27 June 2008

Mathifying the oil bubble

House passes bill to reverse oil price increases.

Why am I writing about this? Because of the following sentence, which opens the article (emphasis added):
After the close of the markets Thursday, as the fear of a continued parabolic rise in the price of oil was still fresh on the minds of investors, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that that could help to reverse the direction of oil prices.
I don't know, the runup looks linear to me, at least in the short term -- although everything looks linear in the short term. That doesn't mean it hasn't been fast. This is mathification at work.

By the way, The 2006-2008 Oil Bubble and Beyond (D. Sornette, R. Woodard, W.-X. Zhou; arXiv:0806.1170) claim that the growth is actually super-exponential, which they claim is diagnostic of a bubble. (Via the physics arXiv blog.) So "parabolic" may be a massive understatement.

1 comment:

CarlBrannen said...

The previous data seems to be manipulations of markets by cornering an expiring future. This forces the shorts to buy near futures at ridiculous prices. This is not at all what is happening now; oil is up even in the very long term contracts. And the dollar is dropping.