People continue to explain this the wrong way. There was not a crude oil bubble but a financial bubble...

Another way of looking at it is that there wasn't a bubble in anything--there was a functioning, "growing" economy. Which is the way I see it.

I think the only way the whole shebang can be seen as a bubble is if we look at the economy as a whole as having outgrown the true source of wealth, which is energy. Everything in the economy is basically energy in another form. We "bubbled" in everything because we stopped getting more energy efficient at a time when it got too costly to produce more supply. (And I see virtually no improvement in efficiency happening now or in the immediate future.)

The fact that people still think in terms of a bubble in oil tells me that people will never understand what's going on. In fact, because many of the people talking about bubbles are at TOD, it tells me that people are incapable of understanding it. Which means that as the price of energy rises again, they're going to be screaming about bubbles again. This will lead to the political "solution" of crashing the economy again to bring down the oil price. And each time we crash the economy, we'll be taking out a bigger and bigger percentage of the population.

We've essentially decided to deal with peak oil by letting the richer part of the population continue to thrive at the expense of the poorer part.

From this point, you can pretty much map out your future based on where you are in the food chain right now. Sad.

It really can't be explained away so easily.

"It's an oil bubble" doesn't mean "oil and only oil"... it simply means "the current price of oil is in no way justified by the fundamentals and it will therefore likely collapse".

Of course this kind of statement was 100% correct.

Two other points:

1) It could easily have been a commodities bubble. Saying "other commodities went up too" doesn't mean oil wasn't in a bubble. Saying "XYZ.COM stock wasn't in a bubble because the NASDAQ fell overall" doesn't say much.

2) Similarly... how far does it get us to say "it wasn't an oil bubble... oil rose and collapsed due to an entirely different phenomenon that also wasn't worldwide scarcity of energy post peak?

The oil price hike of $147 in July 2008 was caused by China buying 80% of a 1 mb/d supply surge between May and July 2008. These were the most expensive Olympic games the world ever had. Most likely the last party on the Titanic.

The insiders basically knew that their markets were hedged using fraudulent practices. Knowing that they would trade commodities which had harder value. The commodities astronomical rise was not sustainable and neither is their crash. Who is going to extract oil, mine or whatever and sell it bellow the costs. This rapid decline and the ranting that goes with it will eventually backfire because once shut down, the ramping it up can be delayed for years. The Chinese are talking it down thinking they can buy all the mines and oil wells cheap but they wont be sold the stuff.