information Administration that will show you why oil and gasoline prices shouldn’t be going up:

Gasoline consumption in the US peaked in 2007 at 9.3 million barrels a day. It was only 9.16 million barrels in 2015, and the EIA is projecting just a slight increase this year.

But crude oil use peaked back in 2005. In 2015 the US, the biggest consumer, used 19.38 million barrels of oil daily — about 1.3 million fewer than in 2005.

Meanwhile, production and inventory of energy have been soaring, thanks mainly to fracking, which made it possible to recover hard-to-reach oil and natural gas.

The US produced only 5 million barrels of crude a day in 2008; it hit 9.43 million in 2015. Although the EIA predicts production will decline this year as the oil glut forces some frackers to go out of business, there is still a massive oversupply in the US and around the world, which have seen similar dynamics.

Right now, there are 255 million barrels of gasoline stockpiled in the US waiting to be used. A year ago, the figure was only 240.1 million.

Crude oil inventories? Now there are 518 million barrels compared with 444.4 million a year ago. Both gasoline and crude oil inventories are near all-time highs.

Consumers can cheer those numbers, as gas prices should remain low even through the summer driving season.

But you can be certain that Wall Street speculators will try their best to create some sort of scare to get their investments higher even if it hurts the average American.

Why aren’t presidential candidates on top of this issue? It’s difficult when you need votes in Texas and Oklahoma, the two main states hurt by the drop in prices.

NY Post