As the price of crude oil hovers near $135 a barrel, it’s time for a big reality check.
A 42-gallon barrel of oil yields around 20 gallons of gasoline— worth about $85 on the street, which price you’ll never see because it includes processing, delivery, retail fees, and taxes. So in theory, if you own a barrel of oil, you’re already fifty bucks in the hole.
From a less theoretical standpoint, what would you *actually* have? A four-foot, hundred-pound metal tube of goo. It isn’t worth $135. If you had one cluttering up your garage, you’d happily slip somebody twenty bucks to haul it off. If you had twenty-five barrels in your home, you couldn’t live there.
The avoidance of true ownership responsibilities is what allows speculation to flourish, so that’s how you deal with speculators: Attach a virtual “bungee cord” to the end product.
Anything you own for more than, say, five days– you’d better be prepared to accept delivery. And there’s some nice fellas from the EPA here to check out the storage site in your living room.