Position yourself now for $300 a barrel oil

Human beings are a predictable bunch and we tend to wait until things get to a painful crisis mode before taking drastic action. My question is why does it always have to get to that point?

Take the most recent run-up of oil prices, when crude hit $147 a barrel and gasoline was trading around $5. As prices reached nosebleed levels, the general public was in a great deal of pain and they acted accordingly. There was an outcry for more alternatives, more refineries, conservation, infrastructure investment etc. Everything from clean-coal technology to nuclear was on the table.

Fast forward to today, with crude prices at around $38 and gas back below $2, and it's a very different picture. No pain means no gain in solving the problem.

Let me be clear, though. That problem hasn't gone anywhere. $300 crude is not far off.

While the global recession and credit crunch have severely impacted global demand for energy, it's only temporary. The problems propelling oil prices to $147 haven't gone away. The patient is, at best, in temporary remission.

from Position yourself now for a barrel of oil at $300.

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Well, you can read the rest of the article yourself. The cynical bunch of MW commentators think this has been planted to move oil up a bit - seems to have succeeded. Pricing oil in dollars is itself distorting of its global value. However, if one prices oil in terms of grams of gold then oil currently looks very very cheap. As both oil and gold are currently priced in dollars by charting the cost of a barrel of oil in terms of gold removes the dollar curency from the equation.