Look to wall street, look to speculators. China's not sucking the world dry, and Japan is a mess. quit betting on the spot market. Hell, cancel the spot market in the US. What would happen to the smaller spot markets-- and this includes Chinas... prices would decline. The only equilibium in the price of oil, and its an artificai equilibirum, is reliance on market pressure.

I disgree with Jim in drilling ourselves out of this issue UNLESS AND UNTIL refining capacity id at a minimum 50 percent more in the US. Oil is a short term solution. Pebble bed reactors are th long term solution, and fusion the ultimate goal.

And the price of gasoline, as Jeff points out, has little to do with supply. As the man said, "There is no shortage of oil... just a shortage of cheap oil."

Fact is that what we have been doing is not working.

Right now, America has an estimated 22.3 billion barrels of oil reserves. But that's hardly the whole story. A recent Congressional Research Service report that I commissioned with Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma found that the United States' recoverable oil resources are estimated at 157 billion barrels. That is seven times as much as our reserves and doesn't even include the roughly 900 billion barrels of unconventional oil resources nearing commercialization.

Consider this: While our nation's oil "reserves" have never reached 40 billion barrels, we've managed to produce nearly 200 billion barrels since 1900. Between 2008 and 2009, America's oil reserves rose more than 8 percent, even as roughly 2 billion barrels were produced. That was made possible by our substantial resource base. Reserves alone have never provided the full picture.

Link

I have no problem with pushing new technologies. But what I see is people pushing new technologies, wind and solar, by taxes and propaganda. And neither will do the job. Ethanol is a net loss.

Nuclear and fusion? Absolutely but the environmentalist will never let that happen. Why?

Fan and Fred CREATED the market for mortgage backed securities (MBS) containing ultra-risky mortgages.  They pulled the cork from the bottle, opened the barn door, and lit the match in the gunpowder factory.  It is true that private banks followed the lead of Fan and Fred.  But Fan and Fred were the leaders.

As Maxine Waters said:

Under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines, everything in the 1992 Act, has worked just fine.  In fact, the GSE's have exceeded their housing goals.  What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator.  And this must be done in a the manner so as not to impede the affordable housing mission.  A mission that has seen innovation flourish, from desktop underwriting to 100 per cent loans.

The 100 percent loan is a no money down loan, and desktop underwriting is another name for "liar loans."  These "innovations" was affordable housing policy.

But more than that, there was indeed focus on the regulators.  It was the regulators, not the rating agencies, that treated the junk MBS on the banks balance sheets as being as good gold, when they would never treat a mortgage with no money down and no proof of employment as being a sound asset.