I selected that it hits $114 based on the expectation a recession and increased production would lower prices in the near term. However, I've been wrong on the last 2-3 polls because I selected the lower price for the same reasons. Good thing I'm not a day trader.

In the last poll I chose the higher number based on the opinion that so-called free market capitalism, to function at all, must continue the game as it exists: borrow in order to buy and then sell to the next sucker... until it kills 'em.

Pretty hard to make big money anywhere else (except drugs and guns) so the new bubbles have just got to be food and oil.

Expensive gasoline, the unraveling mortgage/construction fiasco (national equivalent of a heart attack) and now food have not been enough to scare them into righteousness. Therefore nothing is.

I'm betting that the number of serious players who suddenly find religion and quit their low-down ways voluntarily will be ZERO. Wannabe capitalists will continue to borrow-buy-sell at ever more stratospheric prices until the protracted suicide they have embarked upon is consummated by the terminal collapse of credit.

$140 here we come, I hope, because the alternative would be the signal that hell has finally broken loose for keeps.

So, another question to discus might be: will the price of oil or grain become a bubble that breaks the bank?

err, didn't mean "day trader". I meant short-term-trend investor or something like that.