If you’re my age, the question that follows the dash may evoke memories of Lawrence Olivier’s classic question in Marathon Man, uttered as he interrogates Dustin Hoffman’s character in a dental chair (This may be the least favorite move of dentists worldwide and may have even provided the genesis of the anti-dentite episode of Seinfeld).

  In any case, it’s a question worth asking on a day where crude oil lost more than $2 bbl in the formal NYMEX futures session. It is down another $1.00 bbl in the electronic overnight action that follows the open outcry session (more on that in a future column). In any case, as I write this December WTI fetches $93.62 bbl, down a tidy $5 bbl from the all-time record high reached last Wednesday.

   Since I thought $80 bbl was excessive, and then thought $85 bbl was extreme, and $90 bbl was downright ridiculous, I have to stick with my guns and say that we have only begun to correct lower. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t visit $100 bbl in this crazy week that features the expiration of December futures’ contracts and the fireworks that often goes along with that expiry.

   Note to critics: To the gentleman who suggested that my crystal ball must be cracked, noting correctly that I thought we would not see $3.00 gal gasoline prices again in 2007 - - my crystal ball isn’t just cracked; it’s distorted by the sort of trick optics one views when visiting the local circus funhouse. I hope that there is a return to sanity shortly, and do not believe that $90 bbl plus numbers for crude; or $3.00 gal plus numbers for Winter gasoline, are part of a sane U.S. energy world.

An Important Word From Our Sponsor  .  .  .

     My colleague, Fred Rozell, who oversees the OPIS Retail database of gasoline, today released a study that measures the pain at the pump in relative terms. Like politics, the impact of gasoline prices, are mostly local, and this particular study measures how higher prices may disproportionately impact folks that live many hundreds of miles from Wall Street. It’s worth your consideration and can be found at http://www.opisnet.com/retail/painindex.asp.

    I’ll be out on vacation from Tuesday November 13 through Sunday November 18, and I have no intention of looking at anything remotely related to oil or gasoline. If you’re looking for help in this area, you can call the study’s author, Fred Rozell, at 732-730-2538.

Some Birthday Notes   .  .   .

   Today is my birthday. I am the same age as Pierce Brosnan and younger than most of the leading presidential candidates. I want to use this day to make a comment that might shed just a bit of perspective on a change that has been rendered since the Truman Administration when I came into this world at Passaic General Hospital in beautiful Passaic, N.J.

   In my opinion, the best financial columnist in the business world these days is Gretchen Morgenson at the N.Y. Times. A very recent column by Ms. Morgenson’s column, which ran Saturday, November 11, talked about the recent ills of the U.S. financial sector.

   A chart accompanying the story noted that the financial sector’s share of total corporate profits has risen to 31 percent last year, from 8 percent in 1950.

    I wasn’t around in 1950. Many banks were not participants in oil futures, options, and derivatives markets, until this century. Now, it appears to this observer that they are perhaps the primary culprit in the move from $70 bbl crude to $95 bbl crude. A favorite strategy in the last six weeks has been the buy oil/sell the Dollar play. 

    The American public commonly anoints an evil sobriquet on oil executives, but often gives bankers and financial engineers a free pass. The last leg of the oil price rally has much to do with financial strategies, and much less to do with the behavior of oil companies.

   The financial sector’s share of profits cited in Ms. Morgenson’s story points to a fourfold increase in the last 50 years. I’ll bet that the financial sector’s share of oil trading profits in the last four years makes that 300% increase look like chump change.