Oil's Toughest Question

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- This last week has seen an avalanche of articles, papers and opinion pieces attacking the idea that oil and gasoline prices are affected by speculation, in response to President Obama's recent plan to try and bolster the enforcement resources of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission against speculation.

This plan, which the president knows has no chance of passing through Congress in an election year, has been dismissed as populist political gamesmanship, not to be taken seriously.

President Obama visited an Oklahoma pipeline yard in March.

But just because an argument is populist sounding does not make it untrue. It is a shame that the president is proposing such small and ultimately fruitless changes in the oil market mechanism, because investment and trade in oil has certainly added $30 and perhaps more like $40 dollars a barrel to the price.

Very well-respected and strong economic arguments on the ineffectiveness of money pouring into the oil markets since 2003 have appeared recently in Foreign Affairs magazine, on the Center for Economic Policy Research Web site, as an editorial on Bloomberg and on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Web site, to name just a few of the heavy hitters.

Wow -- this is quite an army of heavy minds summarily dismissing many of the conclusions I came to in my book on economic influences exerted in the oil markets, Oil's Endless Bid.