Oil Bubble Proponents

Oil Prices and Speculation, August 2008

The Washington Post says the scale of speculative activity in commodities markets is larger than previous estimates indicated in the article: A Few Speculators Dominate Vast Market for Oil Trading, by David Cho. Also see Jim Hamilton's objection to this article, More Speculation About Those Oil Speculators.

The 2006-2008 Oil Bubble and Beyond, D. Sornette, R. Woodard and W.-X. Zhou, Physica A (2008)

An analysis of oil prices in US$ and in other major currencies that diagnoses unsustainable faster-than-exponential behavior. This supports the hypothesis that the recent oil price run-up has been amplified by speculative behavior of the type found during a bubble-like expansion.

One Contrarian Sees Oil Prices As a Bubble by Heather Timmons, July 2008

Wilbur Ross Jr., a contrarian, has decided that high oil prices have hit bubble territory, a bubble that should pop in the next 12 months. In the search for new investments he is looking at everything that has been hurt by fuel and has invested $80 million in the flailing Indian airline SpiceJet and has bought up stakes in railroad freight companies in Europe.

What Do We Learn from the Price of Crude Oil Futures? Ron Alquist and Lutz Kilian, November 2007

The authors show empirically how shifts in market expectations about future oil
supply shortfalls affect the spot price of crude oil. Such expectation shifts
have been difficult to quantify, yet have been shown to play an important role
in explaining oil price fluctuations.