"Average U.S. gas prices hover at record-high levels"

[Rudeboyelvis]

From Honu's link:

>>>Investment firms that can influence the oil futures market stand to make a lot; oil companies that both produce the commodity and drive prices up of their product up through oil futures derivatives stand to make even more. Investigations into the unregulated oil futures exchanges turned up major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. But it also revealed energy producers like Vitol, a Swiss company that owned 11 percent of the oil futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange alone [source: Washington Post].<<<



They get to take an enormous stake in oil, then make up whatever value they want to assign to that stake by issuing unsubstantiated values to futures derivatives and letting the "free" market trade those. LOL..