25 May 2009

Oil Prices Are Rigged? It Just Ain’t So!

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I explain in the latest Freeman. Excerpt:

Even though oil prices have fallen and quieted the price-conspiracy mongers, you can bet that when prices go up again, they will be back in force. It happened last time. For example, in an article for Time last August, Ari Officer and Garrett Hayes ask, “Are Oil Prices Rigged?”. Our cynical authors—who are Stanford graduate students in financial mathematics and materials science/engineering respectively—answer in the affirmative, but their arguments are shockingly ignorant of how markets work.

(I wrote the response shortly after their article first ran last August, but for various reasons it kept getting pushed back until the present issue.) As if to prove the point, I coincidentally was just reading an article a colleague sent me concerning the latest charges of evil oil speculation.

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