On 10/28/07, raghu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 10/28/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I think I've posted something like this to pen-l before, but it's worth it. > > > > Is it possible that someone in DC, somebody powerful like Dick Cheney, > > causes foreign-policy events (the tightening of pressure on Iran, the > > "Armenian genocide" resolution in Congress) that he knows will cause > > oil prices to go up? if he can pull this off, , thanks to the magic of > > speculative markets, it's easy to make a killing by buying oil > > futures. > > That sounds unlikely. Someone like Dick Cheney can move markets in > many different ways if he were so inclined. Why would he do something > this much clumsy?
since when has "clumsy" had negative connotations for Cheney _et al_? They do anything they think will work. > Maybe it is not so much that oil gets repriced in the oil markets - > but rather the dollar. From oil being on the dollar standard, maybe > now the dollar is on an oil standard. I find it a very intriguing > hypothesis. Not sure if there is any scholarly work on the connection. back during some of the 1970s, if I remember correctly, the nominal oil price would go up, causing the dollar to fall, which would hurt the value of oil in dollar terms (which was important because of all the goodies the oil producers bought from the US). This encouraged further nominal oil price hikes, so that there was an oil-price/dollar-price spiral. In other words, causation can run both ways. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
