Or is this just the case with models that look at too short a time scale and heaps of unimportant variables?

Looking longer term limits to growth style models, arent there emergent simplicities that make these price fluctuations make sense? as EROEI diminishes and limits are met shouldn't decreasing resilience in the system lead to these kind of fluctuations and instability?

We should realy have learned not to rely on short term market models like 'speculation' to understand the overall system. As we lose energy to power the system we'll also lose energy to smooth out its fluctuations, whatever form they take, whatever random time they appear.

But it does seem that people just have to keep up the futile activity of arguing about causes, and pretending that we could somehow use what we learn from the interaction to prevent future fluctuations! ('if only we had better regulations' etc etc.)

It could be wiser to spend the time disscussing the creation of resiliant systems that aren't affected...