the inimitable Russ Winter uncovers another extremely curious anomaly ...
(snip)"That brings us to speculation. Evans observes that since September 2003, the total number of open crude oil futures and options contracts rose by 364 percent. Meanwhile the global demand for petroleum rose by just 8.2 percent. “So the futures and options market has become more important than the physical supplies in driving the price,” concludes Evans. “We are seeing investment flows into the oil market that don’t have anything to do with the demand and supply of oil.”
Investors are treating oil as a hedge against inflation and a falling dollar. Oil markets are part of a positive feedback loop in which higher oil prices contribute to higher inflation, which in turn lowers the value of the dollar, which boosts oil prices, and so forth. In other words, the oil market is coming to resemble the gold market (which has also been soaring). Evans notes that most gold traders don’t even ask the question of how much gold was mined last year or how much spare gold mining capacity there is."(snip)
The 'tin foil hat' conclusion to be gleaned from the graph is that a whole lot of 'smart money' has been coming out of US stocks / bonds etc. and has been going into commodities futures ... gasoline in particular. This is consistent with an idea that the US dollar is now becoming 'just another currency' which is increasingly subject to manipulation and volatility, thus the 'smart money' is now beginning to use oil / gasoline as a de-facto currency in the same manner as gold.
In other words, the 30 million barrels worth of 'extra' gasoline being built up in American storage facilities since new years are not being offered for sale (if it were the price of gasoline would be dropping) ... instead it is being hoarded like money in a bank account.
The only other plausible explanation is that SOMEBODY is expecting that a massive disruption in US oil / gasoline supplies will occur over the course of the next few months. About the only scenario justifying that conclusion would be massive new problems developing in the middle east.




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