to $350 billion of index investment into oil and other commodities. now the problem with this is that the difference between a commodity like oil and a stock is that for a stock you don t need another side of the trade but for oil you need to find sellers. in fact, you can t find sellers in oil with all these people just rushing in to buy, all the traders, investors, pension plans, all the airlines, all the heating oil distributors, all the people making aluminum, everybody out there doing refrigerati refrigeration, making drugs, they re all buyers. what you have in essence to make it simple is a whole group of people coming into a neighborhood where everybody has a house and everybody s house is worth $200,000 and everybody s happy with their house. but the problem is everybody wants to buy this house and the only way you can get someone out of the house they re happy with that s worth $200,000 is to pay $300,000, $400,000, half a million dollars for this house and that s what is goin
dan, thanks for joining us tonight. thank you, ed. make the folks at home that don t understand wall street and speculation and the nuances of it all, what s going on here? i ll make it very simple, ed. we have a bunch of money just coming in trying to buy oil as if it was a stock and these areç using instruments that wall street creates and wall street sells and the idea is to drive as much money as they can into buying oil as another asset class, something else that they can trade-off of and make money. we ve had this happening for the last ten years but it s happened very quickly in the last five particularly in what they call index investments. we ve gone from basically zero to $350 billion of index investment into oil and other commodities. now the problem with this is that the difference between a commodity like oil and a stock is that for a stock you don t need another side of the trade but for oil you need to find sellers. in fact, you can t find sellers in oil with all