Jackie Speier: “An interesting point along the same lines, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, the percentage of speculation in the oil market was…”

“An interesting point along the same lines, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, the percentage of speculation in the oil market was 30 percent. The speculators were involved in about 30 percent. About 70 percent were end-users that were in the market. But interestingly enough today, those numbers have just flipped so that the end- users of gas, of gasoline, that are betting on the future are 30 percent, and it's the speculators that are 70 percent. The other thing that the experts said this morning, I don't know if you were there at the time, they were talking about Katrina. When Katrina hit, it blew out all of those oil rigs in the gulf. It shut down oil production for a period of time. And you know what happened to the price of oil? It went from $50 a barrel to $60 a barrel for about 4 months, not from $70 a barrel to $147 a barrel. So over 4 months, it went up ever so slightly, but significantly nonetheless; and then it came down. So this, this is ripe for an investigation, I believe, because it would suggest that there is a lot of speculation going on in the market today.”