I get your point about how every buyer has a seller – but that might be oversimplifying things a bit. With each of these selling events there are market implications. It seems that when sales get exagerated or over-applified by rampant speculation, these individual sales events become aggregated into an entire market movement where not just speculators lose, but the true industry-related hedgers who are attempting to mitigate their business risk fall on the losing end of an over-inflated market.
I do not think this needs to be a political issue. Regardless of what politicians are saying or what their motives are, there are real instances where unregulated speculation has distorted commodity markets & the unassuming end-consumer gets hurt in the process.
See this article for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/20/AR2007102001203.html
This article illustrates how one hedge fund manipulated the natural gas market. As an entire market was artificially manipulated, utility companies had to continue to operate & hedge their risks. In the process utilities paid too much for energy & we consumers were left paying a higher bill.
I’m not saying supply & demand is not the main issue, and I agree that we should open more refineries & drill domestically. Encouranging conservation is great too. But there appears to be a real issue here with this speculation, and it seems wrong to brush it away like it’s some sort of political ploy.
Unfortunately, as commodities & other investments have gotten increasingly complex with swaps & derivatives as well as over-the-counter & new alternative foreign trading markets popping up, simply closing a US regulatory loophole probably will not fix the speculative impact for the long-haul.
