Petromania – Black gold, paper barrels and oil price bubbles

Petromania – black gold, paper barrels and oil price bubbles

This book argues that the spike in the oil price in summer 2008 was the last great excess of the crazed ‘noughties’ markets, staged even as stock markets crumbled worldwide. Petromania suggests that this oil price blowout was a classic speculative bubble, but driven primarily by new modes of financial speculation. The book details how this ‘financialisation’ of the oil markets meshed with other trends to create a moment just a year ago that saw investment banks and hedge funds collectively wield more power over the price of black gold than OPEC or any multinational oil company. It also argues that regulatory blindness to the ‘dark matter’ of modern finance caused so many to confuse fantasy with reality for so long.