Not News

This is what you get when breathless headlines and no new information collide:

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to issue a report next month suggesting speculators played a significant role in driving wild swings in oil prices -- a reversal of an earlier CFTC position that augurs intensifying scrutiny on investors.

In a contentious report last year, the main U.S. futures-market regulator pinned oil-price swings primarily on supply and demand. But that analysis was based on "deeply flawed data," Bart Chilton, one of four CFTC commissioners, said in an interview Monday.

The CFTC's new review, due to be released in August, adds fuel to a growing debate over financial investors who bet on the direction of commodities prices by buying contracts tied to indexes. These speculators have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts that were once dominated by producers and consumers who sought to hedge against oil-market volatility.

Who didn't know that speculative buying was driving oil prices up b/t 2006-2008? I'm pretty sure that I wasn't hallucinating when I constantly saw and heard econ reporters talking about speculative buying as a hedge against the weak dollar, especially at the tail end of the oil bubble last year.

So then to see a report like this as 'econ' reporting makes me wonder if it's more like 'political' reporting.