Political Quotes

“I was there for that, and I was struck by the very same statistic. As you look at what happened then, $10 here, a doubling in price. Consider for a moment what it would mean to somebody that had purchased back here in March a million barrels of oil at $70 a barrel, and they come up to July, that million barrels of oil has doubled in value. So this is why speculation occurs. It occurs because somebody by playing the market, by speculating, is able to make a vast sum of money. There's the other side of that coin--somebody lost a vast sum of money coming down here. But the American public, however, was the single biggest loser in all of this because as that went up, the price at the pump also went up, and Americans paid more and more for the price of gasoline. It was about $5 a gallon when it came up here. And it didn't go down from $147 to $32; that proportion didn't happen. It did drop from near $5 down to $3.50, in that area. So the American public was stuck with an exceedingly high price which continues to this day, which leads to those extraordinary profits which you were showing just a few minutes ago. Now, I'm not saying the oil industry was involved in the speculation; but I will say this, the oil industry benefited from the speculation that left a very high price for oil into the future. This didn't last very long. This went back up to $70, and today it's over $100 a barrel. So we need to consider all of these things about what's going on in the oil market.…”