Well, they could be, yes:
The quickest counterpoint: If–and even Paul Krugman and I agree on this, people, so the apocalypse must be nigh–speculators are driving prices above the competitive level determined by supply and demand fundamentals, (a) inventories increase, and (b) speculators hold the inventories.
So, are they?
Well, inventories are dropping to rock bottom levels in everything from oil, to diesel, to industrial metals. So (a) isn’t happening. And if (a) isn’t happening, (b) can’t happen.
No.
QED.
Its always the ‘wreckers’ who cause socialism to fail, so what do you expect from the proponents of money printing (and lockdowns), that they’ll suddenly stick their hands up and say ‘Hey, you know what we were wrong, our policies that we’ve been pushing for ages were complete bollocks, all your criticisms were correct, lets do things your way from now on’? Of course not, they just find someone else to blame for the failure. The Jews, the bourgeois, the kulaks, the speculators, always their fault.
Jim, the credited excuse is Brexit.
Aren’t speculators part of supply and demand, or does the concept require purity of motive?
It’s the speculators. It’s the middlemen. It’s pure greed.
I suspect these are code for either “it’s the chews” or perhaps “I am a cretin”. Or both.
Surely these days it’s the ‘fascists’, or perhaps the ‘white supremacists.’
Whenever I meet someone making the claim about speculators hoarding I ask what they think will happen when they release the stocks are released back into the market. Apparently I have 2 heads.
Aren’t speculators just holding inventories of futures via options markets, which they can leave unexercised if out of the money? And aren’t they rolling futures anyways? How many actual oil futures contracts have hypothetical underlying physical oil?
Simply put, aren’t we dealing with inventories of paper contracts, not actual oil?