Printer Friendly

eMail Article

July 03, 2009

Like the Oil Spike Never Happened
by Adrian Ash

Pricing crude oil out of the Dollar this Fourth of July...

SO THIS WEEK'S spike in the price of Brent crude oil to $73.50 was due to a "rogue trader".

His unauthorized dealing through the PVM brokerage reportedly sparked 30 times the typical trading volume and incurred a loss of $10 million.

Whatever the regulators missed this time, that spike hardly compares to last summer's run. But averaging nearly $70 per barrel in June, the price of US crude oil just matched its average monthly price of the last four years.

No, that's not much of a recovery given the monthly top of $132 per barrel hit this month and last in 2008. And it's peanuts next to the record daily close of $145 hit on Bastille Day, July 14th '08.

This Fourth of July, however, and not least if you're out driving, spare a thought for just how much more expensive crude oil and thus transport, heating, detergents and plastics are today than back before the credit bubble morphed into the financial crisis and then into today's global depression.

Also note how the spike of '08 was only slightly tempered for European drivers and households when the North Sea benchmark, Brent crude, is priced out of Dollars and into the British Pound.

Whereas, if priced in Gold - a simple enough concept amid rumors and counter-rumors of Chinese grumping over the Dollar's volatility and the search for a new world reserve basis - crude oil is now back pretty much where it was throughout the low and falling trend of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Just a thought. Happy holidays if you got any independence to mark.

Adrian Ash
BullionVault.com

Head of research at BullionVault.com, the fastest growing gold bullion service online, Adrian Ash is also City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London, and a regular contributor to MoneyWeek magazine.

Useful links: FAQs, Gold price now, Public order board, and The Case for Gold

More on BullionVault

BullionVault makes buying gold simple. It buys guaranteed, market deliverable gold bars and stores them at professionally recognized bullion vaults. The actuarial risk of loss is so small that your gold is stored with insurance included at 0.12% per annum.

On BullionVault you buy whatever quantity of gold you like, starting from as little as 1 gram. Choose where to store your gold from recognized vaults in London, New York or Zurich. Your gold will be in the form of good delivery bars, so it will retain full resale value straight back to the professional market.

As a seller at any time in the future, you will benefit by having gold of professional market status. Your top-quality warranted bullion can be offered directly to new buyers on BullionVault's highly active and publicly accessible order board. You can even quote your own prices, meaning you will earn - rather than pay - the trading spread.

For your full security and peace of mind, BullionVault also publishes a complete daily bullion audit in the world, enabling you to safely check your proven holding from an internet computer anywhere, and to prove it to the physical bar list issued to BullionVault by its vault operators.

By April 2007 - just two years after launch - BullionVault was storing for its customers cash and gold amounting to more than $68m.

For further information contact enquiries@BullionVault.com

Please Note: This article is to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events and should be verified elsewhere if you choose to include it in your own analysis.

Copyright © 2006-2009 BullionVault

Image rendition and html coding Copyright © 2000-2009 SafeHaven.com

« Opinions expressed at SafeHaven are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of SafeHaven or its management. Articles are available via RSS/XML. Please visit RSSHelp for instructions. »