The problem as I see it are the great discrepancies between the long-run equilibrium price for oil and short term fluctuations.And it is the short term fluctuations that create the opportunity for profiteering and so are often in the interests of speculatators.
Or putting it differently, the oil market is rigged.
It is an international unregulated market. The same type of unregulated market that gave us derivative trading, credit default swaps, and sub-prime mortgages.
Nobody knows how the 'market' price of oil is arrived at.
Two short months back central bankers, international bankers, financial market analysts and regulators were telling us they understood what the probelms were and were pretty much on top of them.
Now, it seems that they were not simply wrong, they were 'Not Even Wrong' (to repeat the phrase used by a Nobel Laureate to describe theories that had no basis in any known reality).
The same applies to any story you are given about why oil prices are as they are on any given point in the global economic cycle.
Nobody knows and any explanation deserves the description, Not Even Wrong.' IMO.
Because the oil price is derived from is a series of multiple, partially linked, unregulated, opaque, secretive, hugely political markets and these are subject to uncontrolled manipulation for the sake of profit by sovereign wealth funds, corporate players, commodity funds, hedge funds, derivative traders to name just a few.
Just like the banks.