Well...I am not going to say the major oil companies dont rack in billions of profit but they arent the ones inflating the price...Nick hit the nail on the head...deregulation.....
So..if I was a huge oil company, had a million barrels in inventory and the deregulated trading of oil futures drives the price way up why wouldnt I take advantage of the profit??
If the CFTC had the power to control and there was transparaency in the market you would see the price of a barrel plummet...
There was a time when (and I am estimating really close) that a single speculator had held something like 40 million gallons of product while only putting up somewhere in the range of like 1% of the cash....thats the rules they make for themselves while I buy "wet" gallons...cash up...I dont get to put up a percentage of the cash and net the profits now with no exposure....and I need to pass the high prices along to my customers...who cant pay in full for 30, 60 or 90 days....
we need a revolution....