By Paul Van Eeden of www.paulvaneeden.com
When the crash dummies up on Capitol Hill see crude oil at $130 a barrel, they cry “Manipulation!” and start looking around for someone to blame. The funny thing is; they’re right. Manipulation is causing the oil price to soar…manipulation of the U.S. dollar. As for finding someone to blame, well, taking a stroll over to the Federal Reserve building might be a good place to start.
By increasing the supply of dollars the government devalues every dollar in existence by an equivalent amount. The impact of this inflation is not uniform through the economy or markets but, with time, it does filter through to everything. If we look at the price of oil in US dollars and simultaneously look at the inflation of the dollar we can see that oil has in fact not gone up in value at all – it is the dollar that has declined in value. So the manipulation is clearly evident, but it is not the supply of oil that is being manipulated, but the supply of dollars, to decrease the dollar’s value on the assumption that that would stimulate spending and economic activity. That is the cause of the rise in the oil price.
If we look at the exchange rate of the US dollar against the euro, and the twelve currencies that comprise the euro before its launch, we see that in January 1970 it took 1.151 “euros” to buy a dollar. Today it takes 0.644 euros to buy a dollar. For the sake of simplicity let’s use the euro-dollar exchange rate as a benchmark for the dollar’s devaluation on foreign exchange markets. From this exchange rate we can see that the oil price would have been 44% lower today were it not for the decline of the US dollar exchange rate. That would make the oil price, not $120 a barrel, but only $67 a barrel. In other words, the oil price is approximately 80% higher today than it would have been if the government was not so hell-bent on destroying the dollar.
For those who cannot fathom that it’s as simple as this, or that inflation of the money supply directly affects the value of the dollar, consider these words from Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, in a speech he made on November 21, 2002 before the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.: “Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.”
Aside from the fact that the assumption that inflation can create economic activity is entirely false, the idea that OPEC is somehow to blame for the rise in the oil price is absurd. Look at the chart below that shows the oil price in US dollars and the increase in the supply of dollars as measured by M3. We see that the oil price is trying desperately to catch up with the dollar’s inflation. In fact, if anything, oil companies and oil producers have been subsidizing American gasoline consumers for the past 22 years!
The manipulation is clearly in the dollar. By rapidly increasing the money supply and thereby decreasing the value of the dollar, the government is directly and solely responsible for the increase in the oil price.
On another front, a proposal was tabled in the Senate this week to mandate higher cash collateral for energy futures trading. The thought is that since energy speculators must be responsible for driving up the price of oil, the government should increase the cost of such trading, thereby making it harder for energy speculators to engage in futures transactions.
This proposal again demonstrates the complete lack of any fundamental understanding of how a market works, and will have exactly the opposite effect to what its proponents have in mind. Professional speculators are seldom the cause of unjustified price increases or decreases (although they can be). Quite the contrary — if speculators deem prices too low they will buy a commodity thereby preventing prices from falling further. Similarly, if they deem prices too high they will engage in short sales thereby mitigating price spikes. The end result is less volatility, not more volatility.
Now, I am not going to try and argue that speculators as a group are always right, or that they do not sometimes get carried away and drive prices too high or too low — they are still human. But when speculators make such serious mistakes they typically lose their own capital, or the capital entrusted to them, and so the market eliminates them or, at least, “educates” them to make better decisions in the future. However, taken over a longer period of time and across a spectrum of commodities, speculators as a group undoubtedly reduce volatility in prices. In the rare instances when speculators do drive prices far too high, or too low, it is usually the result of unsophisticated “retail” gamblers trying to get rich quick at the end of a market cycle.
In the case of oil, the incredible inflation rate of the US dollar, as measured by M3, is clearly devaluing the currency and causing the oil price, and many other commodity prices, to soar. By making it more expensive and difficult for speculators to participate in the market, legislators will achieve only an increase in price volatility and the loss of market share to foreign exchanges that do not impede speculators from doing their work.
Notwithstanding anything said thus far, the oil price had a good run and so in the short term a pull back in the price of oil should be expected. But this would merely be normal market volatility, as we are currently seeing in the gold price. Over the long term the price of oil is going up. The days of $50 or $55 oil are gone forever.
Blame the manipulators!…the ones with reserved parking spaces at the Federal Reserve.