Now that oil is at rock-bottom levels, CBS has decided to start playing the speculator blame game. A 60 Minutes piece that aired this week does what Congress was busy doing all summer: blaming hedge funds and Wall Street trading desks for the skyrocketing price of oil. While Congress created an avalanche of anti-speculation bills, several trading insiders and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) maintained that supply and demand factors were to blame. 

Familiar faces in the piece to speculation hearing watchers included Michael Masters and former CFTC official Michael Greenberger, who testified in a June congressional hearing that 70% of the crude oil market was driven by speculators. The piece seems fairly one-sided and it’s generating a lot of (I think justified) negative buzz in the blogging world among economists and industry experts. What do you think? Let us know by commenting below.

Tags: oil, speculators

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.