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Why high oil & gasoline prices?

Just started reading "The Asylum: The renegades who hijacked the world's oil market" by Leah McGrath Goodman (writer for Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Baron's, & Financial Times). "Contrary to popular opinion, oil prices were not being controlled by Arabs or leftist dictators. They were being controlled by . . . bootstrapping traders . . . Individuals who, like the anonymous Wall Street professionals about to unleash a crippling financial crisis on the world, took the subway and ferry to work, earned unheard-of riches, gave to charity, and thought nothing of bringing the global economy to its knees." (p. 8)

Remember the classic Christmas movie "It's a Wonderful Life" and the line "Every time you hear a bell ring an angel gets its wings"? Every time you you fill up your car remember that you helped make another oil futures speculator a billionaire.

Goodman also wrote: "Yet nobody seemed to know who, exactly, these New York oil traders were or how they, of all people , got to wield such power. . . (they) gathered everyday to beat and berate one another in a money game so absurd that even they could scarcely believe they were being allowed to pay it." (p. 4)

So what do you think? Should they be allowed to keeping playing our oil and gasoline prices like they played games at their favorite casinos or should something else be done?

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