As it becomes clear whether McCain has a lock on the Presidency, the hedge funds and related international interests will have to engineer an early exit from their positions because the expected direction of the price of oil will be down. The hoarders will have to unwind their stocks or see them drop in value.

…Basically, besides enabling the Fed to bail out Wall Street and our banks again, every time you gas up or eat you may be paying investors to cover other financial losses. We know that investors can’t control their losses on mortgages, securities, or bad loans. But, demonstrably, if not restrained they can drive up the price of goods that we can’t get out of buying. Odds are, that’s what’s really been going on.

This sounds too pat. And how, exactly, should ‘unregulated commodities’ be ‘restrained’?

Jack’s formulation is more circumspect than Wallace’s:

Goldman Sachs would appear to have a particularly delicate position, given its prediction of another spike, its non-publicly disclosed bets on the direction of the oil market, and the prominence of its former senior executives at the highest level of economic policy in the US. It all feels a bit unseemly.

That’s a plausible interpretation. By those lights, the Goldman prediction may be laying the groundwork for offloading the overpriced assets onto the public–though I’d expect more of that to be going on than I’ve noticed to date.

Other interpretations that come to mind are discounting of a major Mideast war, and price-fixing by oil producers who are de facto abetted by Western environmentalist special interests.

Maybe all three interpretations above, independently or collusively, are among the factors that are driving prices.